This week, and for the second time this year, President Joe Biden used public resources to go on television and claim that unless you give him unlimited power for life, you are placing democracy in danger. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
Something is very wrong with this poor man and with all the Democratic partisans who, without a hint of self-consciousness, make this authoritarian and anti-democratic argument in favor of democracy. Biden’s serious-sounding exhortation that “you can’t love your country only when you win” is actually a scathing indictment of the Democratic Party and its members’ conduct after every presidential election they lost this century.
THE HYSTERICAL STAGE OF THE CAMPAIGN
The fact that some people — candidates and prominent speakers for both parties, mind you — have denied election outcomes is harmful. The fact that a severely mentally ill and drug-addicted illegal immigrant allegedly attacked the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in his own home is atrocious. The riot at the U.S. Capitol two years ago was a serious incident, which the criminal justice system is now handling just fine as the instigators go on trial.
None of these situations have anything to do with whether democracy can survive.
Given that Biden’s credibility today is so low, and his approval even lower, his ominous-sounding speech on Wednesday was just a tamer echo of his infamous Red Light Special speech from September. Not since the dark days of the late George W. Bush presidency has any president seemed so small and insignificant. But it would be a mistake to let him get away with insulting voters’ intelligence like this yet again.
Certainly, some in the left-wing media tried to make this speech significant. Historian Michael Beschloss took to the MSNBC airwaves (of course) to compare Biden to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He insinuated that a civil war is about to break out and that a democratic election in Republicans’ favor would actually be very un-democratic.
“Six nights from now, we could all be discussing violence all over this country,” he said. “There are signs that may happen, may God forbid, that losers will be declared winners by fraudulent election officers or secretary of state candidates or governors or state legislatures.”
Notice the election denial. Isn’t it impressive how the defenders of democracy, while arguing about the dangers of election denialism, frequently engage in it themselves and encourage others to engage in it whenever they see or expect an adverse election outcome? But he went on, “We could be six days away from losing our rule of law and losing a situation where we have elections that we can rely on.” So now he’s not just trying to deny the results of next week’s election but also all future elections — that is, if Republicans even let us have elections in the future, right?
In his embarrassing television performance, Beschloss said a Republican victory would be much like a return to the one-party authoritarian Jim Crow South, complete with modern-day klansmen organizing violence against random people over the internet. And yes, he even trotted out the Hitler comparison. It was gross.
We should not have to explain this, but any truly democratic election process can have multiple outcomes. If you don’t trust people to vote for the candidates they prefer — election denials, scandals, gaffes, warts, and all — then by definition, you don’t even believe in democracy, so how can you pretend to defend it? This is where Biden and Beschloss and all these other panicking partisans have placed themselves now. They just lack the self-awareness to realize it.
The Democrats’ emotional manipulations really know no bounds. Vote for us, they say, or else elections are over forever. Wow, nobody ever thought of that one before.
Here’s a better idea: Ignore these Chicken Littles pretending they care about democracy — all they really care about is the Democratic Party. Ignore people who say that the nation is on the edge of a civil war. Ignore people who deliberately turn up the heat by claiming that everyone who disagrees with them is a fascist or a Nazi. The coming election will decide a lot of issues, and there probably won’t be any more violence than there is on a typical Tuesday.
In fact, voters are not going to act based on Jan. 6 show trials or whatever pretend threats to democracy Republicans are supposed to be posing. They also won’t punish Democrats for their own transgressions against democratic norms — their very recent threats involve packing the Supreme Court and illegally deputizing social media companies to suppress free speech online about various topics, including Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In the real world, voters are going to decide based on whether they feel they are better off today than they were in January 2021. Real wages are down significantly since Biden took office. Gasoline is about $1.50 more expensive. The stock market is down. Crime is up. And thanks to the inflation Biden helped create with his American Rescue Plan, interest rates have been raised to prohibitively high levels for many people who would otherwise like to buy a home.
If voters make their choices based on these factors, they will be upholding democracy by participating in the sacred process of choosing leaders more competent than Biden and the Democrats in Congress who worked so hard to derail the post-COVID recovery. For democracy, that’s going to be a win.
