[T]he Democratic Party, which nominated Joe Biden because he represents a papering-over of the vast chasms emerging between the pro-Hamas, pro-socialism wing of their party and the more sane, tax-and-regulate left, is stuck in-between. They can't dump Biden and substitute someone else -- to do so would be to admit their complicity in this debacle. And they can't keep him -- to do so would be to doom the Democratic Party to a likely Trump victory, and in the aftermath, the victory of a rebellious hard left demanding more power.Put another way, the Democrats participated in a "rotten Faustian bargain" the people who ran the con made, and Victor "Blade of Perseus" Hanson suggests that "Democracy Dies in Deceit" is the state of play now. We'll leave the "rebellious hard left" reprising George McGovern and Paul Wellstone for another day.
It's the median voters they had to con. The machinations that have come to light since the 2020 election only deepen the commitments of the hard-core Trump voters. In the closing pages of Rigged, Mollie Hemingway lays out their aspirations and their discontents.
What many ordinary Americans saw from 2016 to 2020 was a willingness on the part of the establishment to do whatever it took to defeat its political opponents. The Democrats invented and perpetrated the Russia collusion hoax against Trump, ringing up his affiliates on process crimes as a message to never work against the establishment again. They impeached him and regularly tried to oust him through underhanded means. They invented encyclopedic volumes of fake news. They rioted for years. They pushed fake polls. They refused to give voice to the tens of millions of Americans who were fed up with the establishment's decades of failure on immigration, foreign policy, and economic policy.I submit, dear reader, that Mr Trump did a lot, both during his presidency and in the months after the election, to disgrace himself and, for the short term, make the reluctant voters who ticked the box for that mediocre politician comfortable with their choice. It is what that mediocre politician did afterward, starting with the cancellation of the Keystone pipeline and the opening of the borders, that has made those reluctant Biden voters regret their choice. Now the way in which that establishment installed that mediocre politician might have set in motion forces that will be more destructive to its continuance than the meanest of social media posts from Mar-a-Lago.
The most believable thing in the world is that these powerful entities wouldn't just rig tech algorithms, media coverage, public opinion surveys, debate commissions, and powerful government investigations, but the electoral process itself.
The establishment needed in 2020 what it sought in 2016, not just Trump's defeat but to disgrace him and obliterate the coalition he had built. While Trump's opponents were able to heave over the finish line a mediocre politician who poses no threat to the establishment, they failed at killing the movement.
Let's start with an observation Dan "Baseball Crank" McLaughlin made about the Never Trumpers who were allies of convenience in the 2020 election, but would object to the Bernie Sanders platform that Joe Biden ran on.
[A]nti-Trump Republicans actually believe things that put them deeply at odds with the Democratic Party. If you believe in the sanctity of the life of the unborn, you’ll find it very difficult to join a Democratic Party that believes in abortion on demand, subsidized by the taxpayers. If you believe in any measure of fiscal restraint or limited government, you’re likely to have deep qualms about Joe Biden’s Democrats.That essay continued with something that seemed tangential at the time but might now be germane.
[Consider that] Republicans concerned about “the danger of Trump-style politics to American democracy” are not also deeply alarmed at the threats Democrats and progressives have long posed to the entire American system — our democracy, our Constitution, our governing institutions, our free-market economy, our culture. But while those threats may be invisible to some commentators precisely because they have already wormed their way into so many of our institutions, they are, if anything, graver than the threats posed by Trump. Trump may be individually bad, but the Democrats are institutionally bad.Indeed, and if we're calling the balls and strikes on how the Establishment might have struck out backing Joe Biden, Strike One is the quick revelation that as president, Mr Biden (or, as I have it, the Jarrett regency) quickly disabused all of the notion that he would govern as an institutionalist. Daniel McCarthy provides the recollection.
