Ruling class mandarins on both sides of the Atlantic are hollowing out the institutions of liberal democratic governance.
By Rod DREHER
The bizarre resignation of President Joe Biden plunged the United States into a crisis unlike any it has known. This is what Biden and his party, those stalwart Defenders Of Democracy against the Trumpian menace, have done to the country, out of their arrogant self-righteousness.
The June 27 Atlanta debate with Donald Trump destroyed the lie told by the White House, the Democrats, and their lackeys in the news media: that aging, enfeebled Joe Biden was fit for office. The post-debate network interviews and the campaign speeches at worst reinforced the declinist narrative, and at best failed to reassure anybody not already blinded by ideology. That number includes donors, whose idealistic political zeal is tempered by the hard fact that they have to pay for it.
Donations dried up. More and more Democratic members of Congress began to say Joe must go. Over the past few days, the Democratic leadership played an extraordinary game of psychological pressure, leaking to the media stories that the president was on the verge of withdrawing from the race, forcing the White House to issue denials. Was this an attempt at some kind of soft coup, an attempt to gaslight Biden into quitting?
And then, on Sunday afternoon, came the Biden letter standing down from the race, but not the presidency. Shortly thereafter came an announcement the president is fully behind Kamala Harris's campaign. You would have thought such a momentous event would have been announced in a nationally televised speech, right? That's what Lyndon Johnson did in 1968. Or at least a proper White House press conference. They did none of that. The White House, or whoever is running it now, announced a changing of the guard over Twitter.
All of this seems like a mocktail version of "House Of Cards." How can we trust that the president knew what he was signing, or that he signed it at all? How can we be sure that Biden knew what was happening? After all, nobody thinks he controls his Twitter account.
Nearly all of the prominent Democrats - with the notable exceptions of Barack Obama, and both Democratic Congressional leaders - fell in line behind the Harris campaign. Yesterday, former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki 𝕏 said on MSNBC that the nation will now be witness to a "process" designed by the Democratic Party chiefs to "make the vice president look strong, and be strong by the end...." In other words, a well-choreographed coronation. All very Democratic, if not democratic.
Still, as of this writing Monday morning, nobody has seen the president. It's all very late Soviet, isn't it?
As GOP vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance said on Sunday, if Joe Biden is too weak and confused to run for political office, he is certainly too weak and confused to run the country. In 1968, nobody doubted Lyndon Johnson's ability to do the job. Johnson resigned because he knew that given his personal unpopularity, he would lose; besides, he was fed up with dealing with the Vietnam War.
That's not the case with Biden. Everybody knows that Biden is more or less senile. That's why he has jumped out of the race, or perhaps was pushed against his will. Vance pointed out that if Biden is incapable of doing his job, there is a constitutional solution for that: formal removal by the cabinet, under the 25th Amendment. What is happening now might be formally permissible, but anyone with eyes to see must question its legitimacy.
Vance is obviously right: Nobody can possibly believe that Biden is physically and mentally unfit to be a candidate, but perfectly capable of stewarding the ship of state through treacherous waters: the Ukraine war, the rise of China, the potential of an Israel-Hezbollah clash leading to a wider Mideast war, and so forth. It tells you something that none of the leading American newspapers on Monday-all of them vociferously anti-Trump-are asking these obvious and important questions. The media are simply relieved that now there might be a chance to stop Trump.
The U.S. has just entered one of the most dangerous periods of its existence. America's enemies now know for sure its president is functionally incapacitated. They also must know that should Biden be called on to rally the nation to war, few Americans would answer the call.
How could they? Since that fateful June night in Atlanta, the American people have witnessed an extraordinary drama about the nature of pride and power. Among the lessons learned is that the White House and its media lapdogs lied to the American people for the entirety of the Biden presidency, about the president's mental and physical state. Anything to stop Trump, right?
This did not happen in a vacuum. We all know how the Establishment lied about Russiagate. We know how they misled the nation about Covid. We know about Hunter Biden's laptop, which they all said was Russian disinformation, though that was a lie. We know that they pretended to be on the side of science, while privately pushing for throwing science aside to reform medical standards, for the sake of permitting the sexual mutilation, via chemicals and surgery, of little children. We know their disgusting double standards on the "mostly peaceful" BLM riots, and January 6, as well. We know they punish with cancellation conservatives whom they call bigots, while tolerating open antisemitic, anti-Asian, and anti-white bigotry on college campuses. On and on the list goes.
