For Democrats, Embracing "Democracy" is a Last Resort

When the Democratic Party does something that looks moderate or reasonable, it's usually because they already tried everything else.

If you’ve been following the antics of the leftward half of America’s political class, then you’ll notice pretty quickly that, ever since Kamala Harris got nominated for president, an upbeat mood has prevailed. To the Left, Harris is a champion of normalcy and decency and democracy and the rule of law. Indeed she is the perfect person for the moment – the person who’s answering her country’s call to vindicate American values and banish Trumpistry for good.

So it’s only natural that Democrats were pleased with the outcome of last Tuesday’s debate.

Like in most political debates, it was of course easy for both sides to claim victory. Trump supporters got to hear their candidate say the same things that he’s been saying for years. Immigration, abortion, tariffs, energy, the economy, the Russia-Ukraine war – Donald Trump’s voters know how he stands on the issues, and when he opens his mouth, they like what they hear.

Harris’ people, on the other hand, got to hear their candidate say things. This was also a win, since the man whom Harris replaced is a man who can’t finish his sentences. Obviously, Harris’ positions aren’t consistent – quite often they’re the opposite of what she believed back in 2019-20, the years of Peak Woke. Should we be enforcing the border? Is being a prosecutor an embarrassment, or something to be proud of? Is it a good idea to ban fracking?

Some things haven’t changed. Harris still wants price controls on groceries – as if no one could remember what happened when our country tried that with gasoline in the 1970s (Would you prefer to buy your bread on even-numbered or odd-numbered days?). And she’s against free speech. (In 2019, she told CNN that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.”)

And yet, in the most essential things – i.e. being awake for most of the day and having plans of some sort for the future – Harris is clearly a big step upward from Biden. If I were a Democrat, I would definitely have felt the optimism too when her candidacy was announced, and I would have breathed a sigh of relief that “democracy and the rule of law” (since this is what her party is claiming to stand for now) might survive.

And yet, one must remember that Kamala Harris wasn’t the Democratic party’s first choice. Nominating her was a last resort. The original plan was to just hide Biden’s cognitive decline until after the election.

All throughout winter and spring the media and the whole administration tried to cover it up. As if in lockstep, dozens of prominent Democrats said he was “sharp as a tack.” When videos came out of him wandering off aimlessly at diplomatic conferences and having to be steered back by his aids, his apologists baselessly insisted that he was actually trying to talk to people outside the frame.

And then came the 27 June debate, when everyone got to see just how often Biden was losing his train of thought (‘raped by their brothers and sisters,’ ‘we finally beat Medicare,’ ‘Putin told Trump to invade Ukraine,’ and all that.) And then, when it was obvious that a Biden nomination would end in defeat, and after a month of handwringing and soul-searching and arm-twisting, Democratic party insiders finally got Biden to step aside – after all the voting in the primaries was finished.

They could have done this six months earlier and let their party’s base pick the next nominee. But they didn’t. What is the important takeaway here? That whenever the Democratic Party does something reasonable, it’s usually done as a last resort.

Nominate a presidential candidate who doesn’t have dementia? A backup play, something to do in a rush when the first option, the ‘just lie about it’ option, is obviously blown.

Drop your anti-fracking stance? Something to be done when running for nationwide office, when it’s necessary, not when running for Senator for California, when it isn’t. (Though of course mining and drilling are more easily blocked by judges than by presidents, and as I’ve written about before, any Democratic president, even one whose personal views are “moderate,” will pick judges well to the left of the average American.)

Democrats’ newfound pro-cop stance (remember that Black Lives Matter got only a few shout-outs at the convention, and Democrats are trying a lot harder to respect law enforcement now than in 2020) is likewise mercenary. It really started with 6 January, since if you’re going to call your opponent an “insurrectionist,” then you have to bill yourselves as the law and order party. But beneath this façade there is no real respect for police, and no real belief that, whether or not George Floyd was an innocent victim, it’s still an injustice to respond to his death by burning down hundreds of random businesses.

Likewise the American flags, which were waving by the thousands at the Democratic National Convention last month, aren’t a regular fixture of that party’s events, as anyone who’s been around for a few years will remember. Democrats just realized, at some point, that patriotism was popular and changed their messaging rather than risk more defeats at the ballot box.

The trend should be clear to see. Democrats want to look like the party of normalcy, and decency, and democracy, and the rule of law. They’ve learned the hard way that they don’t want to be the party whose candidate calls the other side’s voters “deplorables,” or brags about putting coal miners out of work. (They’re still stuck with the candidate who helped set up a bail fund for the people who set fire to Minneapolis during the Floyd riots, but since the media is on their side, that seldom gets talked about honestly.)

And yet, everything the Democrats have done to earn this normalcy image turns out to have been a sort of last resort, something done only when they had exhausted their other options.

Not running a dementia patient for President? A last resort, something to be done only when the media’s attempts to hide Joe Biden’s true condition had hopelessly failed.

Respecting the police? A last resort. Just like flying the flag, or renouncing fracking bans, or stripping the platform of lengthy prattle about racial guilt.

The Democrats were spooked into doing these things by their awful poll numbers, which until the end of July were even lower then when they got trounced in 2016. None of these rebrandings are likely to influence how liberal politicians behave once in office.

And then of course there is the wild hypocrisy around abortion. Nowadays, Democrats love to talk about how they’ve won every state-level abortion referendum in the last two years (which means the common people are on their side, which means their cause it just, and so forth.). And left-leaning sites like Huffington Post run headlines about Republicans attempting “to keep abortion off the ballot.”

This is a reference to the lawsuits that always surround ballot initiatives, in which the referendum’s opponents will claim that the ballot measure didn’t get enough signatures, or is described on the ballot inaccurately. Both parties file suits like this, so you can’t really accuse either of being undemocratic on this count – and in any case, elected legislatures (which our country’s founders trusted more than they trusted direct democracy anyway) are still free to legislate for either side.

But of course the reason it’s so baldly hypocritical for the Huffington Post to run this headline is that of course Democrats believe abortion should be kept “off the ballot.” They themselves kept it off the ballot for 49 years – that’s what Roe v. Wade was all about – and for all that time the Democrats never questioned the unworthiness of ordinary Americans to determine the legality of abortion through their votes.

The party’s newfound commitment to democracy on this issue – like their newfound commitments to democracy, patriotism, and the rule of law in general – is yet another thing that they only do when they’ve tried everything else, and failed.

And if America gives Kamala Harris and her party the big win at the ballot box that they’re expecting, then all of these facades will go down as quickly as they went up. Then, when the excitement has died down from November’s elections, Americans will find themselves ruled by the same old deep state progressives who were supposed to have gotten the boot back in 2016.

This essay was originally written for the American Thinker.