By a strange process of transformation, Joe Biden has become Jimmy Carter.
Everything he touches turns into a crisis.
Like Carter, Biden has presided over an inflationary economy, spiking interest rates, shortages of essential goods, and danger and disaster abroad.
Carter offered the world Christian meekness and no ‘inordinate fear of communism.’
The world responded with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the agonizing hostage crisis in Iran.
Biden’s self-inflicted rout from Afghanistan was followed by the release of $6 billion to the religious mafia that rules Iran.
In return, the Iranian regime has encouraged its proxies to kill American soldiers and attack American warships.
The most important way in which Biden resembles Carter is this: Voters have made up their minds about him.
They think he’s a loser, and they want him gone.
That’s true even of Democrats, a majority of whom think he’s too old and dotty to stick around for a second term.
Biden is a loser.
If 2024 were a normal presidential election, Donald Trump would beat him like a drum.
Nikki Haley would beat him.
Spongebob Squarepants would beat him.
Yet these are not normal times, and there’s a high degree of probability that Biden will be re-elected.
Unlike Carter, who really was the Democratic front man, Biden is a sock puppet for an institutional conglomerate that exercises enormous influence over our national politics, our government, and our culture.
The elites who inhabit these institutions like to speak of the arrangement as ‘Our Democracy,’ which roughly translates into ‘given our obvious moral and intellectual superiority, we must be allowed to govern in perpetuity.’
They have the tools to make it happen, too — wearing the appropriate masks and disguises, they often impersonate the popular will.
I’m not talking about Trump’s complaint that he was robbed at the polls in 2020, a sterile controversy best passed over in silence.
The options available to Our Democracy are, in reality, far more tentacular and oppressive than crude ballot-stuffing.
It can, for example, take a lie and make it echo and thunder for years, like the half-million news articles published about Trump’s supposed criminal collusion with Russia.
Or it can take the truth and bury it so deep that it has suffocated to death by the time some determined soul unearths it — think Hunter Biden.
How is this done?
Well, here is a partial roster of the institutions Our Democracy controls at the moment: the White House, half of Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the scientific establishment and expert class in general, the old prestige media, the new digital media (minus Twitter/X), the universities, the arts and entertainment world, and famous corporations from Coca-Cola to Nike.
When these gigantic entities synchronize their voices, the chorus is so deafening little else can be heard within the information sphere.
And when they withdraw their attention — as they have from Americans left behind in Afghanistan or taken hostage by Hamas — it’s as if it never happened.
What does Our Democracy want?
Its representatives spout magnificent nonsense about justice, diversity, and inclusion.
They comprise the college of cardinals of the church of identity and ecology, and are therefore authorized to smite you, as an infidel, with their righteous condemnations.
But the soul of Our Democracy is will to power.
The point of control is control.
The measure of success is the number of Americans placed in a position of dependence to the elite class.
More immediately, the objective is the permanent dominance of the Democratic Party, political home and bastion of that class.
Thus when Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic presidential candidate, abandoned a laptop crammed with all sorts of scandalous material, Our Democracy conscripted 51 intelligence executives, who surely knew better, to dismiss it all as a Russian ‘hack.’
And behold, there was no laptop.
And when Trump, a Republican president, speculated about COVID-19 having started with a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, Our Democracy dragooned five scientists, several of whom had speculated along the same lines as Trump, to author a ‘study’ contradicting him and themselves.
Suddenly, blaming China betrayed a racist predisposition.
Opposition to Our Democracy can never be legitimate.
Consequently, Trump, the likely Republican candidate, must always be a moral impossibility — a ‘dictator,’ an ‘authoritarian,’ a Mussolini from the fascist heartland of Queens.
Listen to The New York Times, Atlantic, Politico: Trump isn’t merely a bad candidate — he’s beyond the pale.
The harsher the attacks, however, the higher Trump seems to climb: to the horror of the elites, he’s presently trouncing Biden in most opinion polls.
So he must be disposed of somehow.
He must be prosecuted in heavily Democratic venues and indicted, not once or twice but 91 times.
And just in case, his name must be removed from the ballot: the ideal election under Our Democracy is a choice of one.
Fear and loathing of Trump is a defining feature of elite sensibility, but any politician who threatens Biden’s re-election will get the same treatment. Robert Kennedy, Jr., who is making a third-party bid, has been called ‘vile’ and ‘racist.’