Four years ago the party made the bet that Biden, an avuncular figure whose decrepitude was masked by the restrictions COVID imposed on campaigning, could beat Trump as a figure of stability and nostalgia—Biden would remind voters not only of the placid Obama-Biden era but also of such Irish-ish Democrats past as Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy. The working-class white voters who made Trump president in 2016 would defect to Biden in numbers significant enough to cost Trump the Rust Belt, and with it the presidency.His continuation is interesting. (I skipped a passage that is also instructive. I repeat my advice, when I excerpt from a long post, surf on over and read more deeply. Alas, that's long been a failing of mine, there's always one more argument to cram into a research paper back in the day or these mini-dissertations just for fun.)
[V]oters stayed loyal to Trump, and now he appears to be on track to win more states than he did in 2016. That’s not just because Biden is old. It’s also because Biden’s record is painful and humiliating to most Americans: Inflation is painful, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and Biden’s floundering response to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza has been humiliating, as has his administration’s inability to get the border under control even for the sake of winning an election.He refers, there, to the base voters, although in that litany of policy failures, he's calling attention to the more glaring reasons for the reluctant Biden voter — not necessarily a Republican-leaning voter — to this time stay home, vote for the Free Soiler or Cornel West or who have you, or even tick the Trump box. Sasha "Thinking through the Fourth Turning" Stone, who was still with the Democrats in 2019 and 2020, also perceived advantages in running that Irish-ish mediocrity.
The voters who backed Trump in this year’s primaries, and who have stayed true to him since 2020, were rewarded last night.
For four years, the party had lost its mind and lost its way over Trump. They seemed to believe he was such a bad president they could reach for the sky. Big structural change! A democratic socialist! The first gay president! But I knew a one-term president with a strong economy doesn’t get voted out.But during the Obama presidency, the likes of Susan Rice and Robert Reich were in the brains trust, and they thought they saw a chance.
Maybe they’d swap out for someone like Joe Biden, some of us believed. What harm could he do? He could be a one-term stop-gap measure to bring down Trump without rocking the boat too much. Calm from chaos, the adults back in the room, rolling the country back to the last time they felt safe under Barack Obama.
We are once again at a crucial juncture for civil rights and voting rights that could shape America for the next half century or more. Joe Biden is not LBJ, and the times are different from the mid-1960s. But the stakes are as high.For "larger goals of the nation" substitute "wish list of the San Francisco Democrats." Normals quickly saw the power grab, and only those parts that could pass the Senate at the margin of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema or be implemented, for the time being, by executive order or a ukase from an agency, are in effect, for now. It hasn't fooled Holman Jenkins.
Biden must wield the power of the presidency to make senators fall in line with the larger goals of the nation. Otherwise, as LBJ asked, "What the hell's the presidency for?"
In the new light, how are we thinking about his administration’s continuing grift aimed at younger voters as if Mr. Biden can wave away their student debts, a climate policy that in record time degenerated into corporate welfare and organized labor payola, a border policy that amounted to abdicating border enforcement?That's Strike Two. Apparently pollsters have uncovered Biden voters who now claim they would have changed their votes, again, whether that's for Mr Trump or Jill Stein or the Marxist-DeLeonist candidate we don't know: or perhaps having Big Tech and Public Radio's "disinformation" scam rather than discontent with the open borders or mediocre boy runners winning track meets for girls keeps the neighborhood block parties more civil. That puts the current press secretary's advocacy for continuing the Jarrett regency, in a different light. “The best predictor of future behavior is past performance.” Yes, a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, two new nation-building wars, money printing to reward favored constituencies as gas prices and mortgage payments increase. More future performance like that and we'll really be happy. I hope only that there are strategists and staffers advising Mr Trump and whoever is on the Free Soil ticket on how to address those policy failures.
Then there’s Mr. Biden’s disconcertingly robotic invocation on every Charlottesville anniversary of the “bulging veins” of racist protesters. His administration adopted a habit, from day one, of equating opponents with white supremacists.
Why was Mr. Biden lending his presidency to unrepresentative activist groups to pursue an agenda for which he had no mandate?
As worrisome, a visibly diminished presidential candidate, he seemed to gape on passively as Obama intelligence officials helped him get elected by falsely portraying his son’s laptop as a Russian plot. Was he even consulted?
