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.
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.”
Over the last seven years, Democrats and the mainstream news media have repeatedly characterized Donald Trump as “abnormal.” Said HBO’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, allows 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 an authoritarian party?
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