When Donald Trump is sworn in next week, America will have a president for the first time in four years.

The Biden era hasn’t been a presidency but an interregnum, with seemingly no one in charge in Washington.

The sign on Harry Truman’s desk used to say, “The buck stops here.”

Where did it stop with President Biden in the Oval Office?

Voters never asked for an experiment in leaderless administration, but the party that put Mr. Biden in power gave them one anyway. 

In the 21st century, Democrats are misnamed: 

They’re the less democratic of the two great parties, and their insider-dominated politics explains both how Mr. Biden wound up in a role for which he was unfit and why the candidate picked to replace him went on to lose every battleground state.

Vice President Harris had never won a presidential primary.

Yet the party’s mandarins first pushed her for vice president, and then they pushed Mr. Biden off the ticket and made her the nominee without giving voters the slightest say.

This isn’t a people’s party:

President Clinton and Secretary Clinton still believed the party belonged to them even after President Obama beat Mrs. Clinton for the 2008 presidential nomination. 

The Clintons and Obama’s coterie subsequently agreed to power-sharing, with Mrs. Clinton as Mr. Obama’s secretary of state and all-but-officially-designated successor.

Mr. Biden was very much a junior partner in the Obama-Clinton party, and that didn’t change after the party made him its nominee in 2020. 

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton kept Mr. Biden from running four years earlier. Mr. Obama wouldn’t support his own vice president because it was Mrs. Clinton’s turn — that was the deal.

Trump shattered their corrupt dynastic bargain, just as he broke the hold of the Bush family and its allies on the GOP.

Trump put to the test a much-debated question in political science: Does the party decide — meaning party elites — or can voters pick a winning nominee in defiance of what the political establishment wants?

Thanks to Trump, the Republicans became a party of primary voters, while the Democrats remained under elite control.

The results are now in, and they can be seen in both Mr. Biden’s sad job performance and Ms. Harris’ humiliation at the polls. 

Turning into a party of primary voters wasn’t without cost for the GOP, however, and led to the nomination of some weak candidates in the 2022 midterms and other recent contests.

Yet the price not only Democrats but the whole country paid for the anti-democratic politics of the Clintons and Obamas has been much steeper.

Democrats forfeited their future by selecting Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris five years ago — the one too senescent to serve as president, the other too unlikeable to win a national election herself.

The Democratic establishment — which includes Speaker Pelosi — has had a stranglehold on the party since the 1990s, as occasional challengers like Senator Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discovered in turn.

That led Ms. Gabbard and Mr. Kennedy out of the Democratic Party’s confines and into the freer and more freewheeling coalition of Trump’s GOP.

The Democrats had actually been the first party to commit fully to the modern presidential primary system, but they were burned by the experience.

President Nixon won the 1968 election in part thanks to Democratic disarray: Like Mr. Biden, the incumbent president that year, Lyndon Johnson, dropped out of the race, and the party’s eventual replacement, Hubert Humphrey, was, like Ms. Harris, a vice president handed the presidential nomination without competing in a single primary.

Stung by defeat, in 1972, Democrats tried to embrace democracy by giving primaries more weight — but wound up with a candidate, Senator McGovern, who lost in a 49-state blowout.

Jimmy Carter, whose dismal years as president look a little brighter by contrast with the Biden-Harris interregnum, was actually the Democrats’ savior in 1976 and seemed to vindicate the wisdom of primaries.

Then the party lost three consecutive presidential elections in the 1980s, and after Mr. Clinton restored the Democrats’ fortunes in 1992, he and his wife were determined to remain the power brokers.

 Mr. Obama could have been the Democrats’ Donald Trump, the man who gave the party back to the people.

Instead he gave it back to Mrs. Clinton, and after Trump trounced her, Democrats had no leaders left — just a nonfunctional Mr. Biden and an unelectable Ms. Harris.

Now that the insiders’ political machine has self-destructed, will Democrats dare trust their voters to choose a new generation of leadership — or do they fear that will only land them with the next McGovern?

Populism can lead to better leaders, but only if a party’s primary voters aren’t already too far from America’s middle ground.

Creators.com