With "Friends" Like These: Clintonite-Right "Democrats" As the Defenders of Liberal Democracy (UPDATED BELOW)

On 5 Jan., Joe Biden held a big-money fundraiser in Boston and--seemingly forgetting where he was and what he was doing there--told the assembled big-money donors to whom he was prostituting his potential 2nd term of a threat posed by Donald Trump should Trump win the presidency again. "American democracy, I give you my word as a Biden, is at stake."

It's a common theme for Biden and Democrats and unlike a lot of the strictly self-serving rhetoric one gets from politicians, it has the virtue of being true: Trump and the protofascist MAGA movement he presently leads are an open, direct threat to liberal democracy.

With little else to render palatable to the public their continued rule, Clintonite-right Democrats like Biden have been particularly prolific in preaching this point. They may not have any policy solutions or anything else positive to offer Americans but they've set themselves up as the defenders of democracy, against a foe that would, if given the power, end it.

It begs the question: How, in the face of this existential threat to the institution, have these Clintonite Dems, these Defenders of Liberal Democracy, actually defended liberal democracy under Biden's leadership?

One way is by trying to keep competing candidates off the ballot.

In 2020 in Texas, they sued to remove Green party candidates from the ballot in the state's high-profile races. In Wisconsin, they petitioned to exclude the Green party presidential candidate from the state ballot on a ridiculous technicality. They did the same in Pennsylvania. In Montana, they went to the extraordinary lengths of seeking out signatories of a petition that got the Green party on the ballot and leaning on them to recant, eventually convincing several hundred to do so. They then had the Greens removed from the ballot for insufficient signatures.

They repeated that performance in North Carolina in 2022, sending operatives to the homes of petition-signers posing as representatives of the state Board of Elections and of even the Green party and otherwise trying to intimidate the signers into recanting their support of the Greens' petition. In New York, they engineered the removal of all 7 third parties from the gubernatorial ballot. Earlier this year, in March, the Arizona Democratic party filed a lawsuit aimed at blocking No Labels "from being recognized as a political party with the ability to place candidates on the state’s ballot."

In October, the New York Times finally got around to reporting that "powerful allies of President Biden are aggressively working to stop third-party and independent presidential candidacies, fearing that an outside bid could cost Democrats" the 2024 election. This campaign has carried out "a multipronged assault" intended "to starve such efforts of financial and political support"; the Times notes that "Mr. Biden's top aides have blessed the multimillion-dollar offensive..."

Biden himself set out to game the Democratic presidential nomination process to perpetually tilt it in favor of more conservative candidates like himself. Earlier this year at his insistence, Democrats made deep-red South Carolina, which hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 47 years, the first state to vote in the party's presidential primaries.

Biden is profoundly unpopular; his approval rating went into majority-disapproval only a few months into his presidency and has only gotten worse since. In the history of polling, no president with comparable ratings at this point in his presidency has ever been reelected but despite the fact that supermajorities of Americans--including large majorities of Democrats--have been saying since at least July 2022 that they don't want Biden to run again, this Defender of Democracy has insisted on launching a reelection campaign.

That decision--to ignore the public and his own party's base--effectively ended any opportunity for a meaningful party primary, as the party machinery in such situations always closes ranks around the incumbent and most potential rivals will stay away from the race. Had Biden done the right thing and simply announced he wouldn't run again, there would now be a vigorous, ongoing Dem primary contest with a dozen or more candidates, all of whom would have a better chance next year against the Republican nominee (in the head-to-head poling, Biden has been losing to Trump--at present, that likely nominee--for months now). As it stands, Biden, whose campaign slogan is "Finish the Job" yet who hasn't outlined any agenda at all for a 2nd term except being Not Trump, faces only marginal opponents, who are ignored by the corporate press and shut out by the party.[1]

With over 2/3 of Democrats saying they'd prefer someone other than Biden and 8 in 10 Dems saying they want to see Dem primary debates in 2024, the Clintonites running the Democratic party have "defended democracy" by refusing to schedule any. In Florida, a significant swing state, Democrats swindled the other Democratic contenders and effectively engineered the cancellation of the state's Democratic primary; Biden will now get all of the state's delegates without a contest. Democrats in Tennessee, North Carolina and Massachusetts soon did the same, with more likely to follow.

