The Anti-Democratic Party

In what may be remembered as the most consequential speech of his career, President Biden used his address to the nation Wednesday night to stress the importance of preserving democracy this November.

“It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president,” he said. “But in defense of democracy, which is at stake—and is more important than any title—I draw strength and I find joy in working for the American people.”

He did use the occasion to, as one might expect, explain precisely why he suddenly decided to abandon his reelection bid or to unite a nation still reeling from the attempted assassination of his rival—the presumed threat to democracy, Donald Trump. Instead, Biden waxed poetic about democracy.

“The great thing about America is, here, kings and dictators do not rule,” he said. “The people do. History is in your hands.”

That is, unless those people happen to be Democratic primary voters. For them, history is always in the hands of powerful insiders and billionaire donors who for three straight election cycles now have openly and brazenly disenfranchised rank-and-file Democrats by disregarding their votes and instead imposing their will.

In 2016, the Democratic National Committee was caught fixing the primary in favor of Hillary Clinton when it seemed as though Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders might steal a nomination that both Clinton and the DNC considered to be her birthright.

Behind closed doors, high-ranking party insiders serving as “superdelegates” pledged their support to her long before a single primary vote was cast, angering Sanders supporters who almost immediately recognized how thoroughly rigged this system was.

As the pro-Sanders site Salon described it at the time: “This unelected party nobility, which overwhelmingly backs Hillary Clinton, entrenches establishment politics and can undermine the candidate democratically chosen by the party’s mass base.”

It did, but it was also the least of the DNC’s efforts. An email hack on the eve of the 2016 Democratic National Convention revealed that the party was, as The Washington Post described it, “actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign.”

The revelations forced DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to resign in disgrace, and her successor suffered the same fate when a second batch of hacked emails was released shortly before the 2016 presidential election.

Interim Chairwoman Donna Brazile, who had been a vice chair while she was working as a CNN contributor, had passed along to the Clinton campaign topics and even specific questions from CNN town halls and debates against Sanders.

“One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash,” she wrote to Clinton campaign manager John Podesta in early March. “Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint.”

Less than a week later, she informed Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri, “From time to time I get the questions in advance,” and outlined a question about the death penalty Clinton would be asked the following night.

“I’ll send a few more,” Brazile promised.

The network forced her to resign when it learned of her behavior, saying in a statement that “we are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor.”

So were Sanders supporters, who correctly surmised that no matter how popular their candidate was among Democrat voters, Democrat insiders would never have allowed him to win their primary.

Four years later, Sanders faced the exact same fate from an even less democratic Democratic Party. In January 2020, President Trump was cruising to re-election on the strength of a booming economy and Democrats were panicked as their preferred candidate, Biden, struggled to gain traction with voters.

Sanders again surged, much to the horror of a party who feared that Trump would use his nomination to frame the election as a battle between capitalism and socialism.

After a shambolic Iowa Caucus in which results weren’t known for weeks, Sanders racked up big wins in the Nevada Caucus and New Hampshire primary (where Biden finished a devastating fifth).

Biden needed a miracle to keep his fledgling campaign alive, and he got one in the form of a resounding win in the South Carolina primary that convinced the power players in the Democratic Party to coalesce around his candidacy. Even though Pete Buttigieg was still very much in the thick of the race (trailing Biden in the delegate count by only a 54-26 margin), he suddenly dropped out ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries.

So too did Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and liberal billionaire Tom Steyer, leaving Biden, Sanders, and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren as the only major candidates in the race.

This on its face seemed puzzling since Warren had won only eight delegates and was in a far worse position heading into Super Tuesday than Buttigieg had been, but it soon became apparent that she stayed in the race only to split Sanders’ far-left vote and allow Biden to claim the majority in each state.

It worked: Biden dominated Super Tuesday and rolled to the nomination. For his part, Buttigieg was rewarded with an appointment as Secretary of Transportation in the Biden Administration.

The Democratic Party had for a second straight election cycle denied Sanders the nomination despite his runaway popularity among the party’s base. Party leaders determined that Sanders could not win a general election and vetoed the will of their voters.

They have now done so for a third straight election, all the while claiming that Republicans are a threat to democracy. So firm a grip do these tyrants have that even the President they forced out is claiming that a vote against their hand-picked successor is a vote against the democratic process itself.

The truth is that there is no greater threat to democracy than a party that refuses to let even its own voters have any say in its elections.