Biden’s Candidacy and the Radicalizing Power of Desperation

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.

Biden’s weakness, elderly and running a basement campaign, was a strength, not a weakness.

Democrats, convinced that they couldn’t win naturally, pulled out all the stops, at the state level, exploiting public health emergencies, unilaterally changing voting rules, setting off race riots and bringing the country to its knees. Would they have been as desperate with a strong candidate?

Now Democrats know just how weak their candidate is and how bad their position is. What can the Left convince them to do to win in 2024? The real question is what won’t they do.

The serial raids, indictments and investigations are just a sample of what is being unleashed.

The real purpose of this exercise is not the 2024 election. The next presidential election, like the previous ones, and all those before it, is just a means to an end to the Left. It uses those elections, win or lose, to radicalize and tear apart the country, to seize control of governing institutions and encourage those under its control (and even sometimes those on the other side) to dismantle the governing processes and safeguards against a totalitarian dictatorship.

It’s not even 2024 and leftists have normalized arresting and indicting presidential candidates and trying them during an election season. Democrats were not ready for that in 2016. If Biden weren’t on the ticket now, maybe they would still hesitate. But desperate people do anything.

The two-sided process of radicalization is to prepare the people and institutions for an emergency seizure of power. The Left finally grasped in the seventies that Americans will never go 0-60 to an overnight dictatorship. Comrade Sunshine and Brother Number 19 showing up on television tomorrow to announce food will be rationed will lead to a swift civil war.

Incremental radicalization however opens the Overton window for certain emergency power grabs and acts of domestic violence. Whether it’s temporary suspensions of the 2nd Amendment, pandemic shutdowns, domestic surveillance, or BLM riots, they’re all tests of what we are willing to incrementally accept as the new normal until our rights have been slowly cooked..

The Left exploits or manufactures a crisis, and then sees what desperate people will be willing to go along with. What do you do if you believe children are being massacred to protect the profits of gun manufacturers? What kind of violent acts would you be willing to commit if you believe black people are being subjected to genocide by police descended from slave institutions? What kind of repression would you be willing to sign off on to survive a virus? What would you do if the country were on the verge of falling to a fascist dictator who will lock you up?

These are all things that the other side has been sincerely taught to believe. And act on.

People are being made desperate to radicalize them into being willing to do anything. The more desperate they are, the weaker their position looks, the more crimes they will commit.

Even though the Left controls the country’s institutional power, much of its wealth, almost all of its culture and communications, and is far more effective than conservatives, your average leftist believes that his movement is beleaguered and fighting against the rich and powerful.

How do you make all of those people even more desperate and radical in 2024?

Run Joe Biden again.

Biden’s presidential candidacy makes no sense except to make Democrats so desperate that they will fall into the leftist trap and set even more of the Constitution on fire, use abusive tactics ever more likely to bring on a civil war and break any kind of credible system of elections.

Who benefits from that? Democrats would benefit more from running a strong candidate who can win rather than running a weak candidate who can’t. Leftists benefit from radicalizing the Democrats and tearing apart the country because their goal isn’t election: it’s revolution.

History shows that once leftists are arresting political candidates for having the wrong politics, they don’t stop with those on the right, they quickly go after Democrats, moderates and anyone who falls short of their radical doctrines. That is how it began in the USSR. It’s beginning here.

Biden may appear to be as unlikely an engine for the radicalization of a nation as he is an unlikely candidate, but an unwinnable candidate is the best incentive for breaking the rules. The more leftists convince Democrats that they need to break more rules, the closer they come to their true objective of breaking all the rules and then taking over America.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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