Democracy in Name Only: How Kamala Harris Became Democratic Nominee
Like many commentators, I have described the sudden, almost magical elevation of Kamala Harris to the status of presumptive Democratic nominee for president as a “coup.” “What just happened,” I wrote on July 23, “is essentially an anti-democratic coup. Kamala Harris, who got no delegates—zero—when she ran for president in 2020 and was only chosen as Biden’s running mate because he had promised to pick a black woman, is on the cusp of being handed the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.”
How did that happen? If you said, “It happened because of the machinations of the deep state,” go to the head of the class. Even Donald Trump has called what just happened a “coup by the Democrats.”
But Mark Steyn makes a good point when he observes that, in many ways, what just happened to Joe Biden was not a “coup” in any ordinary sense. A “coup” (from the French “strike, blow”) suggests an abrupt intervention that brings about a change at the top. The element change is a major part of what a “coup” in this sense means.
Yet what change has the Biden-Harris pas-de-deux brought about? Until the very morning of the day he announced his withdrawal, Joe Biden and his team were insisting he was in the race till the end. His debate performance against Trump was a disaster, true, and his poll numbers were in free fall. No matter. He was going to tough it out.
There are a few things to remember, though. For one thing, Biden’s poll numbers had been in free fall for months. For another, the idea that the debate revealed for the first time how cognitively challenged Biden was is ridiculous. It had been obvious for years that he was slipping in and out of senility. Back in 2020, I described Biden as “an empty cipher . . . a drowsy Howdy Doody puppet, manipulated by a committee of ‘woke’ ventriloquists.”
At the time, I noted, Biden’s “painfully obvious flirtation with senility was as much an asset as a liability, because, though it made for some cringeworthy displays of incompetence, it conspired with COVID-19 to allow his handlers to keep him tucked safely away in his basement for most of the campaign.” Indeed, I had even earlier compared Biden to the aged Achon, a character in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Black Mischief. The legitimate but inconvenient emperor of the fictional kingdom of Azania, Achon, had been safely confined to a cave for 50 years. After some elaborate negotiations among the real powers of state, Achon is set free and is carried to the capital to be invested as emperor. Alas, his long captivity left him bent and senile. He dies upon his coronation.
Biden lasted a bit longer. But the point is that the Council of Elders that manages The Narrative knew from the start that Biden was past it. Nevertheless, aided by the propaganda press, they worked assiduously to cover up the truth. “Oh, Joe is sharp as a tack,” they told us ad nauseam. “He’s intensely probing,” etc.
Nevertheless, the appalling truth was leaking out like dark, malodorous scum from a ripped bag of garbage. Indeed, I speculated that the reason the Democratic establishment scheduled the debate between Trump and Biden so early—remember, Trump hadn’t even clinched the nomination yet—was to give Biden one last chance to prove himself.
Obviously, he failed. But that apparently had no bearing on Biden’s commitment to stay in the race. That was the state of play when I got on a plane from London to New York last Sunday morning. “I’m in it till the end.” By the time I landed, however, Biden’s bizarre announcement that he was dropping out of the race—on his personal, not his official POTUS X account, with no mention of endorsing Kamala—was lighting up the internet.
I have no idea who finally prevailed upon Biden to drop out or what threats or inducements they dangled before him. But it is clear that the action disenfranchised voters. The existential Muzak that had been filling the corridors and elevators of our lives was full of encomia to “democracy.” Here at last, we saw up close and personal what the Dems meant by “democracy.” They meant, as I have been fond of pointing out, rule by Democrats. That’s what “democracy” means in their lexicon. It has nothing to do with voting, rules, or process. It has everything to do with maintaining power for oneself and denying it to the other side.
This was the point of Mark Steyn’s curious quibble about whether what we have just witnessed with the cashiering of Biden and the elevation of Kamala was really a “coup.” In a deep sense, Steyn argues, “The operation was the inversion of a coup: it was to prevent the possibility of any change.”
Just before his election in 2008, Barack Obama famously (or infamously) said that we were on the threshold of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He was right about that. But the irony was that the transformation entailed the establishment of political stasis. Throughout his first term, Donald Trump endeavored to change some important things, to roll back that “fundamental transformation” that Obama had overseen. The FBI and other agencies of the regulatory state, abetted by the propaganda press, intervened to stymie him at every turn. He was investigated, indicted, impeached, nearly bankrupted, and, just a week or so ago, shot.
The Dems love the rhetoric of “change,” just as they cherish the word “democracy.” Their actions show that they are hostile to both. Change is incompatible with the maintenance of their perquisites and privileges, just as genuine democracy is fraught with peril for the establishment. Take democracy seriously and who knows? You might wind up with someone like Donald Trump. As I have often observed, that was Trump’s original, unforgivable sin: being elected. Above all, his democratic election was an affront to democracy, or at least to “Our Democracy™.”
What happens now? I do not know. I think Mark Steyn is right: “The goal of the Permanent State remains the same: nothing will be permitted to change.” Once again, Donald Trump has the temerity to challenge that dispensation. He is much better organized this time around, and he seems more determined than ever. The fact that the Democrats have settled, at least for the moment, on someone as preposterous as Kamala Harris as their candidate is probably a sign of desperation, at least in part. But it is also a sign of their contempt for the American people, and contempt is an attitude that is, in the metabolism of political life, never far from hubris.
Traditionally, nemesis is the regular concomitant of hubris. I know that Dems—and, indeed, many Republicans—disbelieve in the operation of such quaint, antique moral processes. That very fact may be another sign of their hubris.
In any event, I like to think that the movement Trump represents may finally dissolve the iceberg of greedy woke sentimentality that holds America hostage.
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