The Biden crisis is now a game of chicken

All Democrats can do is try to convince the president they won’t swerve.

Ever since the presidential debate, many have wondered why the Democratic Party would not get President Biden to step down as its nominee. The reason is it can’t.

In America, parties are shells in which political entrepreneurs operate at will. Democrats who have more or less revealed they want Biden out — a group that now includes Charles E. Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries — have no formal mechanism to eject him. All leaders can do is pressure Biden behind the scenes, publicly embarrass him (as they’re doing now), and threaten to leave him broke and alone on the trail.

But these are just threats. They have power only if Biden believes them — believes that the party will stand firm against him even as Election Day gets closer and the risk of another Trump presidency rises.

Before primaries dominated American elections, the people who determined whether the candidate was suitable for election — delegates to the convention — included many current or former elected officials, from mayors to senators to governors. These were people who had experience in running for general elections, in attracting mainstream support and in actually governing. Now those who decide are the small number of primary voters, often more ideologically extreme than the average voter, and for whom ideological fealty is more important than electability.

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In almost all other democracies, political parties still function as powerful organizations. In fact, in other democracies, the main role of political parties is to choose their candidates and platforms through some internal process and then present them to the broader public in the elections. In Britain, the Labour Party replaced Jeremy Corbyn with the more electable Keir Starmer, and the Tories have chosen several new leaders over the past six years. Australia’s Labor Party did it in 2010 as its then-leader’s popularity was plummeting.

In the United States, amid the fiery radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, parties gave up that central power, embracing a primary system. The result is that in America, power moved from party leaders to party activists.

This hollowed parties........

© Washington Post

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