Daniel Greenfield: The Point Isn't That Biden Win But The Dems Radicalize

 In his piece, "Biden’s Candidacy And The Radicalizing Power Of Desperation," Daniel Greenfield explains why the Democrats insist on running Biden despite his unpopularity and concerns over his health, even among Democrats:

    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.

He continues (underline added):

    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.

Related:

• "Maybe This Latest Blatant Ballot Box Stuffing Scandal Will Be the Last Straw"--PJ Media. 

    Whether it’s because they have no fear of consequence or because they really are that stupid, Democrat operatives regularly stuff ballot boxes in full view of cameras. The pattern is nauseatingly familiar at this point: First, Big Left’s candidate comes from behind to win an election with a handful of mail-in or absentee votes. Then, video, sworn testimony, and/or official complaints of ballot harvesting and ballot box stuffing emerge. The matter is referred to law enforcement, which opens an investigation.

    And then … nothing.

    In the film “2000 Mules,” rampant ballot harvesting — which is illegal in Georgia, one of the states featured in the film — was documented. The matter was referred to Ga. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whose office launched an investigation. “If Georgia’s investigation into organized ballot harvesting leads to actual arrests and punishment, it will be a great day for America,” I wrote at the time. “We are all weary of lengthy investigations that go nowhere and accomplish nothing, but perhaps this time will be different.”

    LOL, it was no different. Raffensberger declined to proceed without one of the film’s producers, election integrity non-profit True the Vote, giving up the name of a confidential source, which they refused to do. One source — out of the mountains of data and evidence the group provided — was the excuse for halting the investigation. The last I heard, Raffensberger’s office was suing True the Vote. Meanwhile, more elections have occurred in the district without any arrests or serious addressing of the problem.

The author goes on to list some other examples of blatant ballot box stuffing. But there might be a difference this time around:

But the interesting thing about the last two cases I mentioned — Orlando and Bridgeport — is that the complainants are of the same party as the “winners” for whom the harvesters work. And they are tired of getting screwed in the primaries because they aren’t the machine’s preferred candidate.

• "Our Outdated Constitution" by  Terry M. Moe, William G. Howell, The Hoover Institution. In this 2016 article, the authors argue that the real problem facing our nation is dysfunctional government (i.e., in their view, government that isn't streamlined to pass laws).

With Congress’s pathologies rooted in the Constitution, the ultimate problem is the Constitution itself. The founders crafted a government 225 years ago for a simple agrarian society of just four million people, some 700,000 of whom were slaves. Of the free population, 95 percent were farmers. Government was not expected to do much, and the founders—mainly concerned about avoiding “tyranny of the majority”—purposely designed a byzantine government that couldn’t do much, separating authority across the various branches of government and filling it with veto points that made coherent policy action exceedingly difficult.

Well, since government is the enemy of a free people, that was sort of the point. But the authors argue that we instead need a Constitution that largely sidelines Congress, where Congress' only purpose would be to approve or disapprove legislation drafted by the Executive branch (what they refer to as "fast track" legislation--no amendments, just an up or down vote). As an example:

Consider immigration. President Bush submitted immigration reforms to Congress in 2005 and 2006, and President Obama submitted another in 2013. All these bills had majority support in Congress, yet the first two lost on Senate filibusters and the third failed because Speaker John Boehner refused to let the House vote. The result? No reform, a festering immigration problem—and a 2014 executive order by Obama that has caused all sorts of consternation on the political Right. With fast track, the nation would have passed a bipartisan immigration law more than ten years ago. And there would have been no Obama executive order.

That's true. With fast track legislation, we could have had at least a dozen amnesties in that time, or perhaps even done away with any impediments to immigration. The elites are going to get their way in the end, the authors seem to argue, so why not make it easier and faster to get to that end. And just imagine what else they could fast track....

•  And from earlier this month: "‘Tyranny of the Minority’ warns Constitution is dangerously outdated"--Harvard Gazette. The two authors of Tyranny of the Minority are Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt and, as you can probably already guess from the title of their book, they are upset that rednecks, hillbillies, and all the other denizens of "fly-over country" have any say at a national level. Thus, they advise that the Constitution be amended so representation in Congress or the election of the President be purely majoritarian. That means, as a first step, eliminating the Electoral College. 

    “We have a very, very old constitution; in fact, the oldest written constitution in the world,” notes Ziblatt, the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government. “It was written in a pre-democratic era. It hasn’t been amended much compared to other democracies. As a result, we have these institutions in place that most other democracies got rid of over the course of the 20th century.”

    In their new book “Tyranny of the Minority,” the comparative political scientists argue that these antiquated institutions, including the Electoral College, have protected and enabled an increasingly extremist GOP, which keeps moving farther to the right despite losing the popular vote in all but one of the last eight presidential elections. The scholars also survey governments worldwide for examples of democratizing reforms. And they draw from history in underscoring the dangers of our constitutional stasis.

    Levitsky and Ziblatt’s 2018 bestseller, “How Democracies Die,” drew from global case studies to argue that Donald Trump represented a threat to core democratic principles, even flagging the possibility that he would refuse to cede power. Today, in light of the 2020 election — and the 147 Congressional Republicans who voted to overturn the results — the authors say it’s clear the threat is larger than Trump.

    “The new book makes the case that large segments of the Republican Party leadership have lost commitment to democratic rules of the game,” said Levitsky, the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. “The fact that the party remains radicalized means the challenge is ongoing.”

For instance, Levitsky states:

    The United States has a plethora of counter-majoritarian institutions, some of which are essential to democracy. Our independent judiciary and our Bill of Rights are two examples. But we also have a set of counter-majoritarian institutions that don’t exist in most democracies and are arguably antithetical to democracy. The most obvious one is the Electoral College, which allows those who win fewer votes to capture the presidency.

    Another is the U.S. Senate, which gives vast overrepresentation to sparsely populated states like Vermont and Wyoming and the Dakotas. It has repeatedly allowed the party that wins fewer votes to win control of the Senate. In addition, the filibuster is a super-majority rule; you need, in effect, 60 votes to pass legislation in the Senate. 

Ignored is that the Senate and the Electoral College were part of the Great Compromise, which was intended to protect the states with smaller population from complete domination by those states with greater population. Just remember that these people, who are obviously ignorant of American history and clearly totalitarian in their outlook, are educating our elites--the next generation of political, financial, and industrial leaders. They are the pregnant flies readying a new generation of maggots.

    If it is not completely clear that they are biased, I would point out that in 2021, Daniel Ziblatt gave an interview to Vox Magazine where he stated that "the central weakness of our political system right now is the Republican Party."