The Coronation of Kamala Harris Reveals Democracy On the Ropes

By Anne Keala Kelly, The Kennedy Beacon

There’s a long list of the ways the Democratic Party cheated voters out of the opportunity to cast a primary vote for someone other than Joe Biden. But Biden did receive primary votes, however degraded that process may have been. 

Perhaps if we weren’t teetering on the edge of WWIII, with the American military strewn across the globe ready to rumble, democracy being on the ropes wouldn’t matter. And the Democrats elevating a candidate for the presidency that nobody voted for might not feel so threatening.

But here we are — a ‘military industrial complex’ of a nation and a failing ‘democratic’ system of electing our next president.

During the now infamous Biden-Trump debate, just as Biden’s Titanic blunders began taking on a life of their own, Trump casually mocked Biden’s support for the war in Ukraine, proclaiming he will end that war before he is sworn into office. Biden snapped back, “By the way, all that money we give Ukraine, and weapons, we make here in the United States. We give them the weapons, not money at this point.”

The relevance of Biden’s slightly garbled retort got lost in the aftermath, but the man was speaking plainly about what his government does. 

War is good for business. But only if you agree to lose perpetually or, put another way, never win.

During his simulcast of The Real Debate, as Kennedy answered the same questions Trump and Biden were asked, he said, “Every $1 million spent on military weaponry creates two jobs, but that $1 million spent on childcare creates 22 jobs.”

The following day, Kennedy was interviewed by Scott Detrow on NPR’s All Things Considered. He said, “Democracy is supposed to produce the best of the best, but I don’t think that was on display last night.” Then, after Kennedy spoke about both Biden’s and Trump’s contribution to the astronomical nearly $35 trillion deficit, Detrow said, “Can I ask you about the debt for a moment? Because you bring it up a lot. You talk a lot about the debt. Let’s just take the two of the biggest areas of federal spending. Would you cut or modify Social Security? Would you cut Medicare? What would you immediately do to lower the spending?”

Rejecting the narrow premise of the question, Kennedy replied, “Yeah, I would cut the military down to about $500 billion during my first four years in office.”

American military spending under Democratic leaders over the past 40 years has erased the line between them and Republicans, and neither party wants to change the one big thing that makes them the uniparty: bi-partisan support for military spending. As reported on Statista.com, in 2023 the U.S. spent $916 billion on defense ($130 billion more than when Trump left office), whereas Russia, in the middle of its war with Ukraine, spent $109 billion.

For a brief moment, it seemed that maybe the rest of this election season might include discussion on substantive policy issues, like how the economy is geared toward militarism. But things have regressed since the CNN debate. 

Refusing to give up power, Biden limped around with the Sword of Damocles hanging over his head, getting closer to the end of his political career with every verbal gaffe. But then eight days after an alleged assassin’s bullet clipped Trump’s ear, Biden quit his re-election bid from his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, via a letter (with a computer- generated signature) posted on social media. 

Now, it’s almost as though Biden was never there. The political landscape in the U.S. has completely morphed in less time than it takes the moon to complete a full cycle. 

After more than a year of being told by corporate media and everyone in the Democratic Party – including Harris — that Biden was the only person who could beat Trump, it simply took a non-stop, two-week-long media and celebrity blitz to replace that narrative with “Harris or Bust.”

If there is no process for participation, if it is all a performance of pretend democracy played out with the help of a press that broadcasts and publishes for profit (not truth), then it would follow that there are no policy questions. It appears to be a given that Harris doesn’t have to say anything too specific about any issues that actually matter. The unspoken assumption is that she will be Biden – the 5G version. 

The closer we get to November 5, the further we get from Biden’s failed campaign, and the further Americans are from a reason to care about what that means. 

On August 19, Democrats will hold their convention in Chicago, even though all the delegates have committed to support Kamala Harris, which will make it seem like a celebration of unity. But given the events of the preceding month, it might be a celebration of the bloodless coup that almost nobody bothered to question.

Who knew power could move so swiftly from one hand to another without anyone actually dying first? Then again, maybe the threat of killing Biden’s 50-year political legacy was a kind of death.

On July 27, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published, Leaving Las Vegas: Inside the Last Tortured Days of the Biden Campaign, on his Substack. In it, he provides salient details and analysis from a “senior official” about events leading up to Biden’s withdrawal, with Hersh comparing those days to the 1964 John Frankenheimer film, Seven Days in May, about a foiled coup attempt. 

On Tuesday he [Biden] gave the keynote address to 5,000 members of the NAACP at its annual convention. The next day, the president, apparently stricken while campaigning with a yet-to-be-revealed illness, broke from his schedule and made a police escort race to Air Force One after initially telling police they were heading to the nearest emergency room… 

At that point, according to Emily Goodin, a Daily Mail reporter who was in the traveling press pool, the president was “deathly pale” and Air Force One flew at maximum speed to Delaware, where the president has a weekend retreat at Rehoboth Beach. The press pool was told that Biden had COVID… By Saturday, July 20, former President Barack Obama was deeply involved, and there was talk that he would place a call to Biden.

‘On Sunday morning,’ the official told me, with the approval of Pelosi and Schumer, Obama called Biden after breakfast and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment.’” 

Margaret Kimberly, contributing writer to the Black Agenda Report, posted this on X:

This might be the right moment to remember what the founders called our way of governing: a social experiment. The Democrats have weaponized aspects of that experiment to attack democracy itself. 

When the dust settles, and it always does, the true cost of the Democratic Party’s refusal to hold a fair primary, or a process wherein people not hand-chosen by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) could cast a vote for Harris or someone else, may have dealt the party a lethal blow. And, depending on who wins, mortal damage to democracy.

So far, the most successful part of the Democratic Party’s 2024 campaign has been fooling people into thinking Trump is the problem, not domestic and foreign policies. And that Kennedy is a spoiler, not an intelligent, sane, thoughtful leader. 

On second thought, if winning against every anti-democracy lawsuit the DNC files to keep Kennedy off the ballot makes him a spoiler, then okay, maybe they were right about one thing.