That brings us to Strike Three, the basement strategy of 2020, ostensibly a sensible precaution in the presence of a pandemic, which paid off when the sitting president caught what might have been a bad case of coronavirus. In retrospect, that gives the impression of a face-saving cover for early-onset dementia. "The massive lie and disinformation operation to obfuscate the president's decline has been perpetrated in the name of -- you guessed it -- 'our democracy.'" Economist observer Lexington suggests it is time to move on, concluding his column with a touch of the tragic vision.
Mr Biden should be wise enough to encourage impatience and ambition in younger Democrats. He is justly proud of his own. “You know what he said?” a young woman named Neilia Hunter confided in 1964 to a friend about her dazzling new boyfriend. “He told me he’s going to be a senator by the time he’s 30. And then he’s going to be president.” Mr Biden was right, despite the obstacles and agonies life had in store. He won his first Senate race at 29. Before he was sworn in, he lost Neilia and their baby daughter, Amy, in a car crash. He survived two brain aneurysms, lost one son to cancer and struggled with another’s addiction. He lost two presidential races. And then, when it mattered most, he won. He has good reason to believe in his capacity to confound his sceptics and beat the odds. But now he is facing an opponent no one has ever defeated, in a contest that is rigged against us all.Red State's Mike Miller offers a riposte to Lexington's bid for empathy and to the con that inflicted the Jarrett regency upon us. "[Lexington] argued that Biden 'deserves to be remembered for his accomplishments and his decency rather than his decline.' While some might believe that, a growing number of voters — both Republicans and Democrats don't — and neither do I." Yes, empathy has its place; surely Mr Biden has borne numerous tragedies in his private life. And yet his public life is another matter, ask Justice Thomas or Professor Bork, or as recently as that debate, find the passage where he came close to suggesting that some Trump voters were themselves a danger to Our Democracy(TM). His colleague Bob Hoge concurs. A better exit? "Not after what he’s done to this country." Finally, John Kass, who has had more than a little experience with ward-heeler politicians, is having none of that decency talk. "He’s vicious and mean and he has always put his appetites for venality before the welfare of his country. He’s in public service for what he can take and leverage, like the worst of the big city politicos."
Then we got to see Our President respond to friendly interlocutor George Stephanopoulos. "Look, I have a cognitive test every single day. Everything I do. Not only am I campaigning but I'm running the world." Running the world? The mullahs and the Tsar of All the Russias and the mandarins in Pekin would like a word.
So much for the Irish-ish mediocrity scam. Democrats and their court intellectuals hoped to confront the elephant on the campaign poster without confronting, to mix a metaphor, the elephant in the room. "They wished that they could whistle past what they knew and emerge in November victorious and relieved, having helped avoid another four years of Trump." Or antagonizing the Hollywood rainmakers.
“What Jeffrey Katzenberg has done here is unbelievable,” said one Hollywood power broker, donor and influential Democrat who declined to be identified. “Jeffrey lied about the whole Biden thing. The whole Biden inner circle lied… It’s such an act of hypocrisy.”Can't happen to a nicer bunch of people. Matthew Yglesias recognizes what bit him in the ass. "Now that Biden apologists like me are discredited in the eyes of the public, most people will probably just decide he’s been unfit this whole time." Quico Toro, a pundit inclined to agree with Democrats, sees the same problem. "I felt, vividly, why a sane person might prefer to vote for Trump over an asshole who insists we’re better off trusting them than our lyin’ eyes." I'll give Alex Berenson, who has more than a little experience being falsely accused of "misinformation," the final word. "A reckoning for the way media outlets have turned into spear-carriers for the Democratic Party may be coming. I hope it will be. It is long overdue."
“Everyone is furious,” said a leading Hollywood Democratic insider. “People are pissed – they feel betrayed.”
They feel betrayed, certainly, because as an elder statesman of the Hollywood community, Katzenberg has personally vouched for Biden’s mental and physical capacity despite concerns voiced early on by donors about the president’s age.
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