Democrats Don’t Actually Believe Democracy Is at Stake in the Midterms

Having scrabbled around desperately for a sufficiently alarmist closing message, the Democratic Party and its many acolytes in the press have at long last settled upon the proposition that if voters wish to preserve American democracy going forward, they must usher in a period of sustained one-party rule. Scribbling this week in the pages of the Washington Post, Max Boot neatly summed up the ruse: November’s elections, Boot submitted in earnest, “are actually a referendum on whether you favor the continuation of democracy in America.” If you do, he concluded, you are obliged to deliver every office in the country to the party Boot happens to prefer. Anything else is undemocratic.

I shall leave it to the philosophers to unpack the many paradoxes that are contained within the extraordinary contention that if the Republicans receive more votes than the Democrats, “democracies die,” and instead note just how little those who are advancing this argument seem to believe their own spin, or to comprehend their own deleterious roles in the evil they now decry. Donald Trump’s post-election perfidy was, indeed, unique in scale. But it was not unique in type — and, as the evidence increasingly shows, Americans understand that better than the Democratic Party seems to believe. Why are voters split on the question of which party represents a “major threat” to democracy? Because, unlike the media they loathe, they are capable of remembering a world prior to January 6, 2021, and they are aware that the party now casting itself as democracy’s defender has a long and undistinguished history of casting aspersions on each and every part of America’s longstanding constitutional order.

Having scrabbled around desperately for a sufficiently alarmist closing message, the Democratic Party and its many acolytes in the press have at long last settled upon the proposition that if voters wish to preserve American democracy going forward, they must usher in a period of sustained one-party rule. Scribbling this week in the pages of the Washington Post, Max Boot neatly summed up the ruse: November’s elections, Boot submitted in earnest, “are actually a referendum on whether you favor the continuation of democracy in America.” If you do, he concluded, you are obliged to deliver every office in the country to the party Boot happens to prefer. Anything else is undemocratic.

I shall leave it to the philosophers to unpack the many paradoxes that are contained within the extraordinary contention that if the Republicans receive more votes than the Democrats, “democracies die,” and instead note just how little those who are advancing this argument seem to believe their own spin, or to comprehend their own deleterious roles in the evil they now decry. Donald Trump’s post-election perfidy was, indeed, unique in scale. But it was not unique in type — and, as the evidence increasingly shows, Americans understand that better than the Democratic Party seems to believe. Why are voters split on the question of which party represents a “major threat” to democracy? Because, unlike the media they loathe, they are capable of remembering a world prior to January 6, 2021, and they are aware that the party now casting itself as democracy’s defender has a long and undistinguished history of casting aspersions on each and every part of America’s longstanding constitutional order.