Is the Democratic Party Democratic?

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The American Democratic party has not ever been and certainly is not now truly democratic. The process by which President Biden’s apparent disability has been concealed and the method party leaders are using to replace him is more reminiscent of Plato’s lying guardians than it is of Aristotle’s democrats.

Introduction

The ancient Greeks gave the world the first democracy. Aristotle, the greatest philosopher of antiquity and the man who summed up the political experience of the Greeks for us, tells us in his Politics that democracy is the rule of the poor, while oligarchy is the rule of the rich. Because the poor are usually many and the rich are usually few, however, Aristotle explains, democracy is usually regarded as the rule of the many.

Following this definition, a casual observer of American politics would surely point to the Democratic party as the party of democracy. Using Aristotle’s debate between the advocates of oligarchy and the champions of democracy, they would say that the Republican party is the party of oligarchy and the Democratic party of democracy.

To call the American Democratic party “democratic,” however, is to do a grave injustice to history and to contemporary reality. To a very large degree, the American Democratic party has never been democratic, if the word means the rule of the people or the many. And in at least two important respects, today’s American Democratic party is the antithesis of democratic.

The Democratic Party: An Undemocratic History

Historians often call America’s first opposition party the Democratic-Republicans. This party was formed, of course, in opposition to the Federalists, who controlled the government of the United States under Washington and his successor, John Adams. The leader of this Democratic-Republican party, Thomas Jefferson, was in many respects hardly democratic. It is true that Jefferson adopted many supposedly democratic customs, such as shaking hands rather than bowing as his predecessors had done. However, it was also Jefferson who built a ditch around the executive mansion in the style of a ha ha, used by European aristocrats to keep both animals and peasants off their land. It was Jefferson who sipped fine wines at home, and he loved the life of luxury in Paris while waxing eloquent in prose about the French Revolution swirling around him.

Nor was Jefferson a strong believer in open government. He used secret and Machiavellian tactics when lobbying Congress for his favorite projects, calling as little attention to the legality or illegality of his prerogative powers as possible. In the case of the Louisiana Purchase, for example, he thought the less said about the constitutional difficulties the better, and he often concealed his true intentions, claiming to play no direct role in events like the impeachment of Supreme Court justices and the treason trial of his former Vice President Aarron Burr, while at the same time managing and orchestrating these affairs from behind the scenes.

The true originator of the modern Democratic party was, in fact, not Jefferson but Andrew Jackson, the hero of the battle of New Orleans, who was swept into office in 1828 at the head of an army of what then-Chief Justice John Marshall and many others regarded as rabble and “combustible materials.”

Jackson’s movement was certainly more democratic than Jefferson’s had been. The wild mob that descended on the president’s house on his inauguration day attests to the fact that, as New Dealer Rexford Tugwell later put it, “democracy was boiling up.” Still, there were significant limits even to Jackson’s democracy.

It most definitely did not include Blacks or Native Americans, for one thing. Indeed, the party Jackson founded remained the party of slavery and the Trail of Tears for decades after Old Hickory left the presidency.

In the crucible of the Civil War, that same Democratic party became the party first of secession and later of Jim Crow, segregation, and the Klu Klux Klan.

The first Democratic president of the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson, is now almost as famous for bringing racially segregated restrooms to Washington DC as he is for his Fourteen Points. Moreover, the attitude Wilson adopted at the Versailles Conference to “less enlightened,” dark-skinned races in the world befits that of a man who enjoyed a White House screening of DW Griffiths’ racist film, Birth of a Nation. Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Democratic party was the party of the South and therefore of segregation.

This party perspective continued even into the supposedly more enlightened New Deal era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, for all the great things he did for America, never threatened his Democratic southern electoral base by pushing for civil rights reform. While FDR’s cousin, the Republican Teddy Roosevelt, had been the first to entertain a black man, Booker T. Washington, at the White House – an event which drew the ire of many a southern Democrat – FDR rejected calls for national legislation banning lynching of Blacks, thereby ensuring his southern votes.

FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, included a pro-civil rights plank in his platform in 1948, causing the South to walk out of his convention and nominate Strom Thurmond for president, but neither Truman nor the next Democrat to occupy the White House, John F. Kennedy, ever threatened their white southern electoral base by insisting on meaningful civil rights reform.

The big change in the Democratic party on race relations came, ironically, in the presidency of a southerner, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had, as Senate majority leader, been one of the leading opponents of any civil rights legislation. However, while the Irish-Catholic from Massachusetts Kennedy knew he had to go slow on civil rights for Blacks to keep southern states in line, the former segregationist Johnson worried more about the northern left wing of his Democratic party, the pro-civil rights, anti-war wing that had supported Stevenson, then JFK in 1960.

