Professional dismisser of threat posed by Trumpism finally discovers an actual threat to democracy

Samuel Moyn, who has been downplaying the authoritarian threat posed by Trumpism since the first year of his administration, has at least identified an actual example of authoritarianism — the president endorsing his vice president while stepping down as the party’s nominee:

My question is, has anybody making the assertion that there’s something undemocratic about Democrats following the process they had in place after Biden stepped down tried in any detailed way to defend this view? The idea that Biden endorsing Harris is somehow akin to divine right is transparently farcical, but it’s hard to see any version of the argument make any sense.

As we have said before, Biden stepping down in July meant that a primary process could not be replicated. There was no way of having a vote of party members as opposed to their delegates. The only alternatives to what happened are:

• The vote of delegates takes place as planned in the first week of August. There is some kind of two week media primary with multiple candidates, perhaps involving Cory Gardner and Zendaya or something.
• The rules are changed, and Democrats wait until the convention, where after a slightly longer media primary with more chances to hold panels with celebrities and Republican daddies the candidate is selected in some kind of backroom deal.

Are either of these options more “democratic” that Harris earning the endorsement of most of the party leadership and the support of a majority of delegates before the early August vote? Obviously not. And there are other damning questions about how the alternatives are supposed to work, most notably how you force candidates to challenge Harris although they don’t think it’s in either their or the party’s interest. The delegates arbitrarily choosing a random midwestern governor rather than the candidate Democratic primary voters chose to take over if Biden was no longer willing and/or able to serve is much more vulnerable to charges that the party was acting undemocratically. And nobody could look at the reaction of the party’s rank-and-file (including a wave of small donor donations and activist enthusiasm) and seriously claim that Harris is somehow being imposed by a cabal of party elites against the will of the party’s voters.

The reason you don’t see claims that the process following Biden’s withdrawal from the race violated democratic norms unpacked in any detail is that they collapse on the slightest inspection. They do make sense, however, as a rhetorical move if you were hoping for weeks of chaos following Biden stepping down rather than a unified party to make it more likely that Trump would win to own the hysterical libs. I think we have a bingo here.