"Democracy": Another Word Loses Meaning

Everyone favouring greater popular input into state policy is now "anti-democracy."

There are so many threats to “democracy,” and the threats always seem to come from the people, or those reflecting popular opinion, and to be denounced by elites demanding obedience. Our elites cannot see the problem.

As I have argued of other key terms in current discourse, “insurrection,” “terrorism”, “conspiracy theory,” and “white supremacy” among them, the word “democratic” has undergone a large semantic change, losing sight of its original denotation. In more direct language, elite voices are changing its meaning for their own often undemocratic purposes.

A couple of weeks ago, the Southern Poverty Law Centre warned that Tucker Carlson is “anti-democracy,” notwithstanding Carlson’s blistering criticism of authoritarian government overreach, and of elites that ignore and despise the popular will. Tucker Carlson, that estimable preppy, by turns morally serious and wickedly funny, can look after himself. His response to the SPLC will be much more devastating than anything I can write, and likely good for a belly-laugh too. My purpose here is to get at the semantic reversal that elite opinion is imposing on the term “democratic.”

In the SPLC’s rhetoric, the word “democracy” has lost contact with its original meaning, while retaining its strongly positive connotations, so that “anti-democracy” can function as an anathema, a word of exclusion. Democracy is everything good, anti-democracy everything bad, and apparently suspicion of elites is “anti-democracy.” In the SPLC’s universe, policies preferred by elites are democratic, those with no elite support are anti-democratic: the world is upside-down.

A Hegemonic Agenda: Telling You What You May Think

The Southern Poverty Law Center used to fight actual racists, in the old, pre-woke sense of that term. More recently, the SPLC has set itself up as a guardian of the political and moral health of America, branding everything it doesn’t like as “hate.” The old burning-crosses type of racism being thankfully difficult to find, and the very real problems of the black population not admitting of simple or easy solutions, the SPLC has decided instead to label mainstream conservatives from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to the Family Research Council, to Moms for Liberty and James Lindsay, and now Tucker Carlson, as purveyors of “hate,” and opponents of democracy. This is not at all democratic.

The project is consciously hegemonic: the SPLC intends to designate the boundaries of acceptable thought, thereby restricting the range of democratic choice. If they cannot directly control what people think, they want to control what may be said in public fora, indirectly accomplishing the same end. The SPLC is an influential organization, at the center of a large network of often self-referential expert factories and mainstream venues, and their propaganda will have some effect, though over the long term it will come at a cost to their credibility.

The SPLC is not alone in seeing dangers to democracy under every bed. Here, we have George Wallace’s old friend Joe Biden, or whoever tweets for him:

If President Trump is the enemy of democracy, what of the half of the country that supports him? Are they MAGA extremist “semi-fascists,” to borrow Biden’s term? To loudly support democracy while calling half the country illegitimate is inherently problematic. It implies the need for some kind of escape clause or state of emergency that would disenfranchise or override the illegitimate half of the population, likely in the name of “democracy.” The standard talking point is to call the January 6 riot an “insurrection,” thereby criminalizing the opposition party. This move itself illustrates the power and the danger of mis-defining words.

What does “Democratic” mean?

“Democracy” is in its basic sense a system of government, or even more precisely a way of electing governments and choosing policies. Its adjectival cognate, “democratic,” also carries a meaning close to “egalitarian.” These meanings are now reversed: to be a supporter of democracy (newspeak) is to support one party, while denying the legitimacy of the other, making democracy impossible.

Which brings us back to Tucker Carlson, who opposed the January 6 riot, has never denied the legitimacy of half the population, and has never called for the abolition of elections, or the institution of a one-party state, or state control over the media, or anything else that might be meant by “anti-democracy,” in the old pre-newspeak sense. “Anti-democracy” means something else entirely, and that other meaning is almost directly opposed to the normal meaning of free elections, honest officials, an independent media, and popular decision-making.

