By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, October 26, 2022
Having scrabbled around desperately for a
sufficiently alarmist closing message, the Democratic Party and its many
acolytes in the press have at long last settled upon the proposition that if
voters wish to preserve American democracy going forward, they must usher in a
period of sustained one-party rule. Scribbling this week in the pages of
the Washington Post, Max Boot neatly summed up the ruse: November’s elections, Boot
submitted in earnest, “are actually a referendum on whether you favor the
continuation of democracy in America.” If you do, he concluded, you are obliged
to deliver every office in the country to the party Boot happens to prefer.
Anything else is undemocratic.
I shall leave it to the philosophers to unpack the many
paradoxes that are contained within the extraordinary contention that if the Republicans
receive more votes than the Democrats, “democracies die,” and instead note just
how little those who are advancing this argument seem to believe their own
spin, or to comprehend their own deleterious roles in the evil they now decry.
Donald Trump’s post-election perfidy was, indeed, unique in scale. But it was
not unique in type — and, as the evidence increasingly shows,
Americans understand that better than the Democratic Party seems to believe.
Why are voters split on the question of which party represents a
“major threat” to democracy? Because, unlike the media they loathe, they are
capable of remembering a world prior to January 6, 2021, and they are aware
that the party now casting itself as democracy’s defender has a long and
undistinguished history of casting aspersions on each and every part of
America’s longstanding constitutional order.
They remember that Hillary Clinton, who lost fairly to
Donald Trump in 2016, has never accepted that loss: “He knows he’s an illegitimate
president,” she said of Trump in 2019, before pointing to “the many varying
tactics” that were supposedly used to steal the election from her — tactics
that, per Clinton, included “hacking.” They remember that her language
was echoed by figures such as Jimmy Carter, who has averred
that Donald Trump “lost the election” and that “Trump didn’t actually win the
election in 2016.” They remember that the current White House press secretary,
Karine Jean-Pierre, complained in 2016 about the “stolen election” and
called Donald Trump “#unpresidented.” They remember that Stacey Abrams has
spent years pretending that
she won the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race; they remember that she has been
endorsed in this lie by Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Eric Holder, Sherrod Brown, and many other Democrats; and they remember
that she has been rewarded for her chutzpah by being nominated for the
governorship once again. Is it true, as Max Boot insists, that the midterms
will feature too many candidates who “have denied or questioned the
outcome of the last presidential election?” Yes, it is. But does it also matter
that the people who are condemning these figures are election-deniers
themselves? Of course it does. Just four years ago, Max Boot himself was insisting that “Trump is an illegitimate president
whose election is tainted by fraud.” Is that how “democracies die”?
Its rhetoric aside, one does not get the impression that
the Democratic Party truly believes that American democracy is on the line. A
Democratic Party that believed that American democracy was on the line
would have moderated politically, culturally, and fiscally. This Democratic
Party has not done so. A Democratic Party that believed that American democracy
was on the line would have sacrificed some of its pre-existing ideological
agenda so that it could meaningfully address the economic crisis that has
caused its precipitous decline in the polls. This Democratic
Party has not done so. A Democratic Party that believed that American democracy
was on the line would not have consciously elevated the candidates it
now casts as existential threats in the hope that they’d be easier to beat on
Election Day. This Democratic Party has done just that,
repeatedly. A Democratic Party that believed that American democracy was on the
line would not have muddied its message by talking loudly about packing the Supreme Court and abolishing the Senate filibuster, and it certainly would
not have allowed the Democratic president to commit a series of impeachable offenses two months before the
midterm elections. This Democratic Party has done all of those
things. A Democratic Party that believed that American democracy was on the
line would have expelled Stacey Abrams from its ranks. This Democratic
Party has not done so.
Instead, Democrats have done what Democrats always do:
They have sent out endless gobs of money to all and sundry; they have insisted
without qualification that abortion must be available everywhere up until
birth; and they have determined that whatever social innovations progressives
have contrived in the last three weeks are not only desirable, but ought to be
mandatory. And while they have done all this, the Electoral Count Reform Act
has sat gathering dust on the sidelines — a solution to a
problem that Democrats find it convenient to keep unsolved.
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