The Party Decides

Democracy, shmemocray.

Years ago, when I first got involved in election work, there was a feeling among Democrats that their party was in constant internal strife and disarray, while Republicans followed marching orders like some kind of robot army. If only we could be more like them, despaired countless blog posts in the Daily Kos and FireDogLake, we could dominate national elections like the Republicans did during those post-9/11 years.

Today’s Democratic Party is precisely what those 2000’s-era bloggers aspired to be. In 2016, the party had its ideological civil war between the populists driving the Bernie Sanders insurgency and the neoliberal establishment propping up Hillary Clinton. That struggle ended with Trump winning the general election, so in 2020, Democrats committed themselves, above all else, to party unity. In the span of barely a month of voting between the Iowa caucuses and Super Tuesday, they coalesced behind the candidate who was nobody’s first choice but nobody’s last, either: Joe Biden. Their bet on pragmatism paid off, saving the country from the unthinkable — a second Trump term.

The rewards of party unity are now etched into Democratic voters’ cerebellums like lab rats on cocaine. At this moment in the campaign season, it is the sine qua non of every political choice they make and every election-related opinion they utter. So when President Biden finally tweeted out his notice of surrender and then, less than 30 minutes later, endorsed Kamala Harris as his replacement, to Democrats, the question of who would be their nominee was settled at once. There wasn’t even time for a discussion about a truncated process that would involve at least a semblance of voter participation. No challenger threw their hat in the ring to compete for the votes of delegates at the convention. The donors showed their enthusiastic approval of the choice by flooding the campaign with record-breaking sums of money. The media spent not even a second questioning the legitimacy of this unprecedented, cavalier transfer of power, acting as if Harris had just swept the primaries instead of being anointed by an 88-word tweet.

Now the Democrats have a nominee for president who nobody voted to be the nominee for president. Some claim that Democrats at least voted for her as their vice presidential nominee, but on many Democratic ballots, her name didn’t even appear alongside Biden’s. We may thus end up with a President of the United States selected in a single round of voting with exactly two choices. There are no protests in the streets over this breathtaking development. There is no constitutional crisis. We’re acting, as a nation, as if this is perhaps not normal, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.