Democracy is a Threat to Democracy

Democracy, like the polar bears, the bald eagle and the 99-cent pizza slice, is threatened.

We know that’s true because the media, the least democratic body outside of North Korea, tells us this all the time. And we know that it must be true because apart from its daily panics over some political, medical, environmental or economic crisis that will later turn out to be imaginary or overblown, the media has an unbroken track record of honesty and truth that almost equals that of Bill Clinton.

So who better to warn us about the threat to democracy than an undemocratic body whose membership disproportionately tilts toward a handful of elite schools and who get their marching orders from major corporations, who have been caught making up stuff so many times that they make George Santos seem like the soul of integrity. (This hasn’t stopped the media from outraged posturing that a member of Congress who is not named Joe Biden would dare to build his career on a pack of crazy lies.)

America isn’t a democracy, but if we were the media would be in the running for the gold medal of democracy threats. The media ruthlessly interferes in elections by acting as the attack dogs of a partisan political party, without ever officially registering their platforms as PACs, spewing the most nakedly brazen lies while calling for the censorship of their political opponents for spreading “disinformation”.

Between its pre-election hit jobs and rigged polls, the media grotesquely distorts elections in a way that no amount of “disinformation” on social media could possibly hope to compete with in a century.

The vox populi, in the form of surveys, regularly ranks the media’s trust rating below that of the love child of Richard Nixon and Hillary Clinton. The media might have tried to rig them, but even Chicago doesn’t have a single dead ballot harvester who would say a single good thing about the media.

But it’s always the least democratic forces that warn of threats to democracy.

The media brings on experts, a group even less representative than the media, to explain that Republicans and anyone who isn’t a leftist, pose a serious threat to democracy. Especially if people elect them to public office. Then radical billionaires like George Soros of Pierre Omidyar convene sessions at the think tanks that breed those experts on how to fight “populist” threats to democracy.

And those threats usually involve people democratically voting for candidates who aren’t Democrats.

That’s also known as populism, which the media portrays as the next worst thing to organized religion.

But if there’s anything less democratic than a Nazi-collaborating billionaire convening Ivy League grads to discuss how to stop people from voting for candidates they disapprove of, it would have to involve the Castro family. It’s always the people and institutions who are the real threat to democracy who bluster about the threat to democracy. But how better to threaten democracy than in the name of democracy?

After generations of elites declaring class warfare on behalf of the poor by advocating for the elimination of the middle class, the elites switched to calling for the elimination of free elections in order to protect and fortify democracy from the people going to the polls. The exciting new version of democracy involves elites paying ballot harvesters to find the votes to elect the politicians they support.

This twisted version of privately-funded elections has the same relationship to democracy as Doordash and UbetEats do to homecooked meals. Or to the other elite project of replacing women with men in the name of feminism. Just think of the new privately funded and publicly manipulated elections as the democratic equivalent of Steve showing up to the female swim team with a pink bow in his hair.

Just because it ‘identifies’ as democracy doesn’t mean it’s anything more that oligarchy in drag.

Threats to democracy don’t just happen in America. Every time a conservative party wins an election in Europe, Australia, Canada or even Pitcairn Island, it’s a threat to democracy. In Israel, the media is warning that the plans of the new democratically elected conservative government to allow democratically elected legislatures to occasionally overrule the decisions of a high court whose members are democratically chosen by the court is a threat to democracy.

Our media and theirs have sympathetically reported on “pro-democracy” protests by activists wearing the red shirts of Marxist organizations and waving the terrorist flags of the PLO whose leader, Mahmoud Abbas, was last elected almost two decades ago. Now that’s real democracy for you.

Much as the Left has redefined free speech to mean censorship, censorship to mean schools not handing graphic sex novels to 10-year-olds, feminism to mean denying the existence of women, and science to mean anti-technology cults convinced that technology is destroying the planet, it has redefined democracy to mean the elimination of elections, not to mention the political opposition.

Democracy as a practice is being forced to make way for democracy as a value. Like the difference between science as a value and as a practice, democracy as a value impersonates, hollows out and finally nullifies the practice of democracy as a threat to the value of democracy. Transforming a practice into a value identifies it with an ideology. And makes maintaining the power of that ideology becomes more important than the practice of science, democracy or anything else.

The purpose of power, as a dead white Englishman named Orwell once observed, is power.

Every system, no matter how authoritarian, claims to be rooted in the same noble ideals as democracy as a value: the welfare of the people, the stability of society and the upholding of our standards.

The “threat to democracy” agitprop is fundamentally no different than the agitprops that the USSR. Nazi Germany and Communist China justified their respective tyrannies. Suppressing democracy in the name of democracy, the freedom of mankind, the will of the people, or national greatness are just variations on the same excuse.

The easiest way to spot a real threat to democracy is to find the nearest expert warning of threats to democracy. His solution to those threats will invariably involve restrictions on speech, centralized control over elections, and targeted ballot harvesting to find enough votes to nullify actual voters.

According to him, just letting people speak their minds and vote is a threat to democracy because then people like him, who truly believe in democracy, won’t be able to maintain a monopoly on the marketplace of ideas and will occasionally run the risk of losing elections.

And then people might be able to democratically decide who is the real threat to democracy.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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