Over the last seven years, Democrats and the mainstream news media have repeatedly characterized Donald Trump as “abnormal.” SaidHBO’s John Oliver in 2016, “He is not normal. He is abnormal.” On January 31, 2017, a week after Trump took office, the New York Times published an essay on “The Abnormal Presidency of Donald Trump.” One month later, it published another essay asking, “Just How Abnormal Is the Trump Presidency? Rating 20 Events.”
Trump’s abnormality was particularly dangerous, Democrats and the news media warned us, since, as president, he was authorized to start nuclear war. And, explained the Chicago Tribune, “Trump’s abnormal behavior knows no boundaries.”
By contrast, Joe Biden was the “normalcy candidate,” according to Democrats and the media. Biden specifically campaigned on a “return to normalcy.” Concluded experts, “Joe Biden Won on Normalcy.” This came as a relief because Biden could be trusted to keep the country out of war, including nuclear war.
But as the debate last week made clear, there is nothing normal about either Joe Biden or the Biden presidency. Biden spoke incoherently, at one point saying, “We finally beat Medicare,” and claiming that America has a “thousand trillionaires.” Biden’s speech is soft and slurring, but he also sometimes shouts. He struggles to walk. And in mid-June, Biden twice froze in public and appeared disoriented several times in Europe.
After years of denying any serious problem, the news media turned on Biden after the debate, urging him to drop out. Someone in the White House told Axios that he only works productively from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., which could be a serious problem if he had to deal with a global emergency, such as an escalating conflict with Russia. It is not unreasonable to believe that other people are, at a minimum, reducing Biden’s choices if not making decisions for Biden entirely.
It’s true that all presidents rely to a significant degree on their cabinet secretaries and aides. Historians agree that after a stroke incapacitated President Woodrow Wilson, his wife made many decisions for him. President John F. Kennedy was, at times, incapacitated by back pain and high on pain medications.
But Biden appears to depend on unelected aides and officials or family members to a degree that is unprecedented for the United States and inappropriate for a democracy. Few believe he relies at all on Vice President Kamala Harris, who also struggles to speak.
And yet many Democrats, Democratic interest groups, and the news media are now rallying around Biden. This morning, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski defended Biden and blamed his team for not managing his age and schedule better, saying, “Joe Biden has work to do. He has to do better. His team has to do a lot better. I’m just not ready, though, to count Joe Biden out. Not even close.”
The debate was “not a win for Trump,” Brzezinski said. “The choice is one terribly bad night versus a decade of destruction to our core beliefs, our democratic values, and yes, our constitution. Someone who stumbled over his words for 90 minutes versus someone who lied to the American people over and over again. A man slowed down by a cold versus a man with a cold, vile, and merciless heart.”
This continued support for Biden and the demands for his support point to the deeply authoritarian behavior of Democrats and their enablers in the news media.
Some Democrats are still pressuring Biden to step down, but this approach is also anti-democratic. The Democratic Party did not allow any serious challenge to Biden during the primaries. Despite widespread concerns among voters about Biden’s age and competence, he did not face significant opposition at a time when voters could have decided on an alternative. If Biden withdraws from the race now, there will be an open contest at the convention, allowing the party to bypass the direct participation of Democratic voters altogether in electing a candidate for their party.
This would not be the first time the party sidestepped its voters and used undemocratic means to select a candidate. Donna Brazile claimed that there was an “unethical” agreement between the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016, which allowed the Clinton campaign to inappropriately control the party’s finances and strategy, to Bernie Sanders’ disadvantage, before she officially became the nominee. This revelation led many to conclude that the DNC had effectively “rigged” the primary.
With Biden, the party similarly suppressed alternative candidates. The New York Times reported yesterday that “interviews with top party strategists, office holders and people close to Democrats seen as possible presidential hopefuls suggest that, just as crucially, party leaders were lulled into complacency or pressed to step in line at crucial moments when they might have persuaded Mr. Biden to step aside… At key moments, those who tried to sound the alarm… were slapped down by Democrats, often in the brutal discord of social media sites like X, and chastised by top Biden aides for being disloyal.”
