How Democrats Exploit ‘Democracy Is at Stake’

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

 

This year, you’re going to hear a lot of people insisting, “Democracy is at stake,” in the upcoming presidential election. Very often, the person saying this will be a Democrat, or at minimum, rooting for Joe Biden to win reelection over Donald Trump. Trump supporters are much more likely to say, “America is at stake” or “the future of the country is at stake,” genuinely convinced that four more years of Joe Biden and/or Kamala Harris will turn the country into the left-wing dystopian dictatorship out of a young adult novel, or crime-ridden borderless anarchy out of Mad Max, or somehow both simultaneously.

 

Inherent in that argument is that if democracy is at stake, you’re not allowed to have your usual beliefs, expectations, and standards for candidates. You must cut a lot of slack — a lot — to the candidate who allegedly is no threat to democracy. To preserve the Constitution, you must reelect the president who violated the constitutional limits on his powers with the eviction moratorium, the vaccine mandate, the cancellation of student debt, and the appointment of Ann Carlson as the acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration when it was clear the Senate would not confirm her.

 

(If you’re really worried about Trump returning to office and ignoring the Vacancies Act and putting sycophants and yes-men in important government positions without Senate confirmation as acting administrators, you should not avert your eyes, nod in agreement, or applaud when Biden does the same thing.)

 

We will be told that our usual standards and expectations of a president are an unaffordable luxury now because . . . well, as they insist, democracy is at stake.

 

Democracy is at stake, which is why we must act like it’s normal to have an 81-year-old president who does about one public event per weekday, almost never does sit-down interviews or press conferences anymore, and sticks to the teleprompter when he makes an appearance.

 

Democracy is at stake, which is why we must ignore the allegations about a romantic relationship between Fulton County DA Fani Willis and the chief prosecutor in the election-interference case. The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus, about as far as you can get from a Trump fan, rakes Willis over the coals today:

 

What in the world was Willis thinking? She did not help herself after the allegations surfaced by insinuating that the criticism was racially motivated because there were no complaints about her hiring two other special counsels, who are White. “They only attacked one,” Willis said. Um, she’s only accused of having a romantic relationship with one.

 

And this is not complicated. In government or out, you don’t hire your boyfriend. You know who knows this? Fani Willis. “I certainly will not be choosing people to date that work under me,” she said in a 2020 campaign appearance helpfully recirculated by the Georgia GOP chairman.

 

Democracy is at stake, which is why we must pretend that Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas was correct when he asserted, “The border is closed. The border is secure.” Or we must agree with President Biden when he says the border hasn’t been secure for the past ten years. Whatever the administration is saying at any given moment, we must nod in agreement like jostled bobblehead dolls.

 

Democracy is at stake, which is why we must ignore the fact that the Biden administration has released 1 million people into the country under immigration-parole authority, and that 2.4 million migrants have been allowed into the country to stay for future asylum hearings. We must act like it is perfectly fine, and not absurd, that some of those asylum seekers have been told to show up in court in the year 2035. We must choose to believe that this amounts to a controlled and well-run border and immigration system, and not a mess that technically isn’t an open border but amounts to roughly the same thing.

 

Democracy is at stake, which is why we must accept the fact that federal officials falsely claimed that “Texas ‘physically barred’ Border Patrol agents from trying to rescue migrants who drowned.” When democracy is at stake, it’s okay to lie, apparently.

 

Democracy is at stake, which is why we must pretend to not notice that the the Consumer Price Index, the widely cited metric for inflation faced by American families, is up a cumulative 17.1 percent between when Biden took office and November 2023. We must ignore the fact that the cost of purchasing a new car is up 30 percent from 2020 on average, and the cost of purchasing a used car is up 38 percent from that year. We must act like it is perfectly normal for “just 15.5 percent of homes for sale in 2023 were affordable for the typical U.S. household — the lowest share on record.” We have to learn to accept that at the grocery store, a certain “number of items that are 20 percent to 30 percent higher than they were pre-pandemic.”

 

Democracy is at stake, which is why Americans have to give up those extravagant indulgences like . . . cars, and . . . housing, and . . . food.

 

Democracy is at stake, which is why we must pretend that it is a feasible solution for the president to call for a “two-state solution” when one of those states is hell-bent on killing everyone in the other state.

 

Democracy is at stake, which is why we must avert our eyes from the fact that the president’s son stands accused in court of “a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019”; that “between 2016 and Oct. 15, 2020, the defendant spent this money on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes”; and that he faces a maximum of 17 years in prison.

 

Democracy is at stake, which is why we must decide that it’s fine that Hunter Biden initially demanded to know the identities of those who were spending sums up to $875,000 for his . . . “art.”

 

Democracy is at stake, which is why we must insist that what Hunter Biden does has nothing to do with what Joe Biden does, even though records indicate, “Biden exchanged emails with his son Hunter’s business associate 54 times while he was serving as vice president,” the National Archives has “an 11-page log showing a list of 327 emails that Joe Biden sent or received from 2010 to 2019 under pseudonyms that included ‘robinware456’ and ‘robert.l.peters.’ Mr. Biden was a big user of these shadow accounts, with the National Archives and Records Administration disclosing that it has up to 82,000 pages of emails and documents sent or received under Biden aliases while he was Vice President.”

 

Democracy is at stake, which requires us to pretend that it’s perfectly normal for the vice president of the United States to regularly be emailing with his son’s business partners, and to believe the insistence of Biden that at no point was any business ever discussed.

 

If you think about it, if democracy is truly at stake, maybe everybody ought to bring their A-game instead of cutting corners. If democracy is truly at stake, maybe instead of lowering our standards for candidates, we should be raising them. After a while, “Democracy is at stake” stops sounding like a clear-eyed assessment of the stakes of this election, and more of an all-purpose excuse and demand for the forgiveness of all sins and failures on the part of the incumbent.

 

You can make a legitimate argument that the coming years will feature daunting, even unprecedented challenges. Russia is still on the march, China is hungrily looking at Taiwan, North Korea has reportedly given up on peaceful reunification with South Korea, and the Iranians must be awfully close to a having a nuclear weapon by now. If we do nothing, Medicare and Social Security hit a brick wall at high speed in 2031 and 2033, respectively. We’re now paying more than $1 trillion per year on interest payments to our $33 trillion national debt.

 

These do not look like circumstances where we, the voters, should be lowering our standards and accepting the use of the White House as a retirement home — whether the rambling old man hails from Delaware or from Mar-a-Lago.

 

ADDENDUM: Our Charlie Cooke on how Democrats insist Donald Trump will destroy democracy, and how they simultaneously want him to be the Republican nominee:

 

I don’t know how much more plainly I can say it than this: If you believe that Donald Trump represents a unique threat to democracy — as Joe Biden and his team keep saying that they do — then you should not want Donald Trump on the ballot. There are no exceptions to this rule. If Trump is the nominee, he has a chance of winning. If he is a threat to the republic, he ought not to be in a position from which he has a chance of winning. The moment — the very moment — that you start muttering about jolts of energy to voters and donors, or about the best contrast to be drawn, or about motivators of Democrats, you have signaled that you don’t actually consider Trump to be the risk that you say you do. Add into this mix that President Biden’s approval rating is in the low-30s, and the approach becomes even more inexplicable.