The Contradictions of "Our Democracy"
"Our democracy" (new sense) reserves important decisions to unelected elites, while telling itself false but comforting stories (2,100 words, 10 min, TL;DR: the bullets on the way to the end)
The mainstream media has an uncanny knack for getting things exactly backwards, and this weekend’s Globe and Mail does not disappoint. I have argued before that the Globe, like most of the mainstream media, cannot be trusted as a source of news, but is nevertheless useful as an indicator of hegemonic opinion. Illustrating my point, their leader this weekend screams that “a vote for Trump is a vote against democracy.”
After the obligatory misrepresentations of Trump’s words (an example, and many others are possible, here), the editor of The Globe wipes the spittle from the keyboard, and produces the following helpful paragraph:
The Globe is correct to say that democracy is not immutable, but not in quite the way they mean. The range of democratic decision-making has been contracting for some time, and I name below a large number of prominent issues that hegemonic elites, in the adventitious form of Kamala Harris, would like to remove from the realm of democratic decision-making, all the while shouting about “our democracy.”
The Globe’s second sentence explains that “democracy is, rather, a story we tell ourselves.” This is a neologistic use of the term, and not how most of us understand it. In its normal sense, democracy is a system for choosing leaders and for choosing government policies, and not just a story, or a myth, or a comforting fiction, let alone a bunch of things we are instructed to believe. The Globe’s third sentence states explicitly that our shared stories must tell us that our society’s institutions function well (specifics below). But what if those stories are in fact false? That is a question they avoid because in that case, Trump would be the true small-d democrat.
Democracy as a System for Choosing Leaders
Going back to democracy in the old and normal sense, where the people choose leaders, it is plain that Trump is the democratically chosen nominee of his party. He was chosen by primary voters, over the objections and certainly the hopes of much of the Republican machine.
No such thing can be said of Harris, who won no primaries in this cycle, or for that matter in the last. She is a machine politician (even her supporters at The Economist admit that) who went from being Willie Brown’s mistress to being Vice-President because she checked the right DEI identity boxes, and has now become the nominee because Biden avoided any real primary contest in the current cycle, and could no longer hide his mental decline. She is a default nominee chosen by a coterie of panicked party grandees after frenetic backstairs skullduggery that we shall only learn about after the election. To call this “Democracy” requires a lot of storytelling.
Democracy as a System for Choosing Policies
Democracy should be about choosing leaders, and also policies. Without arguing that a democratic government should operate by plebiscite, or that every policy should be popular, there should be some correspondence in a democracy between a government’s policies and its platform, and also between the popular will and the policies of the government.
Herewith a list of issues in current US politics, in a rough order of prominence:
Immigration and border security
Abortion
Crime
Foreign policy and war
Women’s rights and spaces, and gender ideology
DEI and racial preferences
Tariff and industrial policy
Environmental policy
Censorship
My point is not that Trump or Harris is right or wrong on any of these. It is simply that on none of these issues can Trump’s policy be called undemocratic. On each, Trump’s position is advocated clearly and loudly (this is Trump, after all). By contrast, two things are notable about Harris’s positions: they represent elite over popular preferences, and are often simply not mentioned in her speeches, being passed over in silence because she and her handlers know they are not popular, but intend to go ahead anyway.
What a Marxist would call the social position of the two campaigns’ policy positions could not be more different: Trump’s position is normally that of many ordinary people, Harris’s that of elites, and often elites who want to avoid the matter for the duration of the campaign. Running through the list above in more detail, and in the same order (TL;DR readers can skip forward):
Open borders and mass immigration: This is a policy followed furtively, with migrant flights arriving literally in the middle of the night, and the open border has been closed for election season because the Harris people know that it is unpopular. Mass immigration is favoured for ideological and electoral reasons by Democrat and left-wing activists, but denied in public. This is the opposite of democratic policy-making.
Abortion: Abortion is the topic on which Trump is politically weakest (certainly in the view of the Harris campaign, which bangs on about it). Trump’s position is that policy should be made by voters at the state level, and not by judges in Washington. Whatever one thinks of the substance of the question, this is hardly undemocratic.
Crime: The American people are assured that crime is declining and all is well, based on questionable statistics contradicting popular experience (as Rupa Subramanya argues here). Again, what Trump talks about openly, Harris passes over in silence, reserving the matter for policy elites, while surrogates blather about “misinformation.”
Foreign and Defence Policy: The Democrats’ foreign policy positions are little mentioned by the Harris campaign (and also contain large internal contradictions, as I argued here.) Trump’s nationalism and his aversion to foreign entanglements are disdained by Washington policy elites, and answered only with McCarthyite cries of “Putin!”.
DEI, Gender Ideology and Women’s Spaces: Trump takes the popular position, the “trans women are women” dogma being a bureaucratic and faculty club position. As with racial preferences, Harris avoids the topic in public, except when her campaign accuses Trump of racism.
Tariffs and Trade: Free traders are much higher on the social scale and also richer than those who support Trump’s call for protectionist tariffs. Reasonable people can disagree about trade policy, but neither position is inherently undemocratic.
Environmental Policy: Climate change is a dinner party and not a popular cause. RFK’s version of environmental policy, focusing on chemicals in food and pollution in places like East Palestine, commands wide popular support, but elite disdain.
