Saving the world from democracy

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 06, 2024

When our children were young, we had a regular light-hearted morning routine. After breakfast I would head to my office, asking, “Do you know what I’m going to do today?” And the children—having been coached—would chorus: “Save the world from democracy.”

Our government is not a democracy—at least, not just a democracy. When he was asked what sort of government the Constitutional Convention had designed for us, Benjamin Franklin famously answered: “A republic—if you can keep it.”

This week the American people voted to keep it.

A democracy is a government of and by the people, and the US government fits that description. But a republic is a government of limited powers, and our constitutional framework emphasizes that feature as well. The great strength of the American system lies in the combination.

Aristotle taught that a republic tends to decline into a democracy, and a democracy declines into despotism. He reasoned that when the people throw off the constraints of limited government, they grow ever more anxious for new government benefits, and so more willing to give power to a leader who promises to deliver those benefits. But that leader, once firmly in power, finds that he no longer needs popular support, and so he becomes a despot.

During the last few weeks of the presidential campaign, a desperate Kamala Harris warned that the future of American democracy was at stake. She was right—but for the wrong reasons. The danger to our democracy—our republican democracy—was not a Trump dictatorship, but an arrogant liberal elite determined to enforce “woke” ideology on the country.

Trump, remember, had a track record. He had occupied the White House for four years, and during that term he had not tried to put his political opponents behind bars. The Biden administration, on the other hand, had unleashed a campaign of “lawfare” on Trump and his supporters. The Democratic leadership had jiggered the rules of the primary campaign to ensure that Biden would face no serious opposition, and then when his weakness became unmistakable, tossed out the rules altogether to put Harris in his place. Their willingness to bend the rule of law to suit their own political ends was manifest.

Still more ominously, once in power the zealots of the “woke” regime threw the full force of law-enforcement against their ideological enemies. Federal SWAT teams burst into the homes of pro-life activists to make arrests for alleged crimes that local authorities had already declined to prosecute. Elderly women were sent to jail for peaceful, prayerful protests at abortion clinics. Meanwhile truly violent criminals escaped prosecution; the regime was more worried about challenges to its ideology than threats to public safety.

The Harris campaign was obsessively focused on the notion that a Trump victory could undermine access to abortion. (And that obsession was altered not a whit by the shameful Trump-Vance desertion of the longstanding Republican pro-life stand.) Her supporters shrieked about alleged dangers; one liberal commentator tearfully wondered whether his daughters would be able to exterminate his grandchildren. All this at a time when the abortion lobby was pouring tens of millions of dollars into campaigns—mostly successfully—to have the access to abortion enshrined (I use the word advisedly) in state constitutions. There was no existential threat to legal abortion on the political horizon. But the vanguard of the sexual revolution could not tolerate even the hint of some possible future threat—even the emanations from the penumbra of pro-life sentiment.

In the same spirit the culture warriors relentlessly pressed the attack on other fronts: demanding the use of “preferred pronouns,” enforcing the right of “transgender” men to compete as women, denying the objective reality of male and female sexual identity, denouncing parents who resisted the grooming of their children, and in all of these cases, using their clout to shut down any arguments against them. Administration officials leaned on social-media platforms to suppress whatever they defined as “misinformation,” and discussed the need for what George Orwell would readily have recognized as a Ministry of Truth.

When he first campaigned for the White House, Barack Obama opposed the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Eight years later such opposition was routinely denounced as bigotry. With the waves of “woke” ideology coming in so fast, who could predict what moral walls the tide might have breached in four years of a Harris administration? Would any proclamation of the 5th, 6th, or 9th Commandments—or the 1st, for that matter—be classified as “hate speech” and subject to criminal sanction?

The excesses of the Democratic administration—and thus of the Harris campaign—reflected an understanding of American small-d democracy divorced from its essential republican character. Having won office by a slim majority vote, the liberal ideologues thrust aside the Founders’ call for a government of checks and balances, of strictly enumerated powers, of prudent limitations. They could do whatever they wanted to do. The majority could rule, unfettered by concern about the rights of the “deplorable” minority.

Until November 5.