Democracy Must Be Defended!

Except when it must be defeated

Q: When does the Left bellow at us that democracy must be defended? A: Is there ever a time when it’s not bellowing that?

Q: When does it actually think that, instead, democracy must be defeated? A: When Donald Trump is ahead in just about every poll and it seems likely that next year’s quite democratic election will give him the White House.

Q: What must be done to avert this dreaded democratic outcome? A: The Left shrewdly won’t say outright, but they’ve already given us clues, see, e.g., Steve Scalise or the murder plot against Justice Kavanaugh.

What brings all this to mind is the coincidence — or at least it might be a coincidence — of two things. One is the recent issue of the Atlantic devoted entirely to telling us that Trump’s election will be an extinction-level catastrophe for Everything Good in the World. (See also this story today in the Washington Post). More of that in a moment. The second is polling over the last month or so, which by a fat margin shows that Trump will beat Biden in the popular vote, not to mention the Electoral College. The Real Clear Politics summary tells us that, over the last dozen polls taken since the first week in November, Trump is ahead in ten of them, with an overall average lead over Biden of slightly more than two percentage points. Since Biden will win a few big states by very large margins (e.g., California, New York, Illinois), what that means is that Trump would win almost all the rest of the country, and with it a clear victory in the Electoral College, much as in 2016 but more so, since back then Trump lost the popular vote by about three million ballots.

One or two polls here and there can be mistaken. But a dozen different polls over more than a month, polls producing very similar results, are unlikely to be off. What they’re telling us is that next year, American democracy is probably going to re-install Trump as President.

This prospect is not producing merely the by-now shopworn Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s not producing mainly depression and anxiety in Our Elite Masters — although that too. What it’s mainly producing on the Left is panic and rage — rage that we in the unwashed masses are fixin’ to be disobedient.

Did you get taken in by all their “democracy is sacrosanct” stuff?! HAHAHA. Joke’s on you.

Actually, it’s on us all.

In order to see just how unhinged the Left has become — and how so much less devoted to democratic outcomes — I’m going to take the liberty of quoting at length from the Atlantic edition, simply because if I don’t, many of you are going to wonder if I’m exaggerating the extent of the Left’s rage. And I should add that the Atlantic, though distinctly on the liberal side, has been regarded up to now as being more thoughtful and less given over to kneejerk crackpots than outlets like the Nation or Mother Jones.

Here’s what the “thoughtful” Left is saying:

In the January/February issue of The Atlantic, 24 writers explain how Donald Trump could destroy America’s civic and democratic institutions, including its courts, national political culture, and military, if he succeeds in returning to the Oval Office….

Am I mistaken in thinking that the phrase, “if he succeeds in returning to the Oval Office” could more precisely be put as, “if the American people, in the exercise of their democratic franchise, re-elect him”?

For years, Donald Trump’s many opponents were often accused of alarmism, and early on, this seemed a justified criticism: Before he was even sworn in, words such as fascist and autocrat were in the air. Although I was a charter member of the Never Trump movement, I worried that catastrophizing Trump and depicting him as an invincible Demogorgon would induce helplessness and resignation among American citizens. When Trump was defeated in 2020, however, many voters took that as a sign that the guardrails had held and that America was out of danger. Even January 6, 2021, has receded from the public’s consciousness, and a fair number of Americans seem unaware of just how close we came to the violent overthrow of our electoral institutions.

Trump’s autocratic instincts have now fully mutated into an embrace of fascism.

Yes, fascism. The people who did everything they could to muzzle and censor doubts about the country’s COVID panic and the now-admitted (but at the time covered-up) costs to children’s emotional well-being and education of months-long, storm-trooper-lite shutdowns — those people — are accusing their opponents of fascism.

Millions of voters think of the upcoming election as just another contest between a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat, instead of an existential contest between democracy and authoritarianism….

In our January/February edition, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, and 24 writers at the magazine…describe the threats that a second Trump term would pose to the United States government, the country’s institutions, U.S. national security, and the American idea itself.