And so it was Johnson who gave us the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, and Johnson who appointed the first black man, Thurgood Marshall, to the High Court.

Many modern observers point to those years in the 1960s as proof that, while the old Democratic party was racist and hardly democratic, the modern Democratic party is open, populist, and enlightened. But is calling the current Democratic party open and populist accurate in light of what is going on today?

The Cover Up of Presidential Disability

In The Republic of Plato, Socrates says that in an ideal city, the rulers should be the only ones who can tell lies. For the people to lie to the rulers is like a sailor lying to his captain about the sea worthiness of his ship or a patient or athlete lying to his doctor or trainer about his physical condition. That is never appropriate.

However, the rulers may and should lie to the people for their own good.

Surely no one who calls the Democratic party the “defender of democracy” would say that the rulers should lie in this way. And yet that appears to be precisely what the “rulers”—including not only the President’s staff and aides but also the media—were doing for at least a year or more of the Biden presidency. In the recent debate, many observers perceived a Chief Executive who had difficulty putting a string of words together, let alone a sentence. They said they saw a president who, sadly, seems to be suffering from a neurological deterioration. Observers on all sides, Left and Right, from CNN to FOX News, and many in between, saw this. If this picture of an ailing president is accurate, it is completely the opposite of what we had been told by people who are close to the Oval Office. The President is sharp and clear-headed, completely in control of his faculties, demonstrating “substantive mastery,” they said. In the debate and its aftermath, many saw something quite different.

Of course this is not the first time in American history when the disability of a president has been concealed from the American people. In September 1919, while on a speaking tour of the West in support of his beloved League of Nations, President Wilson collapsed. Rushed back to Washington, he suffered a stroke which left him paralyzed on the left side of his body and utterly incapable of performing the duties of the office of president. Instead of having him resign, his wife Edith Wilson became a sort of Regent President, screening people who visited him and concealing the grave nature of his illness from the world. When a committee of prominent senators and congressmen insisted on visiting the ailing Wilson at the White House, his wife and aides used subdued lighting and other tricks to disguise his appearance, limiting the visit to only a short stay and keeping the president at a distance from those who would scrutinize him. In today’s world, we use teleprompters and make up, but it is much the same thing.

Wilson, of course, was also a Democrat, and so too was the other President of the twentieth century whose name is associated with concealed disability, FDR.

It is not the concealing of Franklin Roosevelt’s polio disability that should concern us, however. It was surely a good thing that cameramen and reporters did not show the public film of the president being carried into buildings or in a wheelchair.

If they had, many short-sighted people might not have voted for him, and there is absolutely no evidence that his paralysis had any effect on his ability to govern.

However, the cardiovascular disease that Roosevelt developed while president may have had an effect on his ability to govern. By 1944, FDR was dying, and that fact was totally concealed from the American people. The public was told he had a cold—much as we were told Mr. Biden had a cold as an explanation for his disastrous debate performance—and the true reality of his precarious physical condition in the last year of FDR’s term was never revealed.

After the cases of Wilson and FDR, of course, we enacted the 25^th amendment, which provides a procedure for dealing with presidential disability of a mental or physical form. That procedure, however, is complicated and depends on the Vice President and the Cabinet to, in effect, get the President out:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President. Thereafter, when the President transmits… his declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit … written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue…. If Congress… determines by two thirds vote of both houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers… of his office.

The 25th amendment may seem irrelevant to the current presidential disability issue since President Biden has now pulled out of the race. However, GOP VP candidate JD Vance has said that, if Biden decided not to run because of mental or physical inability to do the job and he refuses to resign, the 25^th amendment should be invoked. Doing so, though, would exacerbate divisions in the Democratic party that the party leaders, desperate for unity, want to avoid.

Under the amendment, even if Vice President Harris and the cabinet were to declare Biden mentally unfit, he could deny this fact, and the matter would have to go to Congress. It might be only after bitter partisan wrangling that we would know whether we had President Joe Biden or Acting President Kamala Harris. This hardly seems an adequate remedy for presidential disability, senility, or even temporary insanity, especially in the nuclear age.

Putting aside the mystifications of the 25th amendment, however, there can be no doubt that the attempts of the administration to conceal the President’s apparent mental and physical deterioration were not in keeping with an open and populist “democratic” party or government. Neither, of course, is the very undemocratic way that the Democratic party is deciding who their standard bearer will be in the upcoming election, now that Biden has pulled out.

