On paper, Biden’s candidacy makes no
sense. Unpopular even in his own party, most Americans believe that at
the age of 80 he’s too old to run, and his long string of gaffes, lies
and inappropriate behaviors are only bringing more Americans over to
that view.
Even
the majority of Democrats would like another candidate. Yet,
bafflingly, the party has allowed Biden’s people to rig the primary
calendar. Alternative candidates, most notably California’s Gov. Gavin
Newsom, have been told to back down, and more fringe candidates, in and
out of the party, have been subjected to harassment and smear campaigns.
A
party uniting around an incumbent isn’t unusual, but in a bad economy
and with widespread public dissatisfaction, there’s no apparent reason
why the party should be clinging to an unpopular old white man from one
of the smallest states in the country who has no strong base. It would
have been nearly unthinkable for the Dems to drop Obama in 2012, but
there’s no real reason for the Dems to make a politician who can barely
campaign its presumptive nominee.
The Democrats (like the
Republicans) have become even more of a party of superannuated elites
where Sen. Dianne Feinstein may not know where she is and Rep. Nancy
Pelosi has just announced she’s running for another term, but none of
them could lose the White House.
Biden can. That’s what makes the
DNC gamble on Biden seem so implausible. Unlike the Obamas or the
Clintons, Biden doesn’t have the deep base of loyalists or the political
machine to intimidate, silence and clear the field. Nor does he have
even their minimal political appeal.
And yet that is exactly the point.
Biden
is the presumptive nominee not because he is a sure thing, but because
he can’t win. That would make no sense to a traditional Democrat’s way
of thinking, but the party is no longer run by the old school, but by a
new school of radicals. Its goal is not to win elections, but to
radicalize the party and the country. A hopelessly weak candidate facing
an unwinnable election against Trump or DeSantis serves that purpose
far better than a Newsom victory.
An unwinnable candidate in an
election they can’t afford to lose will once again radicalize the
Democrats and force them to break rules they hadn’t even previously
thought of breaking.
To leftists the election isn’t the issue,
only the revolution. From the leftist perspective they won in both 2016
and 2020 because they were able to radicalize the party, its apparatus
and rank and file members. Getting suburban housewives to put on pink
hats and howl in the streets after a massive defeat doesn’t look like
anything that the party would have found rewarding in 1956, but the Left
is not out to win elections, but to end them and take over the entire
country.
While Republicans celebrated, leftists broke new ground
in radicalizing Democrats and in coordinating the machinery of the
administrative state to act openly against Trump and Republicans.
Republicans had won an election, but leftists had unleashed a state
within a state. Openly sidelining elected officials for unelected ones
is much more fundamental to the leftist agenda than any of the culture
war battles because it prepares the way for a totalitarian state.
Then
after terrorizing Democrats and some independents with monstrous
caricatures of Trump for four years, the party and its allies were
willing to do anything in 2020. And they did.
Biden’s weakness, elderly and running a basement campaign, was a strength, not a weakness.
Democrats,
convinced that they couldn’t win naturally, pulled out all the stops,
at the state level, exploiting public health emergencies, unilaterally
changing voting rules, setting off race riots and bringing the country
to its knees. Would they have been as desperate with a strong candidate?
Now
Democrats know just how weak their candidate is and how bad their
position is. What can the Left convince them to do to win in 2024? The
real question is what won’t they do.
The serial raids, indictments and investigations are just a sample of what is being unleashed.
The
real purpose of this exercise is not the 2024 election. The next
presidential election, like the previous ones, and all those before it,
is just a means to an end to the Left. It uses those elections, win or
lose, to radicalize and tear apart the country, to seize control of
governing institutions and encourage those under its control (and even
sometimes those on the other side) to dismantle the governing processes
and safeguards against a totalitarian dictatorship.
It’s not even
2024 and leftists have normalized arresting and indicting presidential
candidates and trying them during an election season. Democrats were not
ready for that in 2016. If Biden weren’t on the ticket now, maybe they
would still hesitate. But desperate people do anything.
The
two-sided process of radicalization is to prepare the people and
institutions for an emergency seizure of power. The Left finally grasped
in the seventies that Americans will never go 0-60 to an overnight
dictatorship. Comrade Sunshine and Brother Number 19 showing up on
television tomorrow to announce food will be rationed will lead to a
swift civil war.
Incremental radicalization however opens the
Overton window for certain emergency power grabs and acts of domestic
violence. Whether it’s temporary suspensions of the 2nd Amendment,
pandemic shutdowns, domestic surveillance, or BLM riots, they’re all
tests of what we are willing to incrementally accept as the new normal
until our rights have been slowly cooked..
The Left exploits or
manufactures a crisis, and then sees what desperate people will be
willing to go along with. What do you do if you believe children are
being massacred to protect the profits of gun manufacturers? What kind
of violent acts would you be willing to commit if you believe black
people are being subjected to genocide by police descended from slave
institutions? What kind of repression would you be willing to sign off
on to survive a virus? What would you do if the country were on the
verge of falling to a fascist dictator who will lock you up?
These are all things that the other side has been sincerely taught to believe. And act on.
People
are being made desperate to radicalize them into being willing to do
anything. The more desperate they are, the weaker their position looks,
the more crimes they will commit.
Even though the Left controls
the country’s institutional power, much of its wealth, almost all of its
culture and communications, and is far more effective than
conservatives, your average leftist believes that his movement is
beleaguered and fighting against the rich and powerful.
How do you make all of those people even more desperate and radical in 2024?
Run Joe Biden again.
Biden’s
presidential candidacy makes no sense except to make Democrats so
desperate that they will fall into the leftist trap and set even more of
the Constitution on fire, use abusive tactics ever more likely to bring
on a civil war and break any kind of credible system of elections.
Who
benefits from that? Democrats would benefit more from running a strong
candidate who can win rather than running a weak candidate who can’t.
Leftists benefit from radicalizing the Democrats and tearing apart the
country because their goal isn’t election: it’s revolution.
History
shows that once leftists are arresting political candidates for having
the wrong politics, they don’t stop with those on the right, they
quickly go after Democrats, moderates and anyone who falls short of
their radical doctrines. That is how it began in the USSR. It’s
beginning here.
Biden may appear to be as unlikely an engine for
the radicalization of a nation as he is an unlikely candidate, but an
unwinnable candidate is the best incentive for breaking the rules. The
more leftists convince Democrats that they need to break more rules, the
closer they come to their true objective of breaking all the rules and
then taking over America.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
Tags: Biden, Democrats, recent, US Election
No comments:
Post a Comment