Here is a partial list of controversial topics on which Tucker Carlson takes strong positions, though not always positions with which I agree:

• Border Security;

• Gender Ideology, especially as it involves children;

• DEI racial ideology;

• Law and order in the streets;

• Foreign wars;

• Internet censorship and social media manipulation;

• Election security

The last two are directly related to the institutions of government, and so are directly related to democracy in its original and widely understood sense. In a democracy, the state does not use censorship as a political tool, and in a democracy elections are honest and above-board and seen to be so. One would have to turn the meaning of “democratic” upside down to hold Carlson’s positions to be “anti-democracy.”

The first five topics do not directly touch political decision-making, so any one position is not inherently more “democratic” than any other. A democracy may choose via popular vote or representative institutions to secure its border or not, to push queer theory or racial ideology or not, to fund the police or not, to get involved in this or that war or not, but those choices are not in themselves essentially democratic or undemocratic.

“Democratic” may mean “Preferred by the Majority”

One might intelligibly say that the “democratic” position on one or other of these issues is that preferred by a majority of the people. On the first five positions above, while polls will show varying results, it is easy to argue that in this second empirical meaning of the term “democratic”, Carlson’s positions are on the “democratic” side of the debate. You have to invert language to call Tucker Carlson’s positions on any of them “anti-democracy,” or (a near-synonym) “authoritarian.”

There is therefore no essential or inherent matter-of-definition sense in which any of Carlson’s positions are undemocratic, while there is an empirical popular-preference sense in which Carlson's positions are in a commonly-understood way very democratic.

“Democratic” may indicate a Non-Elite Social Position

There is a third sense in which Carlson’s positions are democratic, and the SPLC/elite sense undemocratic. The SPLC’s view of what is “democracy” is the view of an elite intelligentsia, highly credentialled, well-paid, well placed, writing in the elite mainstream media, teaching in Ivy League universities, infesting the offices of corporations and of the bureaucratic state. In this third, social-position sense of the term “democratic,” Carlson speaks for the popular side, the SPLC for the ruling class.

It might be argued that a favoured policy choice will make democracy more secure or more complete, but to leap to calling the preferred policy “democratic,” let alone to calling dissenters “anti-democracy,” involves inserting not merely a chain of reasoning but a conclusion into the definition of the word. This thereby makes analysis more difficult, which may be intentional, and in that it obstructs debate, it is itself undemocratic.

It might similarly be asserted that the people don’t understand the complexities of some issue, and therefore need to be kept out of it: experts should decide. That is an intelligible position, but not a particularly democratic one. It also makes some audacious assumptions about the character of our experts, who often provide Tucker with objects for his mockery.

There is something decidedly undemocratic in constructing novel definitions understood only by an elite cognoscenti. As I wrote recently in reference to conspiracy theories, it takes a certain kind of institutional power to change the meanings of words so as to retain valued connotations while emptying them of all direct meaning. The ability to do that depends upon a certain status within a permissive environment. Simply to announce that Tucker Carlson’s views on immigration or war or what-have-you are “anti-democratic” would be instantly ridiculous, especially when popular opinion tends to support him. The claim must be surrounded by a certain amount of abstraction, given an appearance of empirical support, obscured by big words, enunciated from high-status platforms, and welcomed by a convincing number of well-placed allies. In order to make false statements without sounding ridiculous, a lot of influential people have to play along. Some would call this hegemonic power.

This, then, is a third way in which the claim that Tucker Carlson is “anti-democratic” is ridiculous: language has been inverted, and those pulling off the inversion are themselves a part of a permanent elite living in and around the bureaucratic state. This is an elite whose fulsome rhetoric of disdain for “low-information,” “conspiracy theory”, “deplorable” voters explains its anti-democratic (old sense) character. Newspeak comes from above, and is the opposite of democracy.

The good news is that the hegemonic authorities can only play these definitional games for so long. Like the SPLC, their power will over the long term tend to beclown itself. In the short term, however, they will harm real people, and we’ll need Tucker and others to expose their anti-democratic tactics.