Translation: “If democracy elects Trump, then democracy stinks.” Broader translation: “If democracy disagrees with our Wise Warnings, then democracy is a failure — although of course we alone are the defenders of democracy.”

If you were wondering if these people even hear themselves, now you know.

David Frum opens this edition with the overarching warning that America’s “existing constitutional system has no room for the subversive legal maneuvers of a criminal in chief.” If Trump’s voters somehow expect that he will undertake policies to improve their lives, they are mistaken. Instead, Trump will envelop the Oval Office in a storm of panic and vindictiveness as he fights multiple felony indictments (and, by 2025, possibly convictions). As David notes, “For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law,” which would allow him to both evade justice and exact revenge—political and physical—on his enemies.

I would ask my pals on the Left to never again accuse the Right of fearmongering, but it would be as useless as asking Biden to remember what he said yesterday.

Barton Gellman writes in detail about exactly how Trump could thwart constitutional limits on his power while pursuing these goals. In a particularly disturbing observation, Bart suggests that the failure of imagination about how bad things could get is not just a problem among the public; even “government veterans and legal scholars” are possibly “blinkered by their own expertise when they try to anticipate what Trump would do,” because they are focused on how he could abuse “the ostensibly lawful powers of the president, even if they amount to gross ruptures of legal norms and boundaries.”

But, as Bart notes, “Trump himself isn’t thinking that way.” Rather, Trump may simply make good on his threat to “terminate” parts of the Constitution that he considers obstacles to his power. He would then count on getting away with such moves by inducing shock and paralysis in a judicial system that has no mechanism for enforcing court decisions against a sitting president. (And don’t rely on the military to stop him: In an article coming later this week, I describe how Trump is likely to try to subvert the constitutional loyalty of America’s armed forces and turn them into a praetorian guard loyal only to him.)

When I was a litigator for the Justice Department, it was considered bad form, not to mention counterproductive, to use in terrorem arguments. Such arguments are regarded by sensible people as juvenile attempts at bullying an audience you don’t respect, or as a particularly distasteful form of breast-beating, or both.

I guess that was long, long ago in a galaxy far away. This is not to mention that there’s not a wisp of evidence for the frantic propositions being advanced.

Nor would the damage be limited to U.S. political institutions. Trump, supported by this cast of misfits, would ramp up the poisoning of American social and cultural life that he began in his first term. Caitlin Dickerson—who won a Pulitzer Prize for her investigation into the horrifying family-separation policies of Trump’s first term—tells us that the Trump adviser Stephen Miller (who would likely return to the White House) would “move even faster and more forcefully” to reinstate such sadistic and shameful practices.

In addition to immigrants, women would be a target: Sophie Gilbert writes about how we would endure another four years of Trump’s misogynistic vulgarity, which would not only coarsen life in the public square but also be a permission structure for more attacks on the rights and dignity of women.

This from the bunch that excuses Hamas atrocities against women, such as rape as weapon of war and mutilation of sexual parts, as needed “contextualizing” of the “Palestinian struggle.” And taking their infants and children as hostages to be used as battlefield pawns (at best) and subject to similarly grotesque torture and then murder (at worst).

I could go on — and the Atlantic surely does — but there is only so much I can ask Ringside readers to bear. So I’ll make just one more point.

I doubt this apparently endless screed is merely a spasm of rage, although it may seem that way. The Left knows what it’s doing, and it wants more than just to vent. If, as now seems likely, its pretend reverence for democracy isn’t going to work out and Trump becomes more and more likely to win a democratic election, something must be done to stop him, democracy be damned.

What is that something? Again, they’re not saying, but Chuck Schumer gave us a hint about how the Left acts when the constitutional system seems about to produce an outcome it hates: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit if you go forward with these awful decisions." Well-armed activist Nicholas Roske got the message. Fortunately, Justice Kavanaugh escaped physical harm. But stakes are far higher now, and the intentionally sulfuric rhetoric much angrier.

If a similar (or worse) episode befalls Trump, the Left will of course make like their hate spasm had nothing to do with it.

Really? “Silence is violence,” they so often scolded us — but a cascade of hateful thundering is, we’ll be told this time, merely political discussion.