The Party of Democracy?

For a political party that positions itself as the saviors of American democracy, Democrats sure don’t seem to trust it all that much. In the span of just two days, their presidential and vice-presidential candidates delivered revealing statements seemingly proving that, at their heart, Democrats don’t seem to believe their own rhetoric.

During a shambolic interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris couldn’t explain how democracy was “best served by President Biden stepping down and handing” her the nomination. The following day, her running mate, Tim Walz called for the elimination of the Electoral College.

Ignoring the obvious point that candidates who believe they are less than a month away from winning the Electoral College typically don’t want to abolish the Electoral College, neither Walz nor Harris sounds they are all that concerned about the will of the people—which makes them fairly typical Democrats.

The party has not given its voters a real choice in the past three presidential election cycles, preferring instead to rig its own primaries in favor of its chosen candidates or, this year, to simply throw out its primary results altogether.

In 2016, the Democratic Party ensured that Hillary Clinton would be its nominee by using a system of “superdelegates”—party insiders who were all loyal to her—to ensure that she could not possibly lose regardless of how many regular delegates her chief rival, Senator Bernie Sanders would win during the primary vote.

“I knew—everybody knew—that this was not a fair deal,” then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid admitted on the eve of the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

A subsequent hack of party emails revealed that Democratic National Committee Vice Chair Donna Brazile leaked questions to Clinton ahead of a CNN town hall with Sanders that spring. Ultimately, though, neither the debate nor the primary vote really mattered: Clinton was going to be the Democratic nominee regardless of Democrat voters’ support for her. The party ensured it.

Four years later, Sanders was again a major problem for Democrats as his wild-eyed socialism presented an easy road to re-election for President Donald Trump. The party, of course, could not allow this and again rigged its primary against Sanders. Just days before the Super Tuesday races, top-tier candidates Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, and Amy Klobuchar suddenly dropped out and endorsed the party’s choice, Joe Biden. Another major candidate, Michael Bloomberg, spent a reported $500 million of his own money on his campaign but dropped out and endorsed Biden the day after Super Tuesday.

The only major candidate who remained in the race was Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose brand of socialist politics aligned very closely with Sanders’ and siphoned support away from him while the vast majority of Democrats coalesced around Biden.

Ahead of Biden’s re-election bid in 2024, the party tried to ward off a primary challenge to the obviously addled incumbent by stripping New Hampshire primary of its first-in-the nation status and moving South Carolina (Biden’s strongest primary state by far) to the front of the calendar.

When the move failed to dissuade challengers like Dean Phillips and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the party simply stacked the deck against them to make it all but impossible for them to win. They weren’t particularly likely to, but Democrats did not care to take any chances.

Biden won nearly every delegate, but when his disastrous debate performance in June laid bare his obvious cognitive decline, the party moved quickly to replace him on the ticket. Harris was the only candidate who could inherit his sizable campaign war chest and, without a single vote being cast for her, was anointed as the nominee just hours after Biden dropped out of the race in July.

When pressed during her “60 Minutes” interview on whether this served the interests of democracy, Harris stumbled and fumbled her way into the most hilariously ironic answer of the entire campaign.

“No one should be able to take for granted that they can just declare themselves a candidate and automatically receive support,” she said. “You have to earn it.”

She is the third straight Democratic presidential nominee to have not earned it and, unlike the first two, never got a single vote. In that sense, she is the perfect presidential nominee for a Democratic Party that doesn’t actually believe in democracy at all.