What Is Democracy? Roger Kimball Roger Kimball
Leaving aside the attack micro-drama involving Paul Pelosi, the Democrats seem to have two issues going into the midterm elections: abortion and democracy.
Neither seems to be getting much purchase with voters.
For reasons that seem puzzling to Democratic strategists, making the slaughter of the unborn (or, for some “make them comfortable” Dems, the recently born) a major plank on your platform just didn’t resonate with most women.
Or, rather, it resonated negatively, partly because it was transparently a cynical attempt at political manipulation, and partly because, for the vast majority of women, motherhood is an important part of their lives. The prospect of blighting that part of themselves doesn’t rally the troops.
Appeals to “democracy” is a little more complicated, but no less saturated with cynicism.
As attentive readers will have noticed, the word “democracy” is appealed to whenever it looks as though Democrats might lose.
One sign that this is about to happen is the promiscuous deployment of the phrase “our democracy.”
They really mean it. It’s not your democracy, peon.
If you voted for a Republican, you voted “against our democracy.”
As I have put it elsewhere, what “democracy” means to them is “rule by Democrats.”
It’s worth pausing to ponder the evolution of this novel meaning of “democracy.”
Originally, of course, “democracy” meant “rule by the demos,” the people.
But as Orwell showed in his novel “Animal Farm,” there’s a moral or political entropy at work in human affairs that, unchecked, regularly perverts “the people” into “some people.”
All animals are equal, you see, but some are more equal than others.
As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that the prevalence of this degeneration in the human heart is one reason that most political theorists, from Plato and Aristotle on down, have been suspicious of democracy.
Aristotle thought it the worse form of government, leading almost inevitably to ochlocracy or mob rule.
James Madison, in “Federalist No. 10,” warned that most democracies have been as “short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
It was part of Madison’s genius, supported by Alexander Hamilton and the other Founders, to forge a species of democracy that carefully modulated the passions of the masses in such a way that protected individual liberty.
You may have noticed that the loudest voices among Democrats aren’t much interested in preserving individual liberty. They’re interested instead in the acquisition and retention of power, on the one hand, and the exercise of control, on the other.
It’s both amusing and alarming to watch this dialectic play out in elections.
In 2016, Donald Trump was elected in a free, open, and (using the term in its old sense) democratic election.
But the nomenklatura screamed that his election was illegitimate, a challenge to democracy, because—why? Because the wrong person won.
The signs are not good for the Dems in the upcoming elections.
Therefore, their weaponization of the election is proceeding at warp speed.
TV host Jane Pauley is part of the advance guard.
If the Republicans win, she implied, democracy could end in the United States.
“The very future of our democracy,” she said, is on the ballot in 2022.
Pauley was the warm-up act for CBS reporter Robert Costa, who sang the same song, only louder.
“The Republican Party,” he said, “is gripped by people who are election deniers. How should the press contend with that? It’s happening inside one particular party.”
Not the phrase “election deniers.” It’s meant to share in the moral obloquy heaped upon “Holocaust deniers.”
The left did the same thing to people who dared to express reservations about the narrative according to which the world was about to end because of “global warming.”
They were denominated “climate deniers” in an effort to smear them with the same moral tar brush.
Misapplying such moral opprobrium is, as I have noted, dishonest and disreputable, but such considerations never stop the left from their attempts to destroy people with whom they disagree.
Now that the midterms are nigh and the writing is on the wall, everywhere one looks, one sees the left’s efforts to engage in preemptive discreditation.
According to MSNBC, the election isn’t just an election between Democrats and Republicans.
It’s a battle between “Democracy and Fascism.”
Political analyst Anand Giridharadas explains, “This is a contest between part of the country that believes in continued and expanded liberal democracy, effort to pursue a more perfect union, and a part of the country that is now attracted to the idea of fascism in the United States.”
Or how about this from a top Biden adviser named Keisha Lance Bottoms: “What we see, again, with this MAGA Republican agenda is an effort to disrupt our democracy. … I think it will always be important to call out any effort there is to destroy—essentially, destroy—the United States of America.”
Gosh.
No wonder nobody trusts the media anymore.
Not, as anyone who has been paying attention will have recognized, that this is anything new.
On Nov. 8, 1994, the GOP picked up 54 House seats. Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” was the darling of the electorate. The left went nuts.
The problem, as always, was the voters. Why hadn’t they listened to their betters?
Peter Jennings (remember him?) couldn’t believe the bad behavior of the voters. He compared them to toddlers throwing a temper tantrum.
“It’s clear,” Jennings said, “that anger controls the child and not the other way around. The voters had a temper tantrum. … The nation can’t be run by an angry 2-year-old.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Commenting on Jennings’s outburst, Cal Thomas posed a question, the answer to which we are still awaiting.
“Why,” Thomas asked, “do liberals such as Jennings refuse to believe it was their failed ideas—not voter anger—that did them in?”
Let me know when you find out the answer.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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