This writer, holding to more radical views, isn't a fan of liberal democracy but it's certainly preferable to many of the alternatives. Infinitely preferable to MAGA protofascism. To the Clintonites, I would say--wishing, all along, that I was pointing out something so obvious it wouldn't need to be this overtly stated--that it isn't possible to "save" liberal democracy by gutting it, and these sorts of antics eviscerate your pose as its defenders and expose you as entirely unserious on this matter.

Americans, however, can't afford to be unserious on this matter. With elected Republicans having largely abandoned liberal democracy while we're getting this nonsense from the Clintonites who run the Democratic party, concern for the fate of liberal democracy is very real. It has no defenders in the upper echelons of either of the major parties, no one at that level making a real case for it, no one offering a progressive reform program responsive to Americans' needs that would shore up support for it and dry up the swamps that undermine that support. Either this state of affairs or the liberal democracy can continue; continuing both is becoming less of an option every day. If it's to survive in any recognizable form, it's genuine defenders must do much better. And soon.

If Biden cared a whit for "American democracy," he wouldn't be warning about the threat to it at an event specifically aimed at selling it out to the highest bidder, he wouldn't be running for reelection and his party wouldn't be trying to eliminate any competition and force a hated incumbent down America's throat. The consequences could be very severe.

--j.

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[1] There have also been several actions to bar Donald Trump from ballots on the grounds that his participation in--indeed, creation of--an "insurrection" rendered him ineligible to run for president under the 14th Amendment. While these have, to date, been mostly unsuccessful, the Colorado Supreme Court just ruled that Trump be excluded from the state's ballots on those grounds. Democrats have been behind some of these efforts, while others are the work of Trump's Republican and third-party rivals or other actors. Trump is arguably ineligible, but barring him from ballots is problematic both in itself and in how it's done. Lots of legalisms involved, questions of due process, etc. It's a subject on which there can be a wide range of good-faith disagreements, and Ben Burgis, writing in Jacobin, is right to argue that instead of pursuing this course, Democrats should run a better candidate.


UPDATE (9 Jan., 2024) - New Hampshire has held the first-in-the nation primary in presidential elections for over a century. The state is proud of this and, in 1975, codified it into law. Biden's efforts to supplant NH (where he finished in an embarrassing 5th place in 2020) with conservative South Carolina as the first Dem primary state--to stack the primary process to perpetually favor more conservative candidates--stomped all over this and when, in Oct. 2023, NH indicated it would maintain its first-in-the-nation position--the Republicans who control the state legislature won't change the law, nor is it likely Dems would do so if they held the majority--Biden declined to have his name put on the ballot there. On 6 Jan., the DNC's Rules & Bylaws committee fired off a letter to the state Democratic party saying no delegates or alternates from the state's "unofficial" primary would be accepted by the DNC and called on state party leaders to "educate the public that January 23rd [the New Hampshire primary] is a non-binding presidential preference event and is meaningless." This, in turn, led the state Attorney General to send a cease-and-desist notice to the DNC, noting, in the words of the Associated Press,

"the comments amount to an illegal attempt to deter voters from participating in the primary and cited state laws against criminal solicitation and voter suppression. The latter, a felony, makes it illegal to attempt to deter someone from voting based on fraudulent, deceptive or misleading information."

New Hampshire, which Biden has chosen to antagonize in this way, is a swing-state, one Dems have won in the 5 of the last 6 presidential contests and that has 4 electoral college votes. Deep-red South Carolina, for whom Biden is throwing NH overboard, has 9 electoral college votes, and all of those will go to the next Republican candidate.