The Political Party that is SO CONCERNED ABOUT THE DOWNFALL OF DEMOCRACY

Has Nominated their Candidate for the Presidency Without Any Consulting of the American People

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

We’ll see how it works out, Cotton.

To no one’s surprise, Vice President Kamala Harris has been given and accepted her party’s nomination for the presidency at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

She’s wasn’t wrong to point out in her speech that her chief opponent, former President Donald Trump, is an “unserious” man who mainly seeks to “serve…himself,” but what she overlooks is how unserious her own party is. In an attempt to perhaps gain back some of those Palestinian protesters around the country, she gave lip service in her speech to wanting to end Israel’s hammering of Gaza, though of course she and her administration have had since the whole thing started to ‘do something,’ whatever they could, about it.

Right wingers recently been correctly pointing out that the Democrats have held the presidency for twelve of the past sixteen years, and so what, exactly, are they going to “do” that they haven’t been able to recently, though of course numbers in Congress obviously matter, too.

My real beef with the Democrats in all this is that for all their rhetoric about how scary Trump is, and how much of a “threat to democracy” he is, they are putting forward a candidate—as I suspected they would, as soon as President Biden announced that he would be stepping down from the race—who was chosen (as way too many things already are in this country) by powerful people shaking hands and signing papers in backrooms rather than by offering up the choice to, you know, the American people.

Harris almost went through such a national vetting process in 2020, but she withdrew before the voting started and endorsed the man who would eventually make her Vice President. In recent polling, there does seem to have been some sort of boost of enthusiasm for Harris—perhaps as much as anything because they are thrilled to have a candidate who is a lot less likely to peel over and die right there on the stage. It should not be forgotten, however, that “it’s my turn” worked out very badly for Democrats in 2016. Harris will now have to go through a couple rounds on stage with the former president who is, on the one hand, attackable on so many fronts, and on the other hand very skilled at going on the offensive in surprising ways that leave his opponents looking frozen and weak. That’s the role of a primary, allowing for the cream to rise to the top.

We’ll see if Harris has it in her, but in the meantime, let’s go ahead and settle the “but we had to do it!” nonsense. How else might the Democrats have handled this process? There were multiple options available to them besides the path that they chose:

1. They could have been, you know, forthcoming about their 81-year-old-with-signs-of-dimentia a long time ago. We would not have been surprised. They could have talked him out of running for a second term and therefore allowed the American people the true primary they deserved. Literally who knows who the candidate would now be if that had happened, but I very much doubt that the answer would be Harris. Say what you want about Trump and the Republicans, but there can be no doubt he is who they have wanted for the past eight years.

2. Democrats could have delayed the DNC Convention if necessary in order to set up a one-day primary across the country for anyone who wished to put their hat in the ring, and they could have pulled off at least one debate on national television for these candidates to square off against each other. There is much to learn from people when they are forced to perform in this manner. ‘But then we would have had to cancel hotel bookings and money would have been lost!’ Right, this is exactly my point, that these sorts of concerns for powerful people and their big, old party taking precedence over seeking out input from voters.

3. At the very least, Democrats could have done something at their convention. They could have reshaped it from the dog-and-pony show that these things usually are to something more like the Iowa Caucus. Seeing as there are actually some real, flesh-and-blood humans that go to these things, and not all elected officials and billionaires, they could have equalized the power structure so that those who wanted to run got their moment to speak and the people in the room got their one vote, with Biden’s counting as exactly the same as the lowliest person in the room. ‘But then feelings would have gotten hurt, and we wouldn’t be united.’ Right, tell that to former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who, by the way, lasted longer in the 2020 primary than Harris did without now hopping on the unity train. Gabbard’s rife with her party is more believable than any unity front the Democrats are propping up at the moment.

The last thing I will say is that I’m aware that you can build a political system that doesn’t ever seek out actual votes from people in the country in some sort of primary, whether that be a heritable monarchy or just a system like the one our country originally had (or that the United Kingdom still has), wherein, say, members of Congress would pick their party’s candidate. I just think all of that sends a message, and it’s not the message—’leave the consequential decisions to powerful people!’—we would send to the governed if we really wanted their buy-in.