Saving Democracy by Eliminating Elections

Sometimes you have to kill democracy to save democracy.

“What we are seeing right now is the all-out assault on democracy,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold claimed in 2021.

“Everything we do every single day to ensure the American people can elect, freely choose their election officials,” the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State held forth in 2022. “We believe that democracy literally is on the ballot.”

In 2023, democracy is no longer on the ballot in Colorado because Griswold, who had spent every single year warning about an “assault on democracy”, launched an actual assault on democracy to ensure that people in Colorado would not be able to freely vote in elections.

After Colorado’s Democrat justices ruled that, on their say-so, former President Trump couldn’t appear on the ballot in Colorado, the state’s GOP proposed to move to a caucus system.

And Griswold responded by warning that the Colorado GOP couldn’t change its own primary so that voters can’t actually vote for the candidate they choose, only those that Democrats choose.

But as the Mills Brothers sang, “you always hurt the one you love.” And sometimes you love democracy so much that you have to kill it to save democracy from itself.

Some Democrats define any opposition as an attack on democracy. And when they end democracy, they’re really “upholding democracy” so high up so that the voters can’t get their grubby fingers on it.

Secretary of State Griswold had previously described Republican bans on ballot harvesting as an “assault on democracy”, challenging election results as a plot to “destroy American democracy” and questioning the behavior of hyper-partisan election officials like herself as an “all-out assault on democracy.”

Everything she doesn’t like, according to Griswold, is an attack on democracy.

She claimed that candidates asking for recounts is an attack on democracy because it makes life harder for her. And “we have to make election administration work for election officials. Part of the attack on democracy is making it so that good people step down.”

Democracy has to work for Democrat election officials. Not so much the voters.

Griswold claimed that a lawsuit by Judicial Watch alleging that she had failed to comply with the National Voter Registration Act was, you guessed it, an “attack on democracy.”

So what is actually ending democracy in Colorado? Obviously it’s defending democracy.

“A group of Colorado voters is pushing back against Donald Trump’s assault on democracy – arguing he should be banned from the state’s ballot,” is how MSNBC framed her interview.

Secretary of State Griswold told the leftist cable news network that, “we are in the middle of the worst attack on democracy that our nation has seen in recent times”, by which she did not mean her own actions, but new House Speaker Mike Johnson: “a known election denier that tried to thwart Americans’ vote in choosing their next president of the United States.”

This was coming from a woman who was on MSNBC to discuss her own efforts to “thwart Americans’ vote in choosing their next president of the United States.”

If Irony isn’t dead, it’s probably also guilty of an assault on democracy.

Over in California’s war on democracy for democracy, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis urged officials to “explore every legal option to remove former President Donald Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot” as part of “protecting the fundamental pillars of democracy.”

The fundamental pillars of democracy can be summed up as not letting Americans vote.

After 8 years of hysterical claims that democracy was at risk, the democracy shouters have begun openly undoing the most public form of democracy at the ballot box. Unsatisfied with rigging elections behind the scenes, tainting voter rolls, incentivizing mass voter fraud and illegal voting by changing election rules, suing over every race they didn’t win while criminalizing election challenges to those they did win, they’ve moved on to banning the opposition.

It’s not just Trump.

In Oregon, Democrats have barred much of of the Republican State Senate delegation from running for reelection using the union and billionaire donor backed Measure 113 which they hailed as an effort to stop the “subversion of democracy”.

When the opposition is defined as the enemies of democracy, ending elections also ends the “subversion of democracy” and then democracy goes smoothly without any actual opposition.

The war on democracy in the name of democracy is in full swing.

The States United Democracy Center promises that it is “holding democracy violators accountable” by disbarring lawyers who engage in election challenges.

Free Speech For People has been arguing that Democrat state election officials should bar not only Trump, but “any other elected officials who helped facilitate or otherwise engaged in the insurrection” and they define that as those who “aided or gave comfort to the insurrectionists.”

There have already been specific proposals to remove two elected House members from Congress, but it’s a wide net that could easily encompass much of the Republican Party.

After the Chinese Communists suppressed the “insurrection” by Christians, liberals, conservatives and other non-Communist Hong Kong citizens, they disenfranchised much of the population, replacing open elections with “patriot only elections” in which only regime lackeys are allowed to run for office. Most people in Hong Kong no longer bother to vote.

Some Democrats seem intent on doing the same thing in the United States.

The lovers of democracy really like the idea of democracy in the abstract. The only part of democracy they have a problem with is that the people they disagree with can also play. They believe that democracy could really reach its potential if there were no Republicans in the race.

The trouble with democracy is that after the speeches, there are elections. Get rid of the elections and democracy will, like a Saturday Night Live political skit or a John Oliver monologue, become a safe space in which they have nothing to fear from the outcome.

The war on free and fair elections is being waged in the name of democracy against democracy.

But it’s all in how you define democracy.

“Blocking Trump from the ballot isn’t an affront to democracy. It’s the essence of it,” an editorial argues. ”Blocking Trump from the presidency is precisely what democracy demands, and failure to do so would be a grave betrayal of democratic values.”

Democratic values and the essence of democracy, as opposed to the practice of it, are very different things. The things that leftists claim to value invariably collide with their values.

When they are in the opposition, they claim to value free speech, a free press and the rights of the minority, but as they gain power, the things they value clash with their values of having unrestricted power to be able to remake the nation and society in line with their politics.

They claim to value processes, but when push comes to shove all they really value is power.

Democracy rests on free and fair elections, but that’s incompatible with democratic values which is what Democrats actually want to accomplish. Democracy becomes an abstraction. It has values and an essence, it even “demands” things which are the same things they demand.

Eventually democratic values demand that democracy cease to operate to protect their power.

Anyone who opposes that is an “enemy of democracy” who is carrying out an “assault on democracy” and the only way to protect democracy is to end democracy.

But sometimes you have to destroy democracy to save 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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