Despite its name, the American Democratic Party is the less democratic of the two parties, both in terms of its governance and the party representation of its constituents in terms of platform congruence. It’s leadership and the decisions of its elected representatives are far removed from those who vote for them, and instead focus on those who fund the slush funds they exploit, and the those who feed them the secrets they profit from in their immunity from insider trading rules. But like the Republican Party, political elites of all stripes may have become focused on radical rhetoric, but their actions almost exclusively constitute a simple maintenance of the status quo, to the benefit of no one except the existing elite structure.
It is ironic that the Democratic Party is less democratic, as post-2020, its raison d’etre has supposedly been the maintenance of the democratic system.
Prior to the rise of Trump, Republican Party’s elites were largely driven by a corps of business affiliated elites and their rhetoric often focused on commercial friendly policies until a lifelong liberal New York Democratic actor and slumlord hijacked the platform and coopted the Party’s base to focus instead on identity issues, and abandon the interventionist post-WWII instinct the party had been known for in favor of nihilistic cavorting with dictators who convinced Trump to push for an abandonment of American prerogatives abroad. Rhetoric underwent a massive shift as a result of this, while policy was left untouched, other than in the foreign policy arena. but not in any substantive form.
The Democratic Party, instead of accepting this rhetorical shift to at least rhetorically reflect the will of its polarized voters, openly rigged the 2016 primary process to favor the candidate favored by elites, despite this being totally unnecessary because the party elite “Superdelegates” have far more power in the voting structure than actual voters. The catastrophic results of this in 2016 taught them nothing, and they repeated the strategy in 2020, , although less openly, using party elites to collude with a plurality of the candidates to prematurely drop out at an opportune time and endorse their favored pick, Joe Biden, in exchange for guaranteed cabinet positions, leading to his triumph.
While Biden has played ball on domestic policy, what they didn’t expect was that Biden would less reflect elite will than his instinct in favoring a strong stance against both Russia and China, even though this led to reduced trade and increased frictional costs for commodities and low-end imports.
As a result, the Democratic Party seems to be taking their 2020 win as a signal that they can get away with anything, and seems to be paving the way for a 2024 Biden exit.
Biden’s strong stances, on Putin being excluded from the international system and not being allowed to re-enter as a revisionist dictator and profit from American trade, and the American defense of democratic Taiwan should it be invaded by China, were met with unprecedented insubordination from those who were in his own administration. Biden’s own appointees watered down and walked back his comments, and undermined not only official American policy, but by implication, the capacity of the president himself to articulate his own policy stances.
Those have been foreboding of a slow shift in which several high-profile Democratic party elites have recently been rhetorically preparing the country for Biden to be pushed aside and asked not to run again in 2024 on account of his age, even though this issue was dismissed in 2020 as ageist and off limits for discussion in the mainstream news.
Whether or not an even less appealing successor loses in 2024, the act of Biden being pushed aside, especially in favor of a more moderate, i.e. isolationist leader would signal a shift towards a permanently less interventionist US foreign policy. It would signal that the elites in both parties are fixated on the end of the post-WWII American-led world order, in favor of retrenchment and inaction. The end result, as we are already seeing form under an American aversion to action is an anarchic, chaotic, and hegemon-free structure, one filled with violence. It one in which values will inevitably take a backseat to state survival and zero-sum competition, portending a cruel future.