Like many commentators, I have described the sudden, almost magical elevation of Kamala Harris to the status of presumptive Democratic nominee for president as a “coup.” “What just happened,” I wrote on July 23, “is essentially an anti-democratic coup. Kamala Harris, who got no delegates—zero—when she ran for president in 2020 and was only chosen as Biden’s running mate because he had promised to pick a black woman, is on the cusp of being handed the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.”
How did that happen? If you said, “It happened because of the machinations of the deep state,” go to the head of the class. Even Donald Trump has called what just happened a “coup by the Democrats.”
But Mark Steyn makes a good point when he observes that, in many ways, what just happened to Joe Biden was not a “coup” in any ordinary sense. A “coup” (from the French “strike, blow”) suggests an abrupt intervention that brings about a change at the top. The element change is a major part of what a “coup” in this sense means.
Yet what change has the Biden-Harris pas-de-deux brought about? Until the very morning of the day he announced his withdrawal, Joe Biden and his team were insisting he was in the race till the end. His debate performance against Trump was a disaster, true, and his poll numbers were in free fall. No matter. He was going to tough it out.
There are a few things to remember, though. For one thing, Biden’s poll numbers had been in free fall for months. For another, the idea that the debate revealed for the first time how cognitively challenged Biden was is ridiculous. It had been obvious for years that he was slipping in and out of senility. Back in 2020, I described Biden as “an empty cipher . . . a drowsy Howdy Doody puppet, manipulated by a committee of ‘woke’ ventriloquists.”
At the time, I noted, Biden’s “painfully obvious flirtation with senility was as much an asset as a liability, because, though it made for some cringeworthy displays of incompetence, it conspired with COVID-19 to allow his handlers to keep him tucked safely away in his basement for most of the campaign.” Indeed, I had even earlier compared Biden to the aged Achon, a character in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Black Mischief. The legitimate but inconvenient emperor of the fictional kingdom of Azania, Achon, had been safely confined to a cave for 50 years. After some elaborate negotiations among the real powers of state, Achon is set free and is carried to the capital to be invested as emperor. Alas, his long captivity left him bent and senile. He dies upon his coronation.
Biden lasted a bit longer. But the point is that the Council of Elders that manages The Narrative knew from the start that Biden was past it. Nevertheless, aided by the propaganda press, they worked assiduously to cover up the truth. “Oh, Joe is sharp as a tack,” they told us ad nauseam. “He’s intensely probing,” etc.
Nevertheless, the appalling truth was leaking out like dark, malodorous scum from a ripped bag of garbage. Indeed, I speculated that the reason the Democratic establishment scheduled the debate between Trump and Biden so early—remember, Trump hadn’t even clinched the nomination yet—was to give Biden one last chance to prove himself.
Obviously, he failed. But that apparently had no bearing on Biden’s commitment to stay in the race. That was the state of play when I got on a plane from London to New York last Sunday morning. “I’m in it till the end.” By the time I landed, however, Biden’s bizarre announcement that he was dropping out of the race—on his personal, not his official POTUS X account, with no mention of endorsing Kamala—was lighting up the internet.
I have no idea who finally prevailed upon Biden to drop out or what threats or inducements they dangled before him. But it is clear that the action disenfranchised voters. The existential Muzak that had been filling the corridors and elevators of our lives was full of encomia to “democracy.” Here at last, we saw up close and personal what the Dems meant by “democracy.” They meant, as I have been fond of pointing out, rule by Democrats. That’s what “democracy” means in their lexicon. It has nothing to do with voting, rules, or process. It has everything to do with maintaining power for oneself and denying it to the other side.
This was the point of Mark Steyn’s curious quibble about whether what we have just witnessed with the cashiering of Biden and the elevation of Kamala was really a “coup.” In a deep sense, Steyn argues, “The operation was the inversion of a coup: it was to prevent the possibility of any change.”
Just before his election in 2008, Barack Obama famously (or infamously) said that we were on the threshold of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He was right about that. But the irony was that the transformation entailed the establishment of political stasis. Throughout his first term, Donald Trump endeavored to change some important things, to roll back that “fundamental transformation” that Obama had overseen. The FBI and other agencies of the regulatory state, abetted by the propaganda press, intervened to stymie him at every turn. He was investigated, indicted, impeached, nearly bankrupted, and, just a week or so ago, shot.
