Where Is Democrats’ Outrage at Biden’s Authoritarianism?
If you want to see the abuse of norms and standards, check out what the 46th president and his cronies are up to.
Democrats keep warning that if Donald Trump gets a second term he will be an authoritarian president. They also claim his first term was authoritarian.
Trump did once attack the Second Amendment by wanting to confiscate Americans' guns before due process. He’s also said during this campaign that he would be a dictator for a day.
Legitimate concerns. But is Trump’s alleged authoritarianism the only kind that should be feared? If a president skirting the law and toppling American democratic norms and standards to carry out his agenda is bad, why do Trump’s critics seem to not mind when Joe Biden does this?
Because that’s definitely happening. Right now.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines authoritarianism as “relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people.”
Last week, Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in New York City in what many considered a partisan, banana republic–style trial built on the shakiest of grounds by the allies of Joe Biden. The District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, is backed by the billionaire leftist George Soros. The judge who oversaw Bragg’s case, Juan Merchan, is a Biden donor whose daughter works for the president’s re-election campaign.
There are more to these curious partisan alliances of Trump’s prosecutors, but let’s just end with the fact that the former president's recent trial violated some of the most basic constitutional due process principles.
If “favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people,” is a textbook definition of ‘authoritarianism,’ and Merriam-Webster says it is, then it’s hard to imagine a more thorough example of this than what went down in that New York City courtroom last Friday.
Was it not an unconstitutional thwarting of democracy when Democratic elites in some blue states simply decided to throw Trump off their ballots earlier this year? We don’t have to wonder, because a unanimous Supreme Court declared this unconstitutional in March.
Throwing one’s political opponents off of ballots is an authoritarian act no matter how sadly some tried to rationalize it.
In late 2022 and 2023, when the ideologically diverse and professionally credible reporters behind the “Twitter Files” revealed a mountain of evidence that the Biden administration and other government officials had tried to force private social media platforms to manipulate and even censor Americans’ speech, there was no uproar among Democrats that the federal government had so flagrantly ignored the First Amendment.
No, instead, Democratic politicians and the establishment media attacked the reporters for bringing any of this to light. In a perfect example of “it’s-not-authoritarianism-when Biden does it,” Democratic elites defended the idea of authorities cracking down on “hate speech,” “disinformation,’ and ‘misinformation.”
So devout had (have) Democrats become to the inherent righteousness of censorship and the dangerousness of free speech, in 2022 the Biden administration even proposed a new federal agency: The Disinformation Governance Board, to exist under the Department of Homeland Security.
In other words, an actual Orwellian Ministry of Truth.
That’s authoritarian as hell.
Imagine if Trump tried to do this. Imagine if he tried to spread his propaganda by using government agencies to bully social media companies. Imagine if Republicans tried to throw Biden off state ballots.
Imagine if Trump allies in the legal system invented unprecedented new legal standards and ignored a bunch of old ones to go after Biden.
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Those would all be unquestionably authoritarian acts. Democrats don’t have a problem with authoritarianism at all, and in fact are often the most enthusiastic supporters of it.
They have a problem with Donald Trump and do not hesitate to resort to authoritarianism to take him down. Raw power. By any means necessary. The Constitution be damned.
To the question: Is Joe Biden’s authoritarianism okay with Democrats? Their silence is the answer, and that answer is yes.
