Throughout the Biden era, Democrats have been preoccupied with painting their political opponents as enemies of the state beyond the pale of Our Democracy™. As the midterm elections draw closer, the limits of this approach are becoming clear. The polls reflect what voters can feel: Democrats are due for a spanking in November.
They have failed to deliver what they promised. The country isn’t calmer or more unified. The Biden Administration is not only reckless and incompetent but often appears indifferent to the problems facing the middle-class. Cost of living is skyrocketing with no end in sight, and basic products are becoming scarce, but Biden’s attention is absorbed by tasks like ensuring “trans youth” have uninhibited access to puberty blockers. The electorate is justifiably depressed and pessimistic about the future.
Voting for new leaders is the essence of democracy. How will Democrats respond when voters reject them in a few months? The story they have told themselves and their base cannot explain the coming rejection. Republicans, instead, must be viewed as an insurrectionist faction. How could Americans willingly vote for the people who tried to disrupt the “peaceful transfer of power?” It must be because the public hasn’t heard enough about January 6 from Democrats and cable news talking heads. Perhaps a televised show trial will wake Americans up to the urgency of excluding Republicans from the political process once and for all.
The January 6 show trials have captivated Biden’s liberal base, which has unabashedly embraced banana republic-style persecution of the Right. But the Democratic party’s fixation with January 6 and their sharply partisan distortion of the events of that day are out of step with the wider population. Less than half of Americans now hold Donald Trump responsible for the riot, and Trump has become more, not less popular, since the “insurrection.” If a Trump-Biden election were held today, Trump would win. It seems increasingly possible, even likely, that Trump will be the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve two nonconsecutive terms.
Democrats know that their hold on power is tenuous and that Joe Biden is a weak and unpopular incumbent. The very media outlets that made Biden the president are now cutting him loose, with the New York Times reporting “whispers” in the Democratic Party about Biden’s age. Biden’s Democratic allies are none too eager to endorse his reelection. The man who, we are told, received 81 million votes in the most democratic election in U.S. history is being disowned less than halfway through his first (and, as now seems likely, only) term.
Biden’s spectacular fall is a consequence of his artificial rise. The central premise of the January 6th show trial is that Biden won a “free and fair” election, and that anyone who doubts this is against “democracy.” But reality is asserting itself: Biden is not where he should be, and the charade cannot go on for much longer. If the 2020 election actually was free and fair, he might be in retirement, where he belongs, instead of dragging Democrats and the rest of the country with him into a ditch.
Biden was never vetted. He was pushed into power due to partisan censorship and an avalanche of propaganda. One has to wonder how many Biden voters feel misled. They were told that Biden was a trustworthy, familiar moderate, an exemplary statesman, even one who would usher in “normalcy.” But he has governed, as detractors predicted, as a vicious, inept demagogue and a pawn of his party’s left-wing. Only now, with the election long over and Biden’s incapacity having become too great and too obvious a liability for his party, are we permitted cautiously to discuss questions previously buried about his fitness and his family’s corrupt ties to China and Ukraine.
Is this how “democracy” is supposed to work?
While Biden came into office by the narrowest of margins in just a few states, one doesn’t have to believe that ballot fraud was decisive to object to the highly unusual manner in which he rose to power. Timely, transparent elections are a necessity in any first-world democracy, and until 2020, Americans had no reason to expect anything less. Does anyone doubt that Democrats would have rejected the outcome had Biden lost a comfortable Election Night lead after several days of ballot “dumps” in Trump counties?
Nevertheless, Biden and his allies have spent the past two years shouting about “the Big Lie” and maligning whole swathes of the population as traitors, extremists, terrorists, Jim Crow racists, and worse for doubting that 2020 was the fairest, most legitimate election ever.
It is because the election was so obviously not on the level that Democrats have gone to such extreme, hyperbolic lengths to dismiss any skepticism of Biden’s legitimacy as an existential threat to the country. If January 6 was, as Democrats claim, an event comparable to Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and the Civil War, then that should be obvious to the public. It clearly is not, which is why Democrats keep beating the “insurrection” horse to death. We must be made to believe that the Capitol riot was much worse than the widespread, state-sanctioned anarchy that pulverized main streets all over the country during the summer of 2020. Americans are obliged to forget all about those riots and stand at attention for a belabored, melodramatic lecture from narcissists on Capitol Hill about the time the QAnon shaman disrupted Biden’s congressional coronation for a few hours.
Those more concerned with their declining standard of living than seeing Trump and his allies punished are being told, “You may think you’re having a hard time, but do you know who’s really struggling? Joe Biden. Dear Leader has delivered great prosperity for the people, but you are too dumb, misguided, or ungrateful to acknowledge that the economy is actually booming. And even if it isn’t booming, that’s not Biden’s fault. Don’t even think about voting for the opposition, or else.”
The January 6 committee hearings are the deeply un-American culmination of an effort to delegitimize political opposition to the most obviously fake presidency in American history. The spectacle shows Democrats at a sad ebb. They have become a faction of emotionally overwrought Stalinists, whose views are overrepresented in the rantings of former g-men on MSNBC and grandstanding, lying demagogues like Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). A political party that treats unhappy citizens like nuisances can’t expect to stay in power long, at least not by legitimate means.