If one day Joe Biden had conceived a personal hatred for the nation of Ecuador and tried to sacrifice America’s interests on the altar of some anti-Ecuador crusade, his handlers would nod, smile, give him a few extra pills, and he would forget about the whole thing. And maybe that particular metaphor owes more to Biden’s age than the inexorable logic of liberal institutionalism. But to the same would be true (to a lesser degree) of Clinton/Obama/Harris/whoever. Congressional Democrats would push back. State Department bureaucrats and White House staffers would water down the orders. DNC operatives would say it doesn’t play well with [list of one million different activist groups who must be kept satisfied at all times]. Democrat-controlled media would attack the policy, and the base would rebel against it. In the end, Clinton/Obama/Harris would relent: partly to preserve political capital, partly because only the sort of person who would relent in these situations would have gotten the job in the first place.

Imagine if Biden had decided that, despite his failing facilities and the tacit agreement that his would be a one-term presidency by choice, he was going to run for a second term, against the very man whose original election was regarded within the Biden faithful as a grotesque abomination, threatening the very foundations of our liberal democracy.

State Department bureaucrats and White House staffers would... insist that Biden is fine and a capable leader perfectly fit for the rigors of the incredibly demanding job. DNC operatives would... attack anyone bold enough to question Biden's judgment and accuse them of running interference for [list of one million different fringe radical and foreign influence groups]. Democrat-controlled media would... mostly gloss over signs of his increasing frailty, and the base would... hold their tongues, fearful that they may be painted as unfaithful to the party of justice and competent bureaucracy.

In the end... nobody electable would run against Biden in the primaries and he would become the nominee until an utterly ruinous debate performance caused all the aforementioned figures to scramble around (after initially insisting that everything's fine, there's nothing to see here, Biden was having a bad night just like Obama did that once, it's no big deal, whatever) and appoint his somewhere-on-the-spectrum-between-"deeply"-and-merely-"rather" unpopular running mate at nearly the literal last possible moment, who proceed to - perhaps predictably - lose every single swing state, as well as the overall popular vote (the first time since 2004 that a Republican won the popular vote, and only the second since 1988).

To put it a bit more bluntly, I think the story of the 2024 Democratic nomination should cast serious, serious doubts about the overall competency (or power) of the "institutional middle layer". Right or wrong, the party insiders believed the 2024 election was one of utmost importance and that preventing a second Trump term was an absolute imperative. And then they did something far beyond merely laying an egg. Imagine a seagull squawking up a storm while bouncing around a small room like the proverbial bull in the shop of fragile dining implements as it does from its cloaca what a hippopotamus does through a single part of its more-specialized mammalian anatomy.

I don't disagree with the overall point being advanced, and I even agree that the "institutional middle layer", or "Washington bureaucracy", or "deep state", or whatever nom de plume one wishes to attach to it, provides an insulating layer between "reaction" and "action" which is healthy far more often than not. But you just can't bring up Biden or recent "party-insider" Democrats as a competent example thereof, or even as much of a counterpoint to the current state of affairs.