Unpacking the Conspiracy of ‘Saving Democracy’

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. ” – H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

You don’t have to agree with all Mencken’s views to appreciate the poignant message of power hunger corrupting good intentions as a metaphysical affliction facing all mankind in his famous quote. The same kind of dialectic operates in much of today’s political and cultural discourse. Advancing diversity morphs into viewpoint exclusion and racial discrimination. Safeguarding equality is hijacked by ensuring equal outcomes. Protecting vulnerable individuals on the basis of gender identity enhances the patriarchy.

Reflective of an empty dogma devoid of academic rigor, the left’s pandering and moral panic about democracy have little to do with democracy.

Straying from Democracy

The Harris-Walz 2024 campaign emails me at least twice a day to help them fight for our country and make history. I surmise that I got on their list after signing up for a gun control nonprofit years ago, in my previous life as a raging progressive. The other day, Harris wrote me to rally support for defeating “Trump and his MAGA extremism” as they are “a threat to our democracy.”

Like all the other Democratic candidates emerging onto the national scene in recent years, Kamala Harris fancies herself a savior of democracy and defender of the American Dream, even though she has little to no record to show for it. But in an age when collective amnesia overshadows legacy media, ideological conformity is required for polite society, and over half of our adult population have literacy below a 6th-grade level, facts and records matter not. Indulging in the rhetoric of “Saving Democracy” is evidence enough for party loyalists. As for the vast swamp of followers with contempt before investigation, the “Saving Democracy” slogan is self-evident priori, which stops them from pursuing this issue of national importance, the issue is what it means to have and keep a democracy.

Considering their petulant campaigns on abolishing the Electoral College, dissing the Constitution, packing the courts, and “expanding” voting rights, leftists have effectively conflated democracy and majoritarian rule. This intentional bait-switch scheme is antithetical to the American spirit and established conceptions of democracy.

The liberal democratic model that governs our nation requires substantively more than the left’s rhetoric of “voter participation.” From a procedural viewpoint, a sound democracy is established and maintained by a series of political processes, including free and fair elections, legitimate forms of representation, and accountability mechanisms. A tendency to homologate democracy with voting creates an electoral fallacy in which the critical roles played by civil society, political leadership, the rule of law, and liberal economic institutions are ignored.

Following the classic, idealist notions of democracy coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville, a substantive definition is more concerned with the long-term stated goals of democracy to promote political equality, civil liberties, and various civil, social, and economic rights that are in the interests of the governed. A substantively robust democracy, argue Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, is:

[A] system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representative.

At a minimum, a procedurally viable democracy, according to mid-20^th-century political scientist Joseph Schumpeter, is an “institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.” The late Yale professor Robert Dahl expanded on this minimalist procedure by theorizing eight institutional guarantees for an ideal democracy (“polyarchy” in Dahl’s definition):

[C]onstitutionally vested decision making by the government, frequent and fairly conducted elections, universal suffrage, citizen rights to run for elective offices, citizen rights to freely express, citizen rights to freely express, citizen rights to seek put alternative sources of information, citizen rights to form independent associations or organization.

It is, therefore, unclear how the Democratic party platform of late can sustain democracy procedurally or substantively. After all, the party machinery routinely demonizes political opponents as “threats to democracy,” crack down on politically incorrect views via proliferating speech codes, and frames electoral competition in “us-versus-them,” zero-sum hyperboles.

A Constitutional Republic vs. Impulsive Democracy

In America, the law is the king. Our Constitution, the supreme law of the land, offers a practical blueprint for the experiment of self-rule, the world’s longest and most successful one. Due to our country’s enormous size and multi-faceted diversity ethnically, religiously, and politically, the United States is governed as a federal republic. This intentional design is to preserve a fledgling experiment and maintain extricated balances of power. It accommodates the popular vote in national elections on the one hand and individual states’ autonomy to retain police power and regulate citizens’ “health, welfare, and morals” on the other hand.

The institutional design of American government is rightfully nuanced and disciplined, defying the left’s demagogic simplification of “One person, one vote.” At the national level, while a majority vote establishes and legitimizes the House of Representatives, ostensibly the most democratic institution in the federal government, the Electoral College process decides the presidency. The Supreme Court retains its independence from partisanship and public passions by insulating from majoritarian rule. Furthermore, voters of each state directly elect U.S. senators, not in proportion to their population size, but in equal terms of two per state, which is to prevent lawmaking from populism-prone national majority—versus state majority.

With this being said, America’s built-in constitutional defense against impulsive democracy is further proof against the left’s “Saving Democracy” demagoguery. The U.S. Constitution contains necessary checks on democracy, not to obstruct it, but to restrain it, not to oppose popular rule, but to discipline public action. Aside from the tripartite structure for national and state governments, constitutionally vested checks and balances include the requirement of supermajorities for constitutional amendments. Often being accused of being “anti-democratic,” supermajorities prevent a bare majority from rewriting laws in controversial ways without broadening support.

Tocqueville warned about the “despotism of public opinion” and the “tyranny of the majority” as hindrances to liberal democracy. At one point in America’s not-so-distant past, economic self-interest, cultural inertia, and prejudice had driven a congressional majority to legalize slavery on the basis of “popular sovereignty” through Kansas-Nebraska. In that case, the popular vote was abused to justify a systemic assault on natural rights and the moral priority of slave liberation. Political leaders are also urged to discipline themselves with the principle of mutual deference, as introduced by President Abraham Lincoln. This means the mutual deference of minorities to the rule of the majority and of the majority for the integrity of the minority.

Would a party that eagerly pursues racial divisions in spite of Americans’ growing consensus against it, morally hijacks the majority by normalizing fringe identity politics, and yet relentlessly persecutes heterodox opinions have the discipline to guard against impulsive democracy? I think not.

In reality, the term “democracy” is used in a staggering number of ways and has possibly been overstretched by both well-intentioned believers and bad-faith actors. In this sense, “pro-democracy” leftists behave quite like their peers in the Chinese Communist Party, who shamelessly market the Chinese political regime as a “Chinese-socialist democracy” writ large and mandate K-12 classes on Marxist-Leninist-Maoist political thought. Illiberal leftists that celebrate “cancel culture” and target dissent as threats to democracy are hallowing out the word into a rhetorical symbol ready to be weaponized for partisanship.

While both sides of the political aisle carry out attacks on free speech, the left nowadays enjoy a disproportionate representation in this area. Not only do adherents to the progressive ideology regularly justify exceptions to free expression, such as in the bizarre case when a first grader writing “any life” under “Black Lives Matter” in a class drawing was punished, but they also project their illiberal impulses onto conservatives by way of gaslighting. Although the woke army has launched a litany of attacks on meritocracy, constitutional neutrality, equal rights, free speech, and the rule of law, the conservatives are blamed for endangering democracy, according to all speakers at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

Alas, with enough fear-mongering and political pandering, the left’s “Saving Democracy” project may even turn into a Maoist conspiracy, in which a lofty ideal is grafted to consolidate power and exert control.

Image by Victoria Pickering on Flickr