This election is different, the Democrats and the news media tell us. It’s not just about which party wins — it’s about whether democracy itself survives!
Yawn, eye roll, gag.
I actually believe that former President Donald Trump is unqualified for the presidency in nearly unique ways, but it’s impossible to listen to the Democrats when they say that, considering what they’ve said in the past.
In 2012, when Mitt Romney was the Republican presidential nominee and John Boehner was the Republican House speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) closing message on the Democrats’ behalf was, “Democracy is on the ballot.”
This echoed the message of leading Democratic proxy groups. NAACP President Ben Jealous made his organization’s 2012 convention about the presidential election, saying, “With 120 days left until the election, we have a choice to make. We can allow this election … to be stolen in advance … or we can double down on democracy.” He also said, “There is no battle more important and urgent to the NAACP right now than the battle to preserve our democracy itself.”
In short, Jealous was arguing that a Romney win meant the end of democracy itself.
You may also recall that Joe Biden also said that Romney, as president, would reinstitute chattel slavery.
So when every liberal outlet and the Democrats say democracy is over if the Democrats don’t win, they are crying wolf for at least the fourth straight election.
An irony is that their main attack on Trump is he restored democracy to abortion: Trump’s Supreme Court nominees provided the margin for overturning Roe v. Wade, which allowed state lawmakers and voters to control abortion law.
It’s also obvious that powerful Democrats don’t really believe Trumpism spells the end of democracy because the Democratic Party regularly does everything it can to ensure that the Trumpiest-possible candidates are the Republican nominees.
Ross Douthat laid this bare in 2022, and he noted:
“You may believe that American democracy is threatened as at no other point since the Civil War, dear reader, but they do not. They are running a political operation in which the threat to democracy is leverage, used to keep swing voters onside without having to make difficult concessions to the center or the right.”
Also, Biden’s substantive attacks on Republicans, the claims that they are pursuing policies that undermine democracy, have consistently proven to be dishonest partisan propaganda.
Remember when he called Georgia’s voting reform an attack on democracy — no informed person actually believes that today, but it was useful get-out-the-vote pablum in the 2022 elections.
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Also, “the other guys are a threat to democracy” is a handy argument for Democrats who are working the refs, the news media and Big Tech, to get them to drop their pretenses of evenhandedness and open debate.
I have written dozens of times that Donald Trump is extraordinary in not appreciating the limits of power. The thing is, I have credibility on this topic, while the party that called Mitt Romney and John Boehner a threat to democracy does not.