Elite Democrats shunned democracy throughout Bidens term and now theyre paying the price
When Donald Trump is sworn in Monday, America will have a president for the first time in four years.The Biden era hasn’t been a presidency but an interregnum, with seemingly no one in charge in Washington.The sign on Harry Truman’s desk used to say, “The buck stops here.”Where did it stop with Joe Biden in the Oval Office?Voters never asked for an experiment in leaderless administration, but the party that put Biden in power gave them one anyway.In the 21st century, Democrats are misnamed.They’re the less democratic of the two great parties, and their insider-dominated politics explains both how Biden wound up in a role for which he was unfit and why the candidate picked to replace him went on to lose every battleground state.Kamala Harris had never won a presidential primary.But the party’s mandarins first pushed her for vice president, and then they pushed Biden off the ticket and made her the nominee without giving voters the slightest say.This isn’t a people’s party: Bill and Hillary Clinton still believed the party belonged to them even after Barack Obama beat Mrs.Clinton for the 2008 presidential nomination.The Clintons and Obama’s coterie subsequently agreed to power-sharing, with Hillary Clinton as President Obama’s secretary of state and all-but-officially-designated successor.Biden was very much a junior partner in the Obama-Clinton party, and that didn’t change after the party made him its nominee in 2020.Obama and Hillary Clinton had kept Biden from running four years earlier.
Obama wouldn’t support his own vice president because it was Hillary’s turn — that was the deal.Trump shattered their corrupt dynastic bargain, just as he broke the hold of the Bush family and its allies on the GOP.Trump put to the test a much-debated question in political science: Does the party decide — meaning party elites — or can voters pick a winning nominee in defiance of what the political establishment wants?Thanks to Trump, the Republican...