In business, they say the customer is always right. This was long true in politics too. No one dared to attack voters, even when they supported an opponent. The voters were all Americans who had a right to their own opinions. Those on the margins were always in play.
This was one of the salutary customs of American political life. Such respect for the voters and their collective judgment supported the peaceful transfer of power.
This is why all the recent celebration of Our Democracy™ rings false. Apparently, Our Democracy™ means something different than the literal words. When invoked by President Joe Biden and his supporters, it equates to “good government,” an idea more about their preferred substantive ends like abortion rights and gay marriage than a celebration of the procedures through which leaders are chosen.
While ordinary democracy is mostly about elections, Our Democracy™ includes management of those elections and control of the flow of information to prevent voters from selecting dangerous outsiders like Donald Trump.
When Trump won the presidential election in 2016, there was no celebration of democracy. Indeed, the media, Hillary, and many of the people now singing the praises of Our Democracy™ went into overdrive talking about Russian interference, the supposed scourge of disinformation, and the dark heart of Red State Americans. They concocted this critique to obscure Trump’s democratic mandate.
The left typically calls the results of a democratic election “populism” when it doesn’t go the way they want. Like “isolationism,” this is one of those incantations about a supposed political evil where the nature of that evil is never really established. Populism was bad because it caused a glitch in the system they thought they fully controlled. The political class was surprised because the demographic changes they engineered through immigration were supposed to guarantee the left retained permanent power.
From the beginning, the entire system has been allergic to Trump. Much of it comes down to taste and style. Trump does not talk or think like the managerial political class, and he does not respect what they deem to be sacred. He is an avatar for the allegedly uncouth, hateful, racist, and backward people of the hinterlands. Trump is correct when he says, “They are coming after me, because I am fighting for you.”
Anti-Trump rhetoric has always existed alongside rhetoric demonizing his supporters. Biden’s creepy speech in Philadelphia attacking “MAGA Americans” in 2022 put the demonization of voters on prominent display. But it goes deeper. It also includes the 2016 campaign to harass those who attended Trump rallies and Hillary’s revealing description of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”
For opponents, Trump voters were never just wrong, mistaken, confused, bamboozled, possessed of different values, or simply fellow Americans. They were backwards, racist, malevolent, hateful, and unpatriotic. They were collectively guilty and deserved to be collectively punished.
The problem is worse than anonymous rhetoric on Twitter and the content of Biden’s speeches. It includes doubling down on January 6 prosecutions, attempts to keep Trump off the ballot, and stretching the law to pursue narrow partisan purposes, such as the recent prosecution of a whistleblower doctor who exposed illegal transgender procedures in a Houston hospital or using FBI SWAT teams to go after pro-life activists.
In short, Biden’s frequent talk of Our Democracy™ is a smokescreen. He and the broader left have no faith in the electorate, voting, or majority rule, as well as absolute hatred for at least a plurality of voters.
This is the reason for all of the handwringing over disinformation, misinformation and populism. This is the reason they want to reengineer the American people through mass immigration. Biden and the governing class believe that government should be left up to the professionals and that the American people need to be persuaded, managed, cajoled, revised, and, if necessary, forced to ratify the professionals’ desires.
Admittedly, the right has become more contemptuous and hostile to leftist voters as well. But the Republicans in power have not wielded their power against individual opponents to the same extent as Biden and the Democrats. For example, Trump threatened Hilary with jail in 2016, while Biden and his surrogates actually delivered against Trump.
In what may prove to be the start of a “war of all against all,” there is more and more talk by Republicans of retaliation, including partisan prosecutions of Biden and his people if Trump wins in November. We are fast becoming a nation of enemies.
We do know for sure that a second Biden term will be ugly. The Democrats will be out for blood. Up to the present, they have violated numerous norms by going against Trump and his lieutenants, but there is still some fear of accountability in November and thus some restraint. If they can figure out a way to rig this election—in which Biden faces more headwinds than 2020—they will be completely emboldened and unrestrained.
The left-in-power manifests a belief that they can keep a lid on discontent by prosecuting and intimidating their opponents. Perhaps they are right. While I am loathe to admit it, the draconian response to January 6 has done a lot to deter organic, right-wing street activism. There has been no MAGA equivalent of the large street protests seen recently in Brazil and France. There has certainly been no right-wing iteration of the 2020 Summer of Riots.
In other words, the age of revolution may be over. People are too wedded to their lifestyles, safety, and sense of powerlessness to do anything other than vote and then shrug in the face of stolen elections and creeping tyranny.
That said, history is full of surprises. If the left solidifies its grip on power and gives people no peaceful options for change, what other choices have they really left our angry and very well-armed population?
