VDH

 Democracy Really Is Dying in Darkness—But by Whom? "Never in modern presidential history has a political party staged a veritable inside coup to remove their current president from his ongoing candidacy for his party’s nomination and reelection. Stranger still, the very elites and grandees, who now are using every imaginable means of deposing Biden as their nominee, are the very public voices that just weeks ago insisted that candidate Biden was “sharp as a tack” and “fit as a fiddle.” And they damned any who thought otherwise! They are also the identical operators whose machinations ensured that there would not be an open Democratic primary. They demonized the few on the Left who weakly challenged Biden in the primaries. Yet now they will select a replacement candidate who likely never received a single primary vote. Note further: Biden’s impending forced abdication is not because he is non compos mentis. Rather, the inside move is due to Biden’s disastrous debate exposure that confirmed his dementia could no longer be disguised by a conspiracy of leftist politicos and media. But far more importantly, the impetus for removal is driven by the admission that the cognitively Biden is headed for a climactic November defeat. Were Biden now ahead in the polls by five points, these same backroom machinists would be insisting that he was still Pericles. Yet now Biden is being un-personed and Trotskyized, as we prepare the new groupthink narrative of his likely surrogate—a soon to be praised eloquent, mellifluous, and articulate Cicero-Harris. That Biden will likely remain as president until January 20, 2025, should remind the country the Left is more worried about its own next four-year continuance in power than the fate of the country that now admittedly will be guided in the next six months by a president judged unfit by his own supporters to run for the very office that he will still keep holding. Further irony arises when those who, as supposedly guardians of democratic norms, pontificated to the country the last nine years about the Trump-Hitlerian threat to democracy. Yet now they so cavalierly work overtime on how: a) to pull off the removal of their candidate from the November ballot on grounds of senility, b) but not the removal of the same president from office (their own fate is more precious than our collective fate as a nation), c) while trying to select, rather than elect, a replace candidate, d) without ever offering any explanation, much less an apology, how a Democrat president from January 20, 2021, was daily declared vibrant, dynamic, and engaged but suddenly one day after June 27, 2024, was remanufactured as not? Perhaps as an aid and primer on Biden removal they should reread the essay by former Obama Pentagon official Rosa Books. Just 11 days after the Trump inauguration, she published in Foreign Policy, “3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020”. It was a veritable manual on the various ways of removing the just inaugurated president—listing immediate alternatives to the distant 2020 election: impeachment and conviction, 25th-Amendment removal, and, barring all that, a military coup: “The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.” So, to make sense of what these self-appointed and sanctimonious protectors of democracy are trying to pull off demands an Orwellian vocabulary—memory hole, newspeak, unperson, and groupthink. Yet there is one more irony. Very soon, those who welcomed the protests of summer 2020 radicals, and exempted the rioting and violence, and then again did nothing in 2024 as mobs tore apart campuses and shut down public facilities, will host a Chicago convention—where those very same liberated forces may wreak havoc on the outside, while their backroom progenitors, with threats, money, and the media, will wreak havoc on democracy on the inside."

 

Victor Davis Hanson