The Dems love the rhetoric of “change,” just as they cherish the word “democracy.” Their actions show that they are hostile to both. Change is incompatible with the maintenance of their perquisites and privileges, just as genuine democracy is fraught with peril for the establishment. Take democracy seriously and who knows? You might wind up with someone like Donald Trump. As I have often observed, that was Trump’s original, unforgivable sin: being elected. Above all, his democratic election was an affront to democracy, or at least to “Our Democracy™.”
What happens now? I do not know. I think Mark Steyn is right: “The goal of the Permanent State remains the same: nothing will be permitted to change.” Once again, Donald Trump has the temerity to challenge that dispensation. He is much better organized this time around, and he seems more determined than ever. The fact that the Democrats have settled, at least for the moment, on someone as preposterous as Kamala Harris as their candidate is probably a sign of desperation, at least in part. But it is also a sign of their contempt for the American people, and contempt is an attitude that is, in the metabolism of political life, never far from hubris.
Traditionally, nemesis is the regular concomitant of hubris. I know that Dems—and, indeed, many Republicans—disbelieve in the operation of such quaint, antique moral processes. That very fact may be another sign of their hubris.
In any event, I like to think that the movement Trump represents may finally dissolve the iceberg of greedy woke sentimentality that holds America hostage.
Mr. Kimball (and Mr. Steyn, who is liberally referenced) makes an interesting and very important point at the end of his article. The non-coup, coup of Joe Biden to replace him with the preposterously incompetent Kamala Harris may be a sign of desperation by the Ruling Class, or ominously, it could be an indication of supreme hubris by the Masters of the Universe.
Whether nemesis lurks and karma abounds remains to be seen. But clearly, our betters in DC, the coasts, and wherever Gulfstreams land, do not appear to have the slightest fear or apprehension of their insouciant taunts, or rubbing Our Democracy™ in the faces of the hoi polloi. Ruling Class contempt for the masses may be the base emotion, but its the kink of taunting and humiliating their subjects that truly animates the powers-that-be.
More than a couple people commented to me immediately after the attempted assassination of President Trump that this country narrowly averted Civil War 2.0. Unfortunately, the assumed crisis/response that might have followed assassinating President Trump would have been too little, too late. The time for such passionate defiance was November 4, 2020.
We know how that worked out.
So, it is not pessimistic or cynical to assume the Deep State / Ruling Class (choose your preferred designation for our closet junta) has surveyed the landscape, assessed similar uppity voter movements internationally (all failed or flaccid in effect), and determined that pipedreams of employing the 2nd Amendment notwithstanding, the little people are far more likely to change the channel, their underwear or their breakfast cereal, than elect the only possible genuine change–Donald J. Trump.
As Stephen Crowder often taunts–prove me wrong.
Democrats’ theft of the 2020 election was the supreme example of hubris in our time. Their belief that they could escape its consequences led them to compound their mistake. But if the theft ever had a chance of long-term success, it went down the drain when Democrats decided to install Biden in the WH—planning for the theft predates selecting Biden. That mistake was compounded when they put the nation’s governance into the hands of the most hubristic individual ever in American politics. Too cowardly to risk his ‘legacy’ by fulfilling his transformation vow when he was president for two terms, Obama exploited a compromised Biden to try to get it done in a third. People would still have stewed over the theft. But rational governance would have given Democrats a decent shot at keeping the steal. Now, only hubris makes them unwilling to live with the consequences. In their ongoing fight against reality, expect more than a few big surprises from Democrats. To help ensure the country’s continuing existence in its present arrangement, Trump should keep himself very safe from more of the same.
To all the pundits talking about how “anti-democratic” the Democrats were in installing Harris as their nominee: How many Biden voters do you think will not vote for Harris because of this? How many will even hesitate? I don’t get it. Start talking about serious issues, of which, in this day and age, there is no shortage.
Not that I would model Americans’ behavior on that of Russians circa 1917, but it’s interesting to review a history of Russia during the immediate years before 1917. In 1905 the citizens engaged in a revolt, an insurrection if you will, which was put down. In fact, for years the peasant revolts in Russia had occurred and were put down. Something changed after 1905 and it was the realization among the aristocrats and nobility that their Tsar was an ineffectual, incompetent autocrat who could not exercise the reins of power as his predecessors had. They lost confidence in his ability to govern and a good number of them began to understand that revolution was not only to be encouraged, but they supported it.
I don’t mean that we are or should become like the Bolsheviks. What I mean is that the history of Russia demonstrates when it comes to revolution/insurrection, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, especially when reform is impossible. Let’s hope we’re not too late for that reform part.