‘Saving democracy’ drivel
Confession: Whenever I encounter an opinion column or news report about “saving democracy,” I ignore it.
I know that it will consist of nothing more than the kind of sanctimonious anti-Trump drivel we’ve been subjected to over and over again for eight years now.
Such pieces are almost always more about the writer signaling virtue than identifying Donald Trump’s lack thereof. Their cartoon theme is always the same: Democrats good, Republicans bad.
The date Jan. 6 will invariably appear by paragraph three, coupled with the word “insurrectionist.”
The term “fascist,” usually applied in a way that indicates ignorance of both fascism and political ideology in general, will show up no later than halfway through.
The underlying assumption seems to be that if you repeat that Trump is a threat to democracy enough times, light bulbs will eventually come on and large numbers of people who haven’t believed you up to this point will suddenly and inexplicably start to.
But Trump is probably too undisciplined and stupid to ever be an actual threat to the republic, and the events of Jan. 6, 2021, best efforts of the Democratic Party to convince us otherwise, still resemble more a protest by drunken buffoons turned riot than any kind of serious effort to overthrow the government.
I distinctly (if involuntarily) remember the weeks following the 2020 election and I don’t recall talking with anyone, even hard-core Democrats, who expressed serious concern that the results would be overturned, Trump’s efforts to that effect being so comically and thus typically inept.
Going further, I would contend that, nearly three years after those events, Trump, although unsavory as always, might be less of a threat to American democracy than those claiming to save it from his predations. Indeed, his antagonists appear increasingly willing to use Trump as a pretext to engage in precisely the kinds of authoritarianism which they accuse him of.
At the least, Democratic claims regarding saving democracy might have more credibility if it weren’t for the fact that they are using naked political power to prosecute the presidential front-runner of the opposition party and even trying to have him removed from ballots based on bogus interpretations of the 14th Amendment.
Along these lines, the logic of the Democratic Party can be distilled down to the claim that, since the GOP in its Trump incarnation has become a fascist party (defined as any party which opposes Democrats), the only way to save our democracy is to establish a Democratic Party one-party state.
Implicit in all this is the rather offensive notion that the 52 percent of voters who prefer Trump to Joe Biden (according to the latest ABC News/ Washington Post poll) are either too dumb to know that Trump is a fascist or know he is but will vote for him because they are fascists too.
Democratic efforts to put their likely opponent in jail and/or have him removed from the ballot thus constitute an effort to foreclose the democratic process in order to prevent people from voting the wrong way. They don’t trust Americans to resist the lure of fascism, so they use fascist tactics to save us from fascism and ourselves.
It should be revealing that the party claiming to be saving our democracy thinks it will be jeopardized by allowing the democratic process to unfold, that their plan to save democracy apparently includes blocking you from voting for whom you wish.
When Democrats say that “democracy is on the ballot” (assuming Trump is also allowed to be, despite their best efforts otherwise) what they really mean is that you have to vote Democrat to prove your commitment to it.
Funny how that works.
As Washington Post/National Review columnist Jim Geraghty points out, in response to accusations that NBC News was normalizing fascism by permitting Trump to be interviewed on “Meet the Press”: “There are people in this country who believe that Trump is so dangerous, odious, and unacceptable that a news institution like NBC News is aiding and abetting him just by interviewing him and airing that interview, even if that interview features tough questions, skepticism, rebuttals, etc. It inadvertently reveals an absolute terror that in a free exchange of ideas, the country will make the wrong choice, and a belief that the electorate must be walled off from certain figures, perspectives, and arguments.”
Welcome to our new “guided democracy,” in which the Democrats do all the guiding and which consequently resembles genuine democracy to roughly the same extent as “people’s republics” resembled genuine republics.
Few seem to have considered that nothing can poison the well and damage democracy more than one party claiming to be its defender and accusing the other of being its foe.
During the pandemic, Democrats’ favorite public health official, Anthony Fauci, claimed to embody “the science”; now the Democrats claim to embody democracy.
A good rule of thumb when it comes to such matters: Just as you should assume that someone calling someone else a fascist is most likely the real fascist, those claiming to be saving us from democracy are most likely the greatest threat to it.
If saving democracy requires voting for the doddering hack Biden, how bad can the alternatives be?