Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

On Sunday, July 21, President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential campaign via a text-only post on Twitter/X.

Less than an hour later, Biden – also via a text-only post on Twitter/X – endorsed vice president Kamala Harris for the presidency. 

Thus, in just a few minutes, the ruling party in Washington completely erased the primary election process from one of the country’s major parties.

That is, the same Democratic party that tells us it is the party of “democracy” just completely cut ordinary voters out of the selection process for the Democratic nominee. 

Instead, the Democratic nominee in 2024 will be chosen by a small group of elite party insiders. We’re told there will be an “open convention” in Chicago to choose the nominee, but all that means is that that there is no pre-determined nominee going into the convention. In any case, however, the nominee will be chosen by delegates and superdelegates (i.e., wealthy party elites like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) behind closed doors. 

The Democratic party’s efforts to circumvent the primary process are quite remarkable for a ruling coalition that lectured the general public endlessly in 2020 about how Donald Trump was allegedly a “threat to democracy” and how “democracy is on the ballot.”

Yet, this is what we’ve come to expect from political elites who use the term “democracy” as a propaganda term. For these people, the term has no objective meaning, it just means “something we like.” “Anti-democratic,” in contrast, just means “something we don’t like.”

Moreover, its use as a propaganda term can be seen in the way that “democracy” is used in the same way as “revolutionary” by Marxist regimes. In such cases “revolutionary” is code for “in favor of the ruling elites” and “something we like.” Similarly, the opposite of “democracy” in a Marxist regime is “counterrevolutionary” or “bourgeois.” Those terms were essentially code for “against the ruling party” and “thing we don’t like.” 

Such terms have no actual content in the usual sense of a word.  Thus, the term “democracy” simply means “good” and “not democratic” means “evil.”

For example, President Joe Biden delivered two major speeches in 2022 on how “democracy” will supposedly be abolished if his opponents win. In November of that year, former president Barack Obama solemnly intoned that if Republicans win in Arizona, “democracy as we know it may not survive.” This is repeated among the party’s media allies. One writer at Salon chastised voters for daring to let their votes be influenced by economic concerns when “democracy is under threat.” One New York Times headline bemoaned the apparent reality that voters don’t seem interested in “saving democracy” when it’s supposedly all so clear that “democracy is in peril.” At no point in these jeremiads is it ever explained how a vote for the out-of-favor candidate will actually end elections or universal suffrage or any other event or institution associated with democracy. 

In Biden’s September 2022 speech in Philadelphia, he went on for twenty minutes about an imagined threat to democracy, without ever actually defining what democracy is. One was reminded of Fidel Castro howling in his multi-hour speeches about the threat to “the revolution” from insidious imperialists and counterrevolutionaries—by which he meant anyone who opposed his regime. The term “revolutionary” had no connection to actual revolution in this context. It simply meant “something my regime likes.” 

Meanwhile, the elites have gone to great lengths to ensure that no actual democracy—in the technical or traditional sense—has taken place in the nomination process. The Democratic Party made it clear that it would not allow any presidential hopefuls to challenge Biden to a debate. Early Democratic challengers Congressman Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson were told to get lost. The most significant challenger within the party, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was effectively expelled from the party in October 2023. He was forced to declare his candidacy as an independent candidate soon after. 

So, after denying Democratic voters the chance to vote on Kennedy or anyone else, the party has now also denied the voters the chance to vote on Harris or whoever else the party elites will decide is the nominee in 2024. 

I don’t mention any of this to burnish the reputation of the Republican Party, by the way. Those of us who remember the Ron Paul campaigns in 2008 and 2012 remember how the GOP conspired to torpedo his campaign, going so far as to change the convention rules, ex post facto, to deny Paul a prime-time speaking position and to disenfranchise his delegates. 

Yet, it’s not the GOP that’s claiming to be the guardian of the vox populi while conspiring to undermine that vox at every turn. 

Rather, the alleged protectors of democracy carry on the tradition of redefining the term “democracy” to serve the interests of the elites whenever it suits their purposes. We see this not only in America, but globally. Any time the “wrong” people win an election—”wrong” according to global elites—the outcome of the election is declared a “threat to democracy.” We see this repeatedly in European politics where “democracy” is defined as support for the unelected European commission. German political elites, meanwhile, have repeatedly declared the rightwing AfD party a “threat to democracy” because party members keep winning elections. In Latin America, “democracy” means to support the social-democratic left. When rightwing Jair Bolsonaro was elected in Brazil, that was denounced as anti-democratic. When leftwing Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was impeached by a democratically elected legislature, that was denounced as an anti-democratic coup. Democratically elected Javier Milei was denounced by uber-establishment magazine The Economist as “a danger for democracy.” 

It is now clear that to be in favor of democracy in 2024 is to support whatever the ruling party elites want you to support. To be “pro-democracy” now apparently means to vote for the candidate selected for you by party elites in secret meetings. According to the ruling elites, in a true “democracy,” there’s no voting allowed.