Democracy, like the polar bears, the bald eagle and the 99-cent pizza slice, is threatened.
We
know that’s true because the media, the least democratic body outside
of North Korea, tells us this all the time. And we know that it must be
true because apart from its daily panics over some political, medical,
environmental or economic crisis that will later turn out to be
imaginary or overblown, the media has an unbroken track record of
honesty and truth that almost equals that of Bill Clinton.
So
who better to warn us about the threat to democracy than an
undemocratic body whose membership disproportionately tilts toward a
handful of elite schools and who get their marching orders from major
corporations, who have been caught making up stuff so many times that
they make George Santos seem like the soul of integrity. (This hasn’t
stopped the media from outraged posturing that a member of Congress who
is not named Joe Biden would dare to build his career on a pack of crazy
lies.)
America isn’t a democracy, but if we were the media would
be in the running for the gold medal of democracy threats. The media
ruthlessly interferes in elections by acting as the attack dogs of a
partisan political party, without ever officially registering their
platforms as PACs, spewing the most nakedly brazen lies while calling
for the censorship of their political opponents for spreading
“disinformation”.
Between its pre-election hit jobs and rigged
polls, the media grotesquely distorts elections in a way that no amount
of “disinformation” on social media could possibly hope to compete with
in a century.
The vox populi, in the form of surveys, regularly
ranks the media’s trust rating below that of the love child of Richard
Nixon and Hillary Clinton. The media might have tried to rig them, but
even Chicago doesn’t have a single dead ballot harvester who would say a
single good thing about the media.
But it’s always the least democratic forces that warn of threats to democracy.
The
media brings on experts, a group even less representative than the
media, to explain that Republicans and anyone who isn’t a leftist, pose a
serious threat to democracy. Especially if people elect them to public
office. Then radical billionaires like George Soros of Pierre Omidyar
convene sessions at the think tanks that breed those experts on how to
fight “populist” threats to democracy.
And those threats usually involve people democratically voting for candidates who aren’t Democrats.
That’s also known as populism, which the media portrays as the next worst thing to organized religion.
But
if there’s anything less democratic than a Nazi-collaborating
billionaire convening Ivy League grads to discuss how to stop people
from voting for candidates they disapprove of, it would have to involve
the Castro family. It’s always the people and institutions who are the
real threat to democracy who bluster about the threat to democracy. But
how better to threaten democracy than in the name of democracy?
After
generations of elites declaring class warfare on behalf of the poor by
advocating for the elimination of the middle class, the elites switched
to calling for the elimination of free elections in order to protect and
fortify democracy from the people going to the polls. The exciting new
version of democracy involves elites paying ballot harvesters to find
the votes to elect the politicians they support.
This twisted
version of privately-funded elections has the same relationship to
democracy as Doordash and UbetEats do to home-cooked meals. Or to the
other elite project of replacing women with men in the name of feminism.
Just think of the new privately funded and publicly manipulated
elections as the democratic equivalent of Steve showing up to the female
swim team with a pink bow in his hair.
Just because it ‘identifies’ as democracy doesn’t mean it’s anything more that oligarchy in drag.
Threats
to democracy don’t just happen in America. Every time a conservative
party wins an election in Europe, Australia, Canada or even Pitcairn
Island, it’s a threat to democracy. In Israel, the media is warning that
the plans of the new democratically elected conservative government to
allow democratically elected legislatures to occasionally overrule the
decisions of a high court whose members are democratically chosen by the
court is a threat to democracy.
Our media and theirs have
sympathetically reported on “pro-democracy” protests by activists
wearing the red shirts of Marxist organizations and waving the terrorist
flags of the PLO whose leader, Mahmoud Abbas, was last elected almost
two decades ago. Now that’s real democracy for you.
Much as the
Left has redefined free speech to mean censorship, censorship to mean
schools not handing graphic sex novels to 10-year-olds, feminism to mean
denying the existence of women, and science to mean anti-technology
cults convinced that technology is destroying the planet, it has
redefined democracy to mean the elimination of elections, not to mention
the political opposition.
Democracy as a practice is being
forced to make way for democracy as a value. Like the difference between
science as a value and as a practice, democracy as a value
impersonates, hollows out and finally nullifies the practice of
democracy as a threat to the value of democracy. Transforming a practice
into a value identifies it with an ideology. And makes maintaining the
power of that ideology becomes more important than the practice of
science, democracy or anything else.
The purpose of power, as a dead white Englishman named Orwell once observed, is power.
Every
system, no matter how authoritarian, claims to be rooted in the same
noble ideals as democracy as a value: the welfare of the people, the
stability of society and the upholding of our standards.
The
“threat to democracy” agitprop is fundamentally no different than the
agitprops that the USSR, Nazi Germany and Communist China justified
their respective tyrannies. Suppressing democracy in the name of
democracy, the freedom of mankind, the will of the people, or national
greatness are just variations on the same excuse.
The easiest way
to spot a real threat to democracy is to find the nearest expert
warning of threats to democracy. His solution to those threats will
invariably involve restrictions on speech, centralized control over
elections, and targeted ballot harvesting to find enough votes to
nullify actual voters.
According to him, just letting people
speak their minds and vote is a threat to democracy because then people
like him, who truly believe in democracy, won’t be able to maintain a
monopoly on the marketplace of ideas and will occasionally run the risk
of losing elections.
And then people might be able to democratically decide who is the real threat to democracy.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
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