The Triumph of Democracy

Turn on the television or log into a website and you will inevitably find more than one serious thinker mewling about the wonders of democracy. To which he will add that our democracy is threatened and our sacred rights are about to be trashed in the compactor called our political system.

Those who pretend to more sophisticated thinking drone on about the greatness of liberal democracy, a grandiose invention of Western civilization, currently involved in a struggle to the death against the authoritarian countries of the BRICS group.

And yet, have you noticed the subliminal suggestion going on here? What could be more democratic than the Democratic Party? And what could be more virtuous, politically speaking, than supporting liberal democracy by being a liberal Democrat?

By definition, then, the enemies of the Democratic Party are enemies of democracy. 

Strictly speaking, Roger Kimball reminds us, the American government is not a pure democracy. In a pure democracy the people make policy by referenda and plebiscites. In our government we elect representatives. We expect that they will do the will of the people, but there is no guarantee that they will.

Moreover, Kimball explains, the founders of the American republic wanted to limit the power of the people. They did it with a system of checks and balances. They feared the tyranny of the majority.

Kimball writes:

True enough, the United States was never really a democracy—a form of government, as James Madison observed in Federalist 10, that tended to be “as short in its life as it is violent in its death.” Rather, the United States was, from the beginning, a democratic republic. Ultimately, the people were sovereign—that was the point of the phrase “We the People.” But their sovereignty was mediated through the agency of representation. 

The point of my distinction, however, still holds. The Founders bequeathed us a democratic republic and a Constitution whose chief purpose was to define and limit the power of government. Their modern successors have inhabited that political dispensation, slyly perverting and emptying it out of its original signification while maintaining the names and rituals of the original.

But then, Kimball reminds us, we have the bureaucracy, where unelected officials issue edicts that Congress did not approve. It is as close as we get to  tyranny. 

And it would do this by casting over society an increasingly intricate network of rules and regulations that sap initiative.

When the bureaucracy is in charge, laws are also applied arbitrarily.

If you doubt this, contemplate the treatment of modern enemies of the state, the January 6 protestors, for example, or the pro-life advocates who demonstrate against abortion, or the ex-Marine who is indicted for murder because he intervened to save his fellow subway riders from the attacks of a violent homeless man. When I tell you that the ex-Marine is white while the homeless man, who died after the Marine tackled him, is black, you have all the information you need to appreciate our modern two-tier justice system at work. You saw the same thing on display last week when a horde of illegal immigrants jumped and savagely beat two New York City policemen. The incident was filmed, as was the aftermath. The perpetrators were arrested but quickly released. They made angry, obscene gestures at the recording cameras and fled to California in order to enjoy the largess provided to criminals by Governor Gavin Newsom. And of course there is the example of Donald Trump: possibly the man most harassed by our laughably named “Department of Justice” in the history of the Republic.

Dare we mention that this new regime is redefining guilt and innocence, as a function of skin color. It is working to engineer a new society, a new political order, where armies of the oppressed can overthrow the constitutional order.

If right and wrong are based on skin color or ethnicity, they we need not study issues and examine the facts of the case. 

By the dim lights of our intelligentsia, the pathway to democracy requires us to destroy a certain former president. One will not set down the ways that Donald Trump threatens democracy, or the Democratic Party, but the American left is not living in the real political world. It has taken up residence in the world of end-of-days prophecy.

Within this world, winning and losing elections is not important. Since all of America’s problems derive from white supremacists, destroying the man who embodies it, the Antichrist Donald Trump, would lead to the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven. That is, the arrival of the Kingdom of Justice.

It is positively Biblical. It relieves you of having to govern. It relieves you of the dire necessity of winning elections and implementing policies. It certainly relieves you of all responsibility for the practical consequences of your policies.

You are living the end of days, or is it the end of history? Inevitably, we will arrive at the triumph of liberal democracy, not through fair elections or government policies, but through the destruction of the great Trumpian Antichrist.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.