Democrats Are Experiencing an ‘Identity Crisis’ Because They Were Living a Lie

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, December 04, 2024

 

To judge from the public polling, when it came to Joe Biden’s troubled adult son, very few Americans believed what the president was telling them.

 

Majorities told pollsters they thought Hunter Biden was guilty of the crimes of which he was charged, thought he had benefited from unduly preferential treatment from Biden’s Justice Department, and even that Joe Biden benefited financially from his son’s indiscretions. Those voters’ verdicts were informed by the extent to which the president eagerly assumed all of Hunter’s political liabilities and even foisted them on his own administration (even going so far as to force Merick Garland to maintain a constant distance from the person his department was prosecuting at a state dinner). When Joe Biden pardoned his son, it seems to have come as a shock to almost no one. Almost.

 

According to Axios, some of the Democratic Party’s faithful bought what the president was selling them, even going so far as to incorporate Biden’s transparently hollow promise to sacrifice his power to save his son from the consequences of his actions into their very identities.

 

By pardoning Hunter not just for the crimes of which he was accused but crimes he “may have committed” over the last decade, “some Democrats believe Biden has sacrificed a moral high ground that’s been foundational to the party’s identity in the Trump era,” the report read. The president’s actions represent “an astonishing betrayal” to Democrats who convinced themselves theirs was the party of rectitude and propriety. Even if his actions are understandable on a human level, Biden’s misuse of the pardon power to subvert the conduct of justice undermines faith in government and, by extension, the party of government.

 

If the Democrats’ self-conception has been shattered by Biden’s actions, some believe the party is in need of a new identity — a darker one.

 

As Axios notes, some Democrats are asking themselves if the party shouldn’t just embrace the nihilism its members have only barely suppressed in the days since Trump’s reelection. “What’s the point of holding the moral high ground when America just elected a convicted felon?” Axios asked, channeling the Democratic id. A few embittered Democratic politicos even insist that their party’s only problem is that it is too upstanding. “We need to stretch the limits of what’s possible and be as ruthless as Republicans when it comes to using every tool at our disposal,” wrote Kamala Harris adviser Mike Nellis.

 

What a portrait of whining self-indulgence Axios has painted for us. Nobody forced Democrats to elevate Joe Biden to the status of saintly paragon of virtue. To do so would be to compartmentalize everything we know about the president from the decades he spent in public life. Nor did Democrats have many indications that this presidency was reflexively deferential to the rule of law. The Biden White House went to court to defend its refusal to enforce immigration law. It abrogated the rights of property owners and illegally attempted to transfer the debt burdens assumed by student-loan borrowers onto taxpayers. As a party, Democrats spent the last decade exposing their soft-spot for lawbreakers — rioters, illegal immigrants, loiterers and vagrants, etc. — and they called it “social justice,” a modifier that reveals the incompatibility of their program with actual justice.

 

This reflection on Biden’s record in office also reveals the depths of the delusion to which Democrats who want their party to “stop playing nice” have succumbed. The attempt to blame one’s bad fortune on a ruthless opposition and a heedless American political consensus is the saddest of partisan coping mechanisms. The Democratic Party can tell itself that the 49.9 percent of Americans who reelected Donald Trump did so out of their contempt for the rule of law all it likes, but to do so would be to disregard their own similar contempt and the disruptions that disdain produced.

 

If Biden’s pardon has imposed on Democrats an “identity crisis,” as Axios contends it has, its because the party was living a lie. They crafted a grandfatherly caricature of Joe Biden — one that did not match the reality of Joe Biden — and they believed his high-flown rhetoric about the virtues of democracy and the primacy of law would paper over his disregard for both. And in much the same way that Biden’s shockingly decrepit debate performance only stole from the president’s defenders any plausible claim that he retained total control of his faculties, the Hunter Biden pardon has just revealed to Democrats what everyone else could see plainly. The Democratic Party may be the party of government, but it hasn’t been the party of good government in quite some time.

 

To put this in terms progressives might recognize: Democrats have been living in the identity of their choice for a long while, and they attempted to force the rest of us to play along with their unreality. The voting public has merely reminded the party that its preferred identity doesn’t match our own lived experience.