By: Daniel Greenfield
On paper, Biden’s candidacy makes no sense. Unpopular even in his own party, most Americans believe that at the age of 80 he’s too old to run, and his long string of gaffes, lies and inappropriate behaviors are only bringing more Americans over to that view.
Even the majority of Democrats would like another candidate. Yet, bafflingly, the party has allowed Biden’s people to rig the primary calendar. Alternative candidates, most notably California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom, have been told to back down, and more fringe candidates, in and out of the party, have been subjected to harassment and smear campaigns.
A party uniting around an incumbent isn’t unusual, but in a bad economy and with widespread public dissatisfaction, there’s no apparent reason why the party should be clinging to an unpopular old white man from one of the smallest states in the country who has no strong base. It would have been nearly unthinkable for the Dems to drop Obama in 2012, but there’s no real reason for the Dems to make a politician who can barely campaign its presumptive nominee.
The Democrats (like the Republicans) have become even more of a party of superannuated elites where Sen. Dianne Feinstein may not know where she is and Rep. Nancy Pelosi has just announced she’s running for another term, but none of them could lose the White House.
Biden can. That’s what makes the DNC gamble on Biden seem so implausible. Unlike the Obamas or the Clintons, Biden doesn’t have the deep base of loyalists or the political machine to intimidate, silence and clear the field. Nor does he have even their minimal political appeal.
And yet that is exactly the point.
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.
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.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-candidacy-and-the-radicalizing-power-of-desperation/