Vice President Joe Biden and the Democrat Party at large have recently embarked upon a messianic crusade to attack opposition fundraising, invoking the time-honored tropes of classic populism. “It bothers me, all these unattributed contributions,” he thundered to campaign workers in Scranton, PA yesterday. “I challenge the Chamber of Commerce to tell us how much of the money they’re investing is from foreign sources,” he continued, conjuring up an insidious plot of external enemies burrowing into American democracy. For as many questionable financial issues as there are in U.S. politics (and there are quite a few, for both parties), this kind of unsubstantiated rhetoric coming from the Vice President still comes as a shock, and is eerily reminiscent of the language we hear from a number authoritarian states which nominally call themselves “democratic.”