It’s common to hear conservatives laugh at leftists who call America a democracy. “Don’t they know we’re a representative republic?” they say. Yet the fixation on the word democracy is not a mistake on the part of the left, rather it is a deliberate redefinition of the nature of our society.
Democracy means rule by the people while republic means the public thing. Generally speaking, democracy refers to a system where a majority of the people direct policy while in a republic the people elect representatives to act on their behalf. Republics also generally have constitutional protections to prevent the majority from completely oppressing the minority.
But dictionary definitions don’t actually matter for this discussion. This is not the first time I’ve written on this issue — see here and here. This subject keeps coming up in our discourse so it deserves some more attention. (By the way, today’s title is a reference to this collection of essays by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, which was itself a reference to an older work.)
When leftists use the word democracy, they don’t mean a system of government in which the people are sovereign. Rather, they mean the current governmental regime of unelected bureaucrats micromanaging our lives, using civil rights law to enforce equity, and extracting resources from working Americans to pay for their pet social justice projects.
Don’t believe me? Check out this tweet from the ACLU of Idaho this week. They presented what they called the racist and anti-LGBTQ legislation that they were fighting:
The ACLU — the American Civil Liberties Union — ostensibly fights for civil rights. But this graphic shows what they consider inalienable civil rights: trafficking fentanyl, employing illegal aliens, using public funds to care for illegal aliens, publicly-funded DEI programs, drug use, forcing us to say that men can be women and vice versa, government infringing upon your right to free speech, putting gay pride flags in public school classrooms, forcing therapists to promote LGBTQ ideology, and taxpayer funded gender transitions.
Would our Founding Fathers have recognized any of these things as civil rights? Would anyone prior to the 21st century have?
I responded to the tweet by suggesting the ACLU of Idaho might be happier if it was the ACLU of California. A regular leftist troll responded by saying the ACLU adheres to the Constitution:
I’m not sure which Constitution Ms. Scott has read, but I don’t see any of those things listed in the document.
This is what the left considers democracy: using your tax dollars to create their ideal society. If that means censoring us, putting us in prison, stealing our elections, and outlawing political opposition, so be it. Calling them hypocrites because they’re not following the dictionary definition is a waste of time, because their only goal is power.
I remember the first time I realized that leftists don’t believe in the dictionary definition of democracy: In 2012, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker defeated a recall attempt. Local news interviewed a young activist who, without any sense of irony, said “democracy died tonight!”
Consider what democracy meant to that man. It clearly didn’t mean the will of the people as determined by the results of the recall election, rather it referred to a left wing system which its adherents want to maintain no matter what the people want.
In House Education earlier this week, Rep. Steve Berch, a Democrat from west Boise, rejected any support for SCR 116, a resolution calling for more patriotic civics education in Idaho public schools. He seemed angry that Sen. Cindy Carlson and Rep. Tony Wisniewski had not used the word