You’ve heard it ad nauseam from liberals in the legacy media for months: a victory for former President Donald Trump in November would signal the “end of democracy” as we know it — if not the end of the world.
Talking heads on MSNBC’s Morning Joe fulminate daily over Trump’s allegedly anti-democratic designs. CNN anchors constantly repeat Trump’s out-of-context quote about being a dictator “on Day One” to frighten their fragile viewership. Elite legacy magazines publish breathless think-pieces with ominously understated headlines such as, “If Trump Wins” and “How Far Trump Would Go.” Disgraced neocon Never-Trumpers and Resistance™ retreads appear to spend most of their days recycling these links on X. “I’m alarmed,” the Bulwark’s Bill Kristol is fond of captioning in such posts.
It’s impossible to overstate the degree to which people have tuned out catastrophization of this kind from establishment Washington’s Chicken Littles. Every election of the last 20 years has been billed as “the most important election of our lifetime,” after all. The sky was supposed to fall by now — but it hasn’t.
In fact, little seems to change from cycle to cycle. No matter which party is in power, the debt grows, the middle class shrinks, and we all seem to hate each other a few ticks more.
The media’s hyperbole is done partly out of greed. Terror attracts eyeballs, after all. It always has and always will.
And it’s partly the natural consequence for a news media trapped in its own echo chamber. Rhetorical escalation is unavoidable in the absence of dissenting views. The sudden burst of loose talk about an impending “civil war” is the natural end of an insulated social group talking itself into a tizzy. It has no basis in reality. There are no reports of either red or blue states threatening secession and signing treaties with one another, no rise of rogue leaders or armed militias that could challenge the might of the U.S. military. And yet, headlines would have us believe the first shots have already been fired.
But the main cause behind the end-times-of-democracy prophesying in the liberal press is more cynical — and more ghoulish. The truth is they are fear mongering in order to survive. They’ve backed themselves into a corner with Trump. If he wins reelection in November and democracy doesn’t end — or worse, if it thrives — the jig is up. They will have lost the defining conflict of the era, and will have lost it for good.
In late April, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went on a podcast and warned America that Trump wants to “kill his opposition, imprison his opposition, drive journalists and others into exile, rule without any check or balance.” It’s worth wondering what becomes of her credibility if, say, Trump wins — and then no one dies. Or what happens to the anti-Trump media if the “dictator on Day One” turns out to have been just a reference to a Day One flurry of executive orders, the kind to which we are accustomed? Or if the “bloodbath” nonsense really was just a comment Trump made about the potential loss of the manufacturing industry? Or if “fascism” never materializes?
What reason would even the most loyal liberal have for listening to the likes of Joe Scarborough and Bill Kristol ever again?
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Of course, it bears mentioning that Trump’s preternatural lack of discipline provides endless fodder for the end-of-democracy preppers, and that this race is only close because of Trump’s uniquely malformed personality.
I don’t know if he’s going to win in November. But if he does, I don’t believe it will be the end of democracy in America for the simple reason that I believe in the genius of our founding and the wisdom of our citizens. If only the “end of democracy” crowd could say the same.
Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.