By Daniel Greenfield August 11, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog
Since 2016, the Democrats defined their primary political purpose not around agenda items like abortion rights, fighting racism, unlimited immigration or gay marriage, but saving democracy.
Who did democracy have to be defended from? Republicans.
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Investigations, indictments, lawsuits and election rigging are just ways to defend democracy.
The
central issue is no longer any individual point of disagreement on
taxes, abortion or anything else: it’s the total illegitimacy of
Republicans and the threat that they represent.
Obama was the
last Dem presidential candidate to have campaigned on something other
than defending democracy from Republicans, but he was the one who
ushered it in with Russiagate. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, both
times, campaigned on the extreme threat that Republicans pose to
democracy. The serial investigations and indictments of Trump that have
stretched on for over seven years represent the fundamental
transformation of our system of elections.
Within less than a
decade the intelligence community, domestic law enforcement,
prosecutors, lawyers and nonprofits had been mobilized in a massive
scheme to sue, investigate, and prosecute their political opponents. The
Trump investigations and prosecutions form the most obvious examples,
but not the only ones, of this new identity of defending democracy.
And
in the process democracy has ceased to be something that happens at the
ballot box, but now involves the national security state, the judiciary
and experts who will determine if actual democracy is taking place or a
vast conspiracy that must be stopped with eavesdropping, FBI raids,
covert investigations and mass internet censorship similar to that of
China.
Elections are now accompanied by dirty tricks campaigns
that don’t just involve campaign operatives like the Fusion GPS gang
behind the Steele dossier at the beating heart of Russiagate, but
intelligence agencies, the FBI, and federal and local prosecutors.
Describing such activities as mere abuses of power misses the point.
This is not JFK dispatching RFK to go after his political enemies: it’s a
political movement whose core argument is that its political opponents
are subversives, criminals and threats to national security who must be
locked up.
Russiagate was initially performed in secret, but the
investigations and indictments since, from Mueller to Jack Smith, have
taken place in broad daylight. The public spectacle is a core part of
the political argument. The endless show trials are not just a tactic,
they’re a political identity.
Democrats have become the party
that protects democracy by locking up their opponents. Trending hashtag
movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have come and gone while
the only consistent movement to endure has been the rise of a political
police state. Unprofitable media outlets like CNN and the Washington
Post have boomed from the investigations. books have been published in
mass quantities and political personalities have been born out of it.
Identity politics still thrives but it is a cultural organizing principle, not a political one.
By
branding as the defenders of democracy, Democrats avoid having to
define what they truly stand for. In the identity politics era,
Democrats ran not for putting pornographic books in school or burning
down entire neighborhoods in violent race riots, but against
“intolerance”. Now they do not run to federalize elections and end any
political dissent, but to protect democracy from Republicans.
And who will defend democracy from the defenders of democracy?
Defending
democracy is the deeply undemocratic idea that there is something
undemocratic about the way that elections are practiced today. Democrats
claim that they want more people involved in the political process when
what they really want is to get the wrong ones out of it. That’s why
there have been all the investigations of Trump, the censorship of
social media and the rise of political gatekeeping. The trouble with
democracy is that sometimes the wrong people win. The purpose of
defending democracy is to make sure that can never happen.
The
defenders of democracy are actually defending oligarchy from democracy.
They define democracy as principles and values rather than free, fair
and open elections. Given a chance, they uphold the principles of
democracy, which invariably happen to consist of their own principles,
by rigging elections and suppressing political debate and free and fair
elections.
When democracy is defined, as it is in California and
Washington D.C., among many other hyper-leftist places, as the absence
of Republicans holding elected office, then eliminating the opposition
and seizing total power becomes the new exciting form of democracy. Much
as in the USSR, Cuba or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the
less meaningful choices people have, the more democratic the elections
are. Real democracy is a process while the defenders of democracy are
after a preferred outcome which is the opposite of actual democracy.
To
make the end of democracy seem like the epitome of democracy, leftists
concoct a political threat, real or imagined, that threatens democracy.
By making Trump or any Republican seem like a threat to democracy, they
make the presence of democracy into a threat to democracy. And
eliminating democracy becomes the only way to save democracy from
democracy.
Ever since the defenders got started, elections are
less trusted and less secure than ever. Political instability has
increased leading to a downgrade and every organization, government,
corporate and nonprofit, that had gotten involved in defending
democracy, from the FBI to Facebook, has been tainted. Defenders of
democracy argue that a crisis of trust means that they are needed more
than ever to end the mistrust by silencing the mistrustful.
This
cycle is not a democratic bug, it’s a totalitarian feature. The
defenders of democracy are breaking the system, the culture and the
marketplace of ideas to eliminate any alternatives.
The Democrats
have rebranded their party identity as a primal struggle to end any
political choices beyond, as in most urban areas, a choice between two
flavors of lefties.
The party of democracy has become the anti-democratic party.
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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