Biden’s appeal to democracy is an insulting inversion of truth

Stop pretending voters had any meaningful choice.

I’d planned to start this newsletter by writing about anything other than the U.S. presidential election. But on Monday, President Biden sent a letter to Congressional Democrats that’s so exactly backward it demands rebuttal.

I think Biden should drop out of the race. There are fair arguments for why he should stay in the race, which I will address in some future, calmer post. But now I am hot, because Biden’s letter contained zero of these arguments. Instead, he had the gall to appeal to a robust democratic process that he himself prevented from happening. He writes:

“We had a Democratic nomination process and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively. We received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process. I have nearly 3,900 delegates, making me the presumptive nominee of our party by a wide margin.

This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run. Only three people chose to challenge me. One fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent. Another attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated. The voters of the Democratic Party have voted. They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party.

Do we now just say this process didn’t matter?”

Yes, we do. Of course it didn’t matter. Biden made it not matter. That’s the main reason people are upset with him. The Democratic primary was a ceremonial coronation with no legitimizing power, and Joe Biden is the man who made it so.

Biden won the primary because he ran unopposed by any viable alternative. This is emphatically not because grassroots Democrats clamored for him to stay, as if no alternative could hold a candle to his overwhelming popularity. Throughout 2023, poll after poll after poll showed about two-thirds of Democrats did not want him to run again, mainly because of his age.

Rather, Biden ran unopposed by any viable alternative because political elites have an unwritten but widely known rule not to challenge an incumbent president of their own party in a primary, for fear of weakening them in the general election.¹ Biden and the DNC knew this, and they leveraged the hell out of it to scare away challengers. So when Joe Biden decided to run for reelection after all-but-promising not to, all the viable alternatives had to shut up and fall in line. Just like Biden expects them to now.

Then as now, viable alternatives did not enter the ring because that would have required them to voice an opinion about his age that everyone now sees is true, but that Biden insisted was not.

After deciding that he wanted to run again, Joe Biden and his team spent months concealing from voters how diminished by age he really was. They dismissed the entire problem as Republican propaganda, until it was almost too late to solve. They spent months weaponizing the least democratic aspect of our system—the tribal pressure to toe the party line, for fear of being branded as a disloyal pariah—in an effort to stifle the most democratic aspect: robust, messy public discussion on what best serves the interests of party and country. And they’re still doing it now, under the infuriating guise of defending democracy.

About 48% of the U.S. population is registered to vote. About 49% of those registered are Democrats. About 20% of those folks turned out to vote in the Democratic primaries, of which 87% picked Biden over a no-name millionaire and a spiritual guru. The DNC sponsored no debates. In a country of 330+ million people, 14 million nerdy politicos accepted a foregone conclusion—and Biden trumpets that THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN!

That’s an insulting dismissal of what so many of those people are saying now. Especially when a key reason the turnout was so low, and the alternatives so few, was that Biden was lying about the extent of his mental decline.

Given this context, President Biden should be mortified to even mention the primary in passing. Instead, he waxes on about the moral sanctity of the choice he took away from us:

“I feel a deep obligation to the faith and the trust the voters of the Democratic Party have placed in me to run this year. It was their decision to make. Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned. The voters – and the voters alone—decide the nominee of the Democratic Party. How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?”

So let’s do what Joe suggests. Let’s contrast decisions by the few against decisions by the many. Let’s contrast the inner circle of DNC bigwigs who anointed Biden despite his sub-40% approval rating, against the undecided voters who will decide this election—and broadly despise Biden, as they’ve despised both major candidates for three straight elections.

We should talk about this contrast because it helps explain why the threat Trump poses to democracy isn’t resonating as a campaign message, and never will from Biden’s lips. From the decisive voters’ perspective, you can’t save a democracy that’s already dead. A 2023 Pew survey is instructive here, summarized in the Washington Informer:

“favorable views of governmental and political institutions have plummeted to historic lows. A mere 16% of respondents claimed to trust the federal government…reaching one of the lowest points in nearly 70 years. 

Also, a growing discontent towards both political parties is evident from the research, with 28% expressing unfavorable views of both, the highest percentage in three decades. An equivalent share of adults, 25%, feel inadequately represented by either party….”

72% of Americans held an unfavorable view of Congress. A full year before Biden’s debate, 63% said they were dissatisfied with all current presidential candidates. As Ezra Klein said (after he was proven right), Democrats are “giving the American people an option they do not want and then threatening them with the end of democracy if they do not take it.”

Every four years, the many get a choice between a short list of names. This is certainly better than nothing. But the few are the ones who shape that shortlist, and the many damn well know it. Since at least 2016, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates have been nominated less because they are broadly popular than because they have mastered the backroom parlor games that determine who’s on the ballot.

That’s why every general election hinges on “lesser of two evils” arguments. It’s why undecided voters were praying for a shakeup even before the debate: the thought of Biden vs. Trump again had them terribly disillusioned. Exasperated, one might say.

Biden’s idea that he is “the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024” did not come from the brains of the many, who overwhelmingly believe he’s too old. It came from the hubris of one man and his family, who imagined he won the presidency because of some great political genius—as opposed to because Democrats needed the blandest, safest, most milquetoast generic Democrat they could find to make the election all about Trump.

In 2020, that’s what it took to win the parlor game. It might work in 2024 too, if only Biden admitted he’s not that guy. The elites do not need convincing; they’d vote for an empty suit over Donald Trump. It’s the many who will not.

1. In this case, the particular attack that Democrats feared might weaken Biden was the obvious and widespread concern that he was too old. Then as now, the calls to silence that criticism for the sake of unity were rooted in the condescending, undemocratic assumption that elites know best; that voters can’t be trusted to sift through good faith criticism of their party’s candidate and still vote in line with their interests.