Democratic politicians could have rebelled but were too obedient to do so. “Candidates who might have considered challenging Mr. Biden,” wrote the Times, “after reviewing his weaknesses, yielded in the face of the threat of backlash from a party united behind its president.”
When Biden and the party could have been held accountable to voters during the primary season, party operatives and their media allies gaslit the public, insisted that everything was fine, and claimed that alarming videos of Biden’s impairment were simply right-wing disinformation. Only now that they have the opportunity to install a new candidate at the convention, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, are they finally being honest about Biden’s evident cognitive decline. And some Democrats, like Brzezinski, are still absurdly obedient to Biden’s handlers, arguing that a president who can’t reliably string a sentence together is a viable option.
This is not the Democrats’ only authoritarian turn. Since at least 2016, Democrats have undermined democracy by facilitating and supporting the Censorship Industrial Complex. In 2020, the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop, coordinated by party operatives and the intelligence community, may have impacted the election results. What’s more, Democrats overwhelmingly support the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), even as both of these agencies have engaged in profoundly anti-democratic activities.
It wasn’t always this way. From the 1960s until recently, the Democratic Party was the party of anti-authoritarianism. Democrats opposed foreign wars favored by the foreign policy establishment and fought to expose and end abuses of power by the FBI. And as the Times noted, the Democratic Party 50 years ago “rewrote its rules to marginalize the role of political bosses.” Democrats pasted “Question Authority” bumper stickers on their Hondas and Volvos. As recently as 2008, Democrats rejected the establishment candidate Hillary Clinton for the apparent outsider Barack Obama.
But now all this has changed. Republicans rejected their own party leaders, donors, and the foreign policy establishment to nominate Trump for president in 2016. Democrats, by contrast, sided with the establishment candidate in choosing Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. And they did so again for 2024, even though nearly half of Democrats say Biden shouldn’t be running.
Why is that? Why did Democrats become the party obedient to authority?
Why Democrats Became The Party Of Authoritarianism
The apparent reason Democrats have rallied around Biden is because they believe Trump poses a grave threat to democracy.
But in choosing Biden, Democrats chose someone who is not actually governing as president. In this way, they have advanced an authoritarian system in which unelected bureaucrats, advisors, and lobbyists shape policy without any semblance of real democratic input.
Much of the party’s authoritarianism can be explained by its class composition. Beginning in the 1930s, the “New Deal coalition” was the primary source of support for the Democratic Party. This coalition, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi explains, “united white rural and blue-collar workers, religious minorities (Jews, Catholics) and, increasingly, African Americans.”
The Democratic Party began losing significant support from white Southerners after President John F. Kennedy proposed civil rights legislation in 1963. American Independent Party candidate George Wallace won over Southern Democrats and split the New Deal Coalition in 1968, leading to Richard Nixon’s victory over incumbent Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
Following this loss, Democrats essentially gave up on the white working class and the New Deal coalition. Writes al-Ghabri, “Democratic Party insiders decided to rebrand the party—to form a new coalition centered around women, college students, young professionals, and racial and ethnic minorities. They doubled down on cultural liberalism, adopted a more dovish posture on foreign policy (to appeal to former anti-war activists, despite the fact that the Vietnam War was started and perpetuated by Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson).”
What’s more, Democrats “de-emphasized ties to organized labor. Indeed, white rural and blue-collar workers increasingly came to be viewed as a liability rather than an asset. Many party insiders depicted them as ignorant, bigoted, misogynistic and reactionary—an impediment to the party’s more enlightened future.”
Over the next few decades, Democrats’ emphasis on educated professionals and socially progressive values led to a major shift in the party’s demographics. In 1960, Kennedy lost the votes of white college graduates, but won the support of white voters without a college degree by a 2-to-1 margin. For Joe Biden, the results were the exact opposite in 2020. In 1992, almost 60% of Bill Clinton’s supporters were whites without a degree, but the same was true of only 27% of Biden voters. By 2018, the top 10 wealthiest congressional districts were all held by Democrats.
Writer Michael Lind explains that the Democratic Party currently consists largely of an alliance between the “professional bourgeoisie,” which includes lawyers, teachers, doctors, and journalists, and the “hub-city working class,” many of whom “work directly for the urban overclass as maids, nannies and other domestic staff, or otherwise indirectly in luxury services that cater to the affluent elite.”
