What Biden’s Decision Shows About Democratic Government

by Randall G. Holcombe

A romantic view of democracy depicts democratic governments as accountable to their citizens and acting in their citizens’ interests. An alternative view of democratic governments—and all governments—is that they are run by an elite few and act to further the interests of the elite.

This alternative view is not new and is widely expressed in both the academic literature and the popular press.

In his 1956 book, The Power Elite , C. Wright Mills observes,

The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday world in which they live… But not all men are, in this sense, ordinary. As the means of information and power are centralized, some men come to occupy positions in American society from which they can look down upon, so to speak, and by their decisions mightily affect, the everyday world of ordinary men and women.

Mills calls those people the power elite. They are the ones who run governments.

Recognizing the influence of the elite, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz says in his 2012 book The Price of Inequality , “It’s one thing to win a fair game. It’s quite another to be able to write the rules of the game—and write them in ways that enhance one’s prospects of winning. And it’s even worse when you can choose your own referees.” The elite run the government despite the illusion, in democracies, that they are accountable to the citizens.

Citizens recognize this, which accounts for the popularity of populist politicians who say they want to return power to the people. But this can’t happen. The election of populist leaders just shifts power from one set of elites to another. I explain why in this somewhat technical article .

There is the illusion that through democratic elections, citizens choose those who run the government. Still, popular elections give citizens only the choice to vote for candidates selected by one group of elites or another. In markets, people have the option of buying a wide variety of products. If they deem none satisfactory, they don’t have to buy anything. In elections, they have very limited choices—choices offered to them by the elite. In markets, they get what they choose. In elections, how they vote has no effect on the outcome they get.

While it is true that all the votes taken together determine who is elected, in any but the smallest elections, voters know that their one vote will have no effect on the outcome.

President Biden’s presidency illustrates how the elite determines who will rule. In 2020, many Democrats were vying for their party’s nomination, but the Democratic elite viewed the front runners—Sanders, Buttigieg, and yes, Harris—as too extreme to win and pressured them to step aside so the more moderate Biden could get the nomination.

Now, in 2024, the Democratic elite have pressured President Biden to abandon his quest for a second term. On July 11, Biden said, “I think I’m the most qualified person to run for president. I beat him once, and I will beat him again.” He offered a similar message on July 9 . Biden won his primary elections and would have taken a majority of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention. But the Democratic political elite forced him out of office a few weeks after he made his defiant stand against them.

As this article said, “Democratic lawmakers began calling on him to step aside, a rebellion that started slowly but grew steadily in size and intensity. Thirty-seven congressional Democrats, including independent Sen. Joe Manchin, who previously was in the Democratic Party, had called on Biden to drop out of the 2024 election before he delivered his decision Sunday afternoon.”

Having secured the primary votes to gain the party’s nomination, the party elite managed to displace Democratic voters’ choice, allowing the party elite to choose his replacement.

It is obvious in this case that the elite, not the voters, decide who will hold power, but this is true in every case. The voters can only vote for candidates offered to them by the elite.

My message here is not an attack on democratic elections. As long as there are competing elites, they constrain those in power. Come November, voters will have the choice of voting for one of two presidential candidates offered to them by their party elites (or a third-party candidate who can’t win). No individual’s vote will matter, even though taken together, they all determine the outcome.

And many voters have expressed dissatisfaction with all the candidates.

Just as there are power struggles between parties, there are power struggles within parties. Many Republicans did not support Trump in 2016, and quite obviously, Biden was on the losing end of a power struggle in 2024 despite being the sitting president.

Individual members of the masses have no power. Ultimately, the government is run by an elite few, as I have explained here and here . American democracy works as well as it does because competition among elites limits their ability to abuse power—not because elected officials are accountable to the voters. Without effective competition among elites, nations get governments like Putin’s Russia, Maduro’s Venezuela, or Kim’s North Korea.

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