Censorship: The Harris/Biden policy of censorship, as revealed in the Twitter Files and also in the Facebook Files, is supported by Beltway elites but not defended by the Harris campaign, which would prefer to avoid the topic. “Misinformation” is the new false consciousness, essentially an argument that the populace is too stupid to make its own decisions about who to trust.
One does not need to agree with all or indeed any of Trump’s positions to see that they are not in themselves undemocratic. Trump’s positions in fact find social support from what an earlier generation would have called the popular classes. It is Harris’s policies that are supported by elites and followed over popular objections, and attempts are made by Harris’s media supporters to remove them from the realm of polite conversation. If either campaign is against democracy in the commonly understood sense of popular decision-making, it is that of Harris, who would like policies on important topics like mass immigration, gender ideology, women’s spaces, war, and censorship to be reserved to credentialed elites operating without too much popular interruption.
The Stories of Democracy (New Sense): Mostly False
This is where democracy in the old popular decision-making sense meets democracy in the neologistic stories-we-tell-ourselves sense. The Globe’s cherished stories are myths that Trump has rudely interrupted, and managerial elites are very upset. Here are The Globe’s obligatory stories:
“Our elected legislators have our interests at heart”: Many legislators persuade themselves that they have our interests at heart, but that is not quite the same thing;
“That our political opponents deserve our respect”: Some do, but others like Harris (and Trudeau) imprison their opponents (nor do Trump or the “garbage” people get much respect);
“That the courts are fair”: failure to believe this would make the critical race theorists and until this campaign most Globe journalists enemies of democracy. It is transparently the case that the courts are not always fair (more below);
“That the media are balanced and honest”: No reader of the mainstream media can believe that (examples from the Globe here);
“That bureaucracies are competent”: the people of western Carolina would not agree, nor the Marines who died in the Afghan chaos, nor the residents of long-term care homes;
“That elections are safe from interference”: In 2020, Zuckerberg (with $400 million for ballot harvesting) and the 51 intelligence agents who said the Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation” obviously did not agree, and interfered anyway, and to great effect;
“That democracy’s incremental nature is preferable to revolution and upheaval”: sometimes upheaval may help to avoid worse;
“That we do not want to be ruled by a single, unaccountable, all-powerful person”: true, but nor does anyone want to be ruled by an all-powerful unaccountable bureaucracy operating through a cipher like Biden or Harris;
“That the rule of law is paramount”: The Globe, like so many, does not understand this concept and supports an arbitrary use of the law against those it considers deplorable.
The Rule of Law
I have mentioned the rule of law last, and it is the most important of these points. Many use that expression to mean a strict or severe enforcement of the law, when in its original sense, deriving from the English legal theorist A.V. Dicey, it refers to an equal application of the law without regard to personal identity or political allegiance. This is clearly not how the law is applied to Trump, nor to his supporters, and not even to conservatives as a group, all of whom are targeted for arbitrary prosecutions.
Trump has been prosecuted for matters relating to classified documents and mistresses, while obviously Biden and Clinton have not. These prosecutions were aimed at him personally. The prosecuting District Attorney in New York ran for office with explicit “I’ll get Trump” ads. This is the opposite of the rule of law.
Similarly with Trump’s supporters: Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro went to prison for exactly the same thing that Hunter Biden and Merrick Garland did not go to prison for. Peaceful January 6 protesters have faced prison sentences,1 and even those who were guilty of violence face long sentences and spurious “terrorism” enhancements, unlike protesters for more privileged causes like BLM, Antifa, or Hamas who normally go free. There is much more that could be said, but the long and short of it is that the Harris/Biden administration holds political prisoners. This makes it an enemy of the rule of law, and the elite media run cover for it.
The Contradictions of Democracy (New Sense)
The “our democracy” people are in favour of what General Pinochet called guided democracy: there will be elections within firmly policed boundaries, and with few real policy choices. The differences between parties will be differences of personality and style, at best of emphasis, rather than of substance.
Under “democracy” (new sense), the electorate will choose between alternating groups of Washington insiders. Under “democracy” (new sense), the cultural left will control all the institutions and make all important policy decisions on anything elite opinion cares about, from mass immigration to DEI, from women’s spaces to crime, from war to censorship. Under “democracy” (new sense), the voters will have an occasional choice of cipher, perhaps selecting an affect or a cackle, a skin colour or a gender, though in this election even that was lacking on the Democrat side.
Trump is the only candidate supporting democracy in the normal popular choice sense of the word, indeed the only candidate supporting constitutional government and the rule of law over the rule of a deadening bureaucratic state able to censor and when necessary to arrest its opponents.
This is the central contradiction of the elite’s conception of “democracy”: it removes most decision-making power, even over matters as basic as civil liberties, economic policy, and war, from the realm of democratic choice. It talks incessantly about “our democracy,” but really thinks the populace too stupid to make important choices, which it would reserve to purported experts and Beltway elites. It is a contradiction at the core of the Harris campaign, and we should thank Canada’s national fishwrap for making it so plain.
One example: https://x.com/julie_kelly2/status/1851651507927613928;
’s substack contains many more, scandalously many.
Outstanding analysis, as usual.