In Historians privately warn Biden that America’s democracy is teetering, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Tyler Pager reported in early August for The Washington Post:
President Joe Biden paused last week, during one of the busiest stretches of his presidency, for a nearly two-hour private history lesson from a group of academics who raised alarms about the dire condition of democracy at home and abroad.
One person familiar with the exchange said the conversation was mostly a way for Biden to hear and think about the larger context in which his tenure is unfolding. He did not make any major pronouncements or discuss his plans for the future.
“A lot of the conversation was about the larger context of the contest between democratic values and institutions and the trends toward autocracy globally,” the person said.
Most of the experts in attendance have been outspoken in recent months about the threat they see to the American democratic project, after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, the continued denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results and the efforts of election deniers to seek state office.
Note, first, that the Jan. 6 attack is packaged in with the “denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results.”
But do they belong together? No. Outrageous as the continuing 2020 election denial is, the freedom to scrutinize and criticize election processes and results is vital to electoral integrity. If fraud or irregularities are suspected, it is the duty and right of the observer to speak up. Now, the Republicans who still question the 2020 results have been proven wrong time and again, and should be condemned for continuing the charade. But they in and of themselves are not a “threat to democracy.” The continuing “denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results” is not of the same nature as violently storming the Capitol building, as overblown as a threat to the democratic process the storming is portrayed as. Republicans’ continuing denials are a political tactic, just as Democrats’ continuing claim of the election denials as a “threat to democracy” is a political tactic. Our democratic process is not under threat because some Republican still think the 2020 election was “stolen.”
What’s genuinely threatening is thart, in the whole article, there is not one mention of “the American Republic.” Yet our free republic certainly is under threat. And it’s coming from the Left in the form of their denial of inalienable individual rights.The Democratic Party is perfectly content with authoritarianism, as long as it’s democratic authoritarianism; i.e., imposed by elected officials and voting majorities.
And then they have the nerve to channel Alexander Hamilton:
[Sean] Wilentz, prizewinning author of “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln,” has also voiced alarm in recent months about the state of the country. “We’re on the verge of what Hamilton in ‘The Federalist’ called government by brute force,” Wilentz told the Hill last month.
The Founders were well aware of the power of democracy to slip into “government by brute force.” If Wilentz had actually read the Federalist Papers, he would have known that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution were concerned about the potential rise of three forms of tyranny, the one, the few, and the many; in other words, autocracy, aristocracy, and democracy. As James Madison wrote in Federalist #47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
And full-blown, total democracy is fundamental to the Democratic Party. From its founding in 1828, the Democratic Party has reinterpreted the American Founding as a democracy, not a limited republic. Consistent with democracy, the new party supported slavery as long as it is imposed democratically -- i.e., either unilaterally across America by representatives or by a popular referendum at the state level.
They haven’t changed their stripes. It still holds, as Joe Biden has declared in a Georgia speech, that “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” This premise is not a miss-speak. Biden’s Justice Department has sued Georgia based on the same premise. Said Attorney General Merrick Garland, "The right of all eligible citizens to vote is the central pillar of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow." “We are still, at our core, a democracy,” Biden lectured in his MAGA speech, reiterating the his reactionary assertion that “the most fundamental freedom in this country [is] the freedom to vote and have your vote counted”—essentially repudiating the Founder’s Declaration of the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as most fundamental. A society in which all of our rights, including the right not to be held in bondage, are subject to a vote is not a free society. It is a totalitarian state, and 100% contrary to the fundamental American principle of individual rights as inalienable, meaning outside the scope of any electoral power to violate.
I have said that the Democratic Party and the Left generally is the gravest threat to Americanism today, at least in the medium term. The Democratic Party is what its name explicitly declares. It is anti-American Republic. It is a democracy party through and through. It is and has always been the central domestic threat to the American Republic.
RELATED READING:
Joe Biden—the Real Protégé of Jefferson Davis
Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right.
America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson
America; Democracy or Republic or Both--Why it Matters
Senator Mike Lee is Right: America ‘is not a Democracy’
Constitutional Republicanism: A Counter-Argument to Barbara Rank’s Ode to Democracy
Jesse Jackson’s Big Lie: ‘American Democracy is Under Siege’.
Rights are Inalienable, Not an Electoral Privilege
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