The No Labels group, which is considering fielding a candidate, has been accused of ‘brain-breaking logic’ that promotes ‘less democracy.’
Nikki Haley has so far been spared because she is thought to weaken Trump.
The moment she endangers Biden, we can be sure that The New York Times will reveal her participation in a sex trafficking ring or possibly ritual cannibalism.
Nobody is so insignificant as to avoid the tentacles of the conglomerate.
Only in this sense is Our Democracy truly democratic: all of us, high and low, are given our marching orders, which we defy at our peril.
Parents of schoolchildren who dissented from the identity creed have been treated like domestic terrorists.
Participants at the pro-Trump Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol building were prosecuted as subversives and punished with long prison sentences.
Other critics have been subjected to harassment from federal agencies like the IRS and the FBI.
A convoluted censorship apparatus was erected at the start of the pandemic, eventually giving the White House control over what was allowed to be said on all the major digital platforms.
The FBI, faithful servant of the system, stood guard over forbidden speech: unorthodox opinions about the virus at first, but soon, inevitably, the ban spread to topics that favored Trump and the Republicans, identity heresy, Ukraine war criticism, mockery of the Biden administration — pretty much everything the First Amendment was enacted to protect.
Censorship bureaucrats devised a bizarre jargon of control: ‘misinformation’ meant error, ‘disinformation’ meant deliberate falsehood, and ‘malinformation’ was truth Our Democracy found unacceptable.
Without warrant or warning, millions of posts by ordinary Americans were taken down.
Some of those posters were permanently silenced.
Trumpist websites were arbitrarily ‘deplatformed.’
Nothing like it had been seen in our country since John Adams rubbed his hands with glee over the Alien and Sedition Acts.
One might have expected members of the entity formerly known as ‘the press’ to investigate the abuses and raise the alarm.
That idea is too retro for words, literally.
Today, the great organs of the news media are happy to serve as attack dogs of the elite class and obedient apologists of institutional power.
Our Democracy aims to dominate the information sphere — as things now stand, it can speak loudly to everyone, while its opponents, shoved into an informational ghetto, speak mostly to themselves.
This is the array of forces standing behind the doddering, stupefied figure of Joe Biden, eager to foist him on American voters.
Our Democracy is the true candidate and ultimate question to be settled by the 2024 election.
It is battling mightily, with every weapon available, to destroy Trump and other obstacles to its continued rule.
Sooner or later, I imagine, it will succeed.
The wisdom of Ecclesiastes tells us that the fight does not go to the strong — but a political analyst would be crazy to bet any other way.
Is it possible to identify a glimmer of optimism somewhere in this bleak landscape?
I can think of two strategic vulnerabilities that should trouble Our Democracy.
One is the massive unpopularity of its policy positions.
Large majorities of Americans of all races and political leanings question the sanity of open borders, for example, and believe that merit rather than grievance should determine outcomes.
If the 2024 election is fought on the merits of the case, the Democrats lose big.
The second vulnerability is Biden’s obvious and extraordinary unfitness to stay on as president.
The report by Special Counsel Robert Hur, which characterized the president as ‘an elderly man with poor memory,’ was official confirmation of what we can plainly see with our own eyes.
Old age is terminal: there’s no fixing Biden, and there’s no clear way out of this mess for the Democrats.
If he clings to power, he will continue to decline physically and politically, opening the door to a Republican victory in 2024 — in the person, it may be, of the dreaded Trump.
If Biden turns down a second term at this late hour, his vice president, Kamala Harris, would be the natural heir to the party leadership, but she’s even more unpopular than he is.
With Harris as candidate, defeat would be virtually certain.
If a free-for-all erupts over the top spot, either because Biden has offered to abdicate or because the paladins of Our Democracy wish to shove him aside, the internal trauma to the Democratic Party would probably prove fatal, regardless of who the winner might be.
The Democratic establishment is solid but brittle.
Once it crumbles, the agents of chaos will be in command, as they have been for some time in the Republican Party.
To my mind, these are low-probability events, as the elites realize how much they stand to lose and will huddle in a conformist herd for protection.
Fortunately, however, history is not a mathematical proposition — and one can always hope.
