AMAC Exclusive – By Aaron Flanigan
Without any notable successes to run on or any discernable plan for solving the many crises the nation is now facing, it seems that Joe Biden is betting his re-election campaign on the “democracy” narrative—or the claim that Donald Trump, the America First movement, and Republican voters pose an existential threat to the survival of American democracy.
“That’s why I’m running. I’m running because democracy is at stake,” Biden said at a fundraiser last September. During another speech in January, Biden again insisted “democracy” is “the central cause of [his] presidency.” Following Trump’s runaway primary victories in the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, the Biden campaign also claimed Trump was seeking to “undermine American democracy,” whereas Biden will “strengthen our democracy.”
But ample evidence suggests that the “democracy” issue might not be the political winner team Biden thinks it is.
Many in the corporate media and the Democrat consultant class have chalked up Democrats’ better-than-expected 2022 midterm cycle to backlash over the Dobbs Supreme Court decision and liberal candidates hammering the “democracy” issue.
Even if that analysis is accurate (and ample evidence suggests that it’s not), Republicans are now beginning to turn the democracy issue back on Democrats, leading a number of political pundits, including even some leftists and corporate media operatives, to acknowledge that it may not be the political dynamite they once thought it could be.
Among the most notable criticisms of the left’s “democracy” push came from Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. “I wish the Democrats would think a little more carefully when they talk about MAGA,” he recently stated, referring to how the left has branded every Trump supporter as a threat to democracy.
“I think this negative talk about MAGA is going to hurt Biden’s election campaign,” Dimon continued, before acknowledging some of the Trump administration’s major policy victories. “Take a step back, be honest. He was kind of right about NATO, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Trade tax reform worked. He was right about some of China.”
Dimon’s concerns were echoed by former Obama advisor David Axelrod, who warned that the left’s attempts to keep Trump off the 2024 ballot “would rip the country apart.” As Axelrod underscored, it is Democrats, not Republicans, who are threatening “democratic norms” by trying to either imprison their top political rival or bury him in lawsuits to keep him off the campaign trail.
A recent Time story also contended that the Biden campaign “must be about more than Trump.” Even Trump-hating Senator Mitt Romney—who for years has bolstered many of the left’s lies about the former president and indicated he would support Biden over Trump this November—dismissed the Biden “democracy” narrative as a political loser. “As a Biden campaign theme, I think the threat to democracy pitch is a bust,” he said. “Biden needs fresh material, a new attack, rather than kicking a dead political horse.”
Perhaps most jarringly, Nancy Pelosi openly suggested that Biden’s “democracy” strategy will be electorally insufficient this fall. “We have to relate democracy to the kitchen table, to our people’s personal lives,” she said. “The kitchen table issues are our motivation and our mobilization to get the job done, win the election.”
In other words, Pelosi is suggesting that voters are not buying Biden’s “democracy” pitch, and more will ultimately be needed if he is serious about winning a second term in the White House.
Donald Trump himself has also highlighted the futility of the left’s “democracy” narrative. “Biden and his radical left allies like to pose as standing up as allies of democracy,” he told supporters in a December speech. “Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy, Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.”
It’s no secret why voters are not convinced. For more than three years, the American people have stood by and watched as the same people branding themselves as “defenders of democracy” have worked in plain sight to imprison their leading political opponent, censor dissenting views on social media, label patriotic parents as domestic terrorists, deprive states of their right to manage their own elections, open our southern border, persecute Christians and pro-life activists, and use partisan legal prosecutions to keep Trump off the ballot and destroy his family’s business.
Conservative scholar Victor Davis Hanson summed up the Democrats’ 2024 playbook with the following slogan: “We had to destroy democracy to save it.” The left, he continued in a January American Greatness essay, is “tearing apart the country in a manner not seen since the Civil War era—apparently convinced democracy cannot be trusted and so itself must be sacrificed as the price of destroying Donald Trump.”
Though most Democrats lack the self-awareness to recognize it, it is them—not conservatives, Republicans, or Trump supporters—who are the greatest threat to American democracy. Voters are increasingly coming to terms with this reality.
On November 5, it is the American democratic process which could deal the final blow to the left’s hypocritical “democracy” narrative.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