And Republicans are disproportionately entrepreneurs and small business owners less obedient to governmental authority. These small business owners, Lind argues, are aligned with the “heartland working class” who work in “manufacturing, agriculture, energy, retail distribution and warehousing.”
Since 2016, corporate and government functionaries have had a clear affiliation with the Democratic base of the professional bourgeoisie in opposition to Trump. This powerful alliance of elites has strongly authoritarian characteristics, attempting to eliminate all other spheres of influence, such as small businesses, religious groups, and other centers of potential populist dissent. Using tools of censorship, propaganda, and state power, the professional-managerial class has increasingly aimed to place all facets of life under its expertise and technical guidance.
In this way, the progressive ideology of these elites is deeply authoritarian, as it demands the subordination of the will of the people to the rule of experts. On Covid, climate change, and social media censorship, the progressive professional bourgeoisie has determined that their ideological and political views are settled science, and that disagreement is fundamentally illogical or hateful. Only professionals, they say, hold the keys to reality, and they demand that democracy defer to “the science,” by which they mean committees of experts.
There is a psychological element. Progressives have condemned Republicans as on the grip of “right-wing authoritarianism,” similar to Nazis. By contrast, argued a psychologist in 1980, left-wing authoritarianism was a “myth.” But that turned out to be wrong. Swiss psychologists recently found an almost exact overlap between dark personality traits and social justice commitment. This research suggests that progressive professionals are often entitled and narcissistic and that these tendencies are what’s behind left-wing authoritarianism.
The Democrats’ embrace of racialist and hierarchical DEI ideology ultimately contributed to Biden’s downfall. “Mr. Biden was also protected, in an unexpected way, by his choice of Ms. Harris as his vice president,” observed the Times. “Many Democrats thought she lacked the political skills and presence to lead a national ticket but believed it would be hard to deny the first Black woman vice president the top spot if Mr. Biden did not run again.”
Elections As The Antidote To Authoritarianism
All of this is a very dark turn not just for Democrats, who used to be defined around their rebellious spirit; now they are defined by their dogmatism and deference to authority. If Trump cannot defeat Biden in his impaired state, then it’s a grave indictment of Trump. Whatever the outcome, the current situation is an indictment of the large percentage of the country that is apparently fine with voting for someone who cannot plainly lead.
Biden’s presidency and the Democrats’ deference to him as a candidate are profoundly abnormal. The first qualification to be a leader, including president, is the ability to speak. A president need not be a great writer. His oratory need not be beautiful. But he must speak clearly to express what he thinks we should do and what he will do. A person who cannot do this, as Biden cannot, is not considered a leader. Google “leadership qualities” and communication is near the top of every list.
If there is any hope to be had, it’s that Democrats will suffer a defeat large enough to force them to reconsider more than their choice of candidates. America will always have a left-wing party just as it will always have a right-wing party. Today, the Left-wing party is the party of obedience to authority, but that need not last. A defeat of Biden should undermine the legitimacy not just of Biden but of the Democratic Party’s leaders who enabled him and snuffed out opposition. The takeaway for Democrats should be that the party is stronger with internal rivalries and competition, not deference to elders.
It should also make Democrats take seriously the need for candidates young and competent enough to work hours longer than 10 am to 4 pm and mentally acute sufficient to make tough decisions in a crisis, including ones that may occur in the middle of the night. We appear to have reached or passed peak Wokeism, including peak DEI. The incompetence of Vice President Harris should be a wake-up call to Democrats about the fundamentally irresponsible nature of making critical job hires and nominations based on race and sex. If Democrats continue to make choices based on racialist and sexist metrics, they can expect to continue to lose to Republicans.
Whatever happens with Biden and the elections, the Democrats’ debacle should change how we think about claims of “normalcy.” Normalcy, like tradition, is sometimes good and sometimes bad. What we should want in a leader are other qualities, like vision, competence, rationality, imagination, and the ability to communicate. The “abnormality” that the mainstream news media, the professional-managerial class, and progressive interests feared in Trump in 2016 was fear that his election threatened their status and power. It blinded them to the equally serious threat posed by rallying around Biden, whose candidacy in 2024 has proven to be far from “normal.”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-146180041?source=queue
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