The Most Undemocratic of Nomination Procedures

After the first political parties formed in America in the early 1800s, it became traditional for the party leaders in Congress to meet in a caucus to decide who the nominee of the party for president every four years would be. Later, starting with Jackson’s Democrats, a nominating convention was held to make that decision. Still, for decades, those conventions were controlled by a small minority of party bosses, who, in smoke-filled rooms, bargained for days until a candidate was selected. Even when primaries emerged, they were more or less beauty contests, the results of which never challenged what the party bosses wanted. This was true of both major parties. In 1912, for example, although former President Theodore Roosevelt had won the primaries, the Republican party bosses gave the nomination to the incumbent William Howard Taft, thereby prompting TR to bolt from the convention and start a new third Progressive or “Bull Moose” party.

In 1968, the Democrats assembling at their convention in Chicago turned their back on Eugene McCarthy, the anti-Vietnam War candidate who, like the assassinated Robert Kennedy had challenged LBJ’s war policies, and nominated LBJ’s loyal Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, as the party’s standard bearer.

The riots that this nomination process produced led to the McGovern Fraser reforms of 1972, which tried to make the Democratic party’s nomination process truly democratic. The McGovern-Fraser Commission proposed, and the Democratic National Committee agreed, that states should be required to select Convention delegates in primaries and caucuses in which all voters who identified as party members could participate. From then on, the voters in the primaries and caucuses, not the party bosses or insiders, would decide who the nominee would be. Delegates at the convention would be bound to vote for the candidate who had won the primary, at least on the first ballot. Following the Democratic party’s lead, the Republicans soon adopted a similar procedure.

Of course this new democratic process didn’t work out so well for the Democratic party the first time it was tried. The man who got the Democratic nomination for president in 1972, George Stanley McGovern, was defeated by a landslide in the fall general election, carrying only the state of Massachusetts against incumbent Republican Richard Nixon. Thereafter, the Democrats became less democratic again.

In the early 1980s, a series of Democratic party committees recommended that party leaders be brought back into the nomination process by giving them automatic seats at the convention without requiring them to pledge to vote for any candidate elected by the voters. These unpledged Party Leaders and Elected Officials of the Democratic Party, PLEOs, are also known as “superdelegates.”

All current Democratic senators, congressmen, and governors are superdelegates. So too are all state party chairs and all former and current Democratic presidents, vice presidents, and congressional leaders. Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example, are among the many superdelegates of the party, along with mayors and party insiders from every part of the country.

The Republicans also give a number of party leaders automatic delegate status, including all state party chairs, but, unlike the Democrats, the Republicans do not include members of Congress or any other elected officials in such a role. Moreover, starting with the convention that nominated the outsider Trump in 2016, the Republicans provided that all delegates, including party insiders, must support the candidate who placed first in their home state’s caucus or primary, thereby limiting the ability of these superdelegates to affect the nomination.

On the Democratic party side, of course, the effects of this de-democratizing of the process led to the blocking of the nomination of Bernie Sanders and the selection of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020—two political insiders whom the superdelegates anointed as the party’s safe choices for the general election. Now the Democratic party has used practically the same undemocratic process that gave Joe Biden the nomination in 2020 to kick him out in 2024.

Big donors cut off money. Party insiders put private and public pressure on the ailing Biden. In the end, of course, the president gave way to the pressure, ending his re-election bid with a bizarre stark letter posted on X (formerly Twitter), without explanation or even public appearance. In an apparent afterthought, he endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to be the party’s nominee, setting off a wave of political and media endorsements that have all but crowned her as the party standard bearer without any vote of the people. What happened to the voters?

What happened to the primaries and caucuses? For all the talk of an “open” convention, it is clear that Mr. Biden’s successor as nominee of the party will be chosen, not by the people, not by the voters, but by a small select group of top superdelegates—a handful of elite party Platonic guardians—who know better than the people what they want and should want for their future. Is this the party of democracy? Is this the modern American Democratic party?

Conclusion

The American Democratic party has not ever been and certainly is not now truly democratic. The process by which President Biden’s apparent disability has been concealed and the method party leaders are using to replace him is more reminiscent of Plato’s lying guardians than it is of Aristotle’s democrats.

Like millions of Democrats, many of us hope that the Democratic party will change and live up to its name, becoming more populist, more open, more responsive to the will of the voters. Time will tell, of course, whether the leaders of the Democratic party will take the party in that democratic direction.

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The featured image is a photograph of Kamala Harris with Joe Biden, 4 July 2024, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.