And now we are supposed to believe the defenestration of Joe Biden, who as late as last week was angrily protesting his intention to stay in the race, was legitimate? It's absurd. This lot are the defenders of democracy? It's a sick joke. And if America's foreign allies and enemies don't know this, they are fools.
I don't believe they are fools-not even the EU mandarins, despite what they say in public. It is clear that the United States is now ruled-not governed, ruledˆby an elite that has power, but no authority. The Chicago coronation will rightly be laughed at as a charade-at best. Recall the last time the Democrats were in Chicago-1968, after the LBJ resignation. Street clashes between the Chicago police and antiwar protesters created a historical debacle that humiliated the party and led to the election that fall of Richard M. Nixon, the law and order candidate.
Antifa, pro-Palestinian protesters, and other leftist hotheads are lying in wait. They sense opportunities that the Democrats' disgrace present. And they are surely not going to let them pass.
It is sometimes said that God loves drunks, fools, and the United States of America. It had better be true. The most powerful nation in the world has a ruling class that fewer and fewer Americans believe in. The "shining city on a hill" is a Potemkin village. If it had been otherwise, Donald Trump would never have been elected in 2016. Whatever one thinks of Trump, he has exposed the hypocrisies, the weaknesses, and the self-serving phoniness of the ruling class, both Democrats and Republicans.
And now that regime loyalists have sabotaged the Democratic president that they protected with a phalanx of lies, until those lies no longer worked, their true nature stands revealed. The next few months will be among the most consequential in the history of American politics. America's European allies must not allow themselves to be deceived about what's really happening in Washington.
Here is my greatest fear for my country: that the corruption and self-dealing of the establishment-both Democrats and Republicans-has reached such an advanced degree that a significant number of ordinary Americans no longer believe in liberal democracy. If it is true that Biden, Harris, and their ruling claque in the government, in academia, and in the media, represent "democracy," then what sensible person can believe in democracy?
Consider the trials of El Salvador, where the established parties in that democracy pathetically failed to deliver law and order, the most basic requirement for government. Nayib Bukele, the Caesar-like president of that country, is wildly popular among the Salvadoran people, because he fixed the problem by throwing all the gangs in prison. The chihuahuas of the human rights NGOs bark inconsequentially, but the Bukele caravan moves on, because he has not only power, but authority - authority that comes from having exercised that power to dramatically improve the lives of the masses.
Is this coming for America? It is far from unthinkable. The Democratic Party and the Washington establishment-whose number includes Never Trump Republicans-expect Americans to believe that the future of American democracy depends on a California lightweight, a dingbat diversity hire and Sen. Kamala Harris: The Nationwide Protests Are A Movement. They're Not Going To StopSen. Kamala Harris: The Nationwide Protests Are A Movement. They're Not Going To Stop who failed conspicuously in the single job Biden gave her: managing the crisis on the U.S. southern border. Conservative U.S. Catholics angry at the Trump GOP for backing away from the party's strong anti-abortion line must now face the fact that the likely Democratic nominee has been an abortion-rights fanatic who has been willing to trample the liberties of Catholic and Christian institutions, for the sake of imposing a pro-abortion hard line.
This is yet another opportunity for Europeans to reflect on the fact that Trump did not come from nowhere. What America, and the world, is seeing now, with this dirty behind-the-scenes Democratic Party drama, is yet another example of why Trump emerged: because the establishment failed, and lost its authority. From the start of the Trump presidency, that same establishment stopped at nothing to defend its power from Trump. The long, pitiful epiphany that began on June 27, in Atlanta, and now draws to its disgraceful close, shows us all how far they will go to "protect democracy"-which is to say, ruling-class privileges.
What's happening in America now is also happening, in a sense, in Europe. The Brussels establishment and its allies in national capitals, and certainly in the media, posit themselves as defenders of democracy against supposed tyrants like Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, and other leaders of the Right. In Germany, democracy's defenders last week took the extraordinary act of closing down Compact, a magazine of ideas supporting Alternative for Germany, the country's second-largest political party.
What these ruling class mandarins are doing on both sides of the Atlantic is hollowing out the institutions of liberal democratic governance. The real enemies of democracy are those who have ordained themselves as its saviors. This will not end well.
Original article: The European Conservative