DNC’s Opening Night: A Pathetically Sad Display For A Party Quickly Headed For Oblivion

by Paul Ingrassia

The specter of 82-year-old Biden opening a half empty Democratic National Convention alongside 76-year-old Hillary Clinton, whose obvious envy over the prospect that not she but another woman would be coronated Democratic nominee was a pathetic, borderline tragic, display of the party that once produced such giants like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy.  Now, after having been browbeaten into submission, Joe Biden has formally passed the baton – though against his will – to a woman who has never been democratically elected to any significant post in her political career.  For her part, Clinton, looking quite haggard herself, also cut the image of someone resigned to her fate in Democratic circles trying to pretend she will not go down as the greatest loser in history.

Clinton was supposed to have broken the glass ceiling.  Biden was supposed to have “saved democracy.”  Instead, these two geriatrics are the barely walking embodiments of a woefully failed system.  They capture everything wrong with this dismal era in America’s political history.  Should this nation survive, and somehow navigate itself out of this dark age, the likes of Biden and Clinton – alongside Pelosi, et al. – will be assigned the blame by future historians for nearly sinking the republic.  Should it fall, they will be indicted as its executioners.

The half empty arena was a perfect metaphor for the fractured psychology of the modern Democratic Party.  Outside, hordes of Hamas-sympathetic protestors clashed with local police and pro-Israeli demonstrators.  Inside, Democrats – wrestling among themselves in a bitter power play between progressives and establishmentarians – struggled mightily to present a convincing unified front, one that more or less shared a general sense of identity and purpose.  In the past, they would call these natural clashes a family feud.  Today, while too sloppy to be deemed a civil war, the Democratic Party – much like the governance of the country overall – appears dysfunctional beyond repair: a sinking ship.

So, what is the Democratic Party in 2024?  Well, the most cynical – though, likely accurate – reading is a front for the administrative state, the shadowy cabal of behind-the-scenes operators who possesses the real political power, where the traditional institutions of government – notably, the presidency and Congress, but also the courts – serve the interests of the bureaucracy, contra the Constitution’s original design.  For its part, the bureaucracy, which includes the intelligence agencies and increasingly weaponized Department of Justice, is replete with unelected operators – more like operatives – who may be far less competent than their forebears, even though their power is arguably at its greatest to date.

As an illustration: when Harry Truman first signed into law the National Security Act of 1947, the ceremonial start of the Global American Empire, marking the death of the old constitutional Republic, the intelligence agencies of the time (this, after all, was the era of Hoover and Dulles) were far more sophisticated than they are, functionally speaking, today.  Though indeed military technology was more rudimentary, the minds behind these agencies were far and away more competent than the DEI-hires of 2024.  They reflected a regime that, by the midpoint of the previous century, covered half the earth – offering a bulwark, both institutionally and ideologically – against the communist menace, vested in the former Soviet Union.  Superficially, this planetary divide was a clash between freedom and democracy on the one hand, and tyranny and communism on the other.

As the decades rolled on, the bureaucracy gained more and more power — at the expense of the constitutional and democratically accountable institutions of government. JFK’s assassination, and the near-certain prospect of intel collusion, and Richard Nixon’s unceremonious ouster, are but two of the most famous expressions from the past six decades of the bureaucracy’s rise — and indeed, wholesale replacement — of the Executive Branch and the Congress’ political power. But even in those cases, the fact that bureaucratic agents had to resort to actual violence demonstrated the tug of war of power that still existed between the old and new regimes.

Today, the bureaucracy can oust a sitting president, reduced to a near-comatose figurehead, from his post in a slipshod coup d’état that all but the most brainwashed devotees of the regnant order can see.   And the remarkable thing about it is that it no longer has to rely on brute force, as in the cases of Kennedy and Nixon, but can get the President to capitulate on a whim.

And yet, a paradox: though it can oust a president in a bloodless coup, it is utterly incapable of winning a war overseas, or for that matter, even withdrawing from a lost one, as evident in the Afghanistan troop debacle.  The latter is blistering testimony of a regime – and the greater bureaucracy of which Biden and Harris are its figureheads – that is utterly spent.

Its diminishing political capital, to the extent it has any, solely rides on the glories of its increasingly distant past (a past that it is also driven to revise, if not outright erase, to accommodate today’s woke morality).  The party on display in Chicago has reverted, much like all once great empires in rapid decline, to an increasingly barbaric and pre-civilized state.

Its politicians literally embody the most primitive societies, where tribal leaders cannibalize other tribes – and where no other tribes exist, inevitably turn on their own.  Joe Biden, like Clinton before him, is being cannibalized by his tribe in real time.  He may not realize or fully understand what is happening, given his cognitive decline, but on some level he must intuit what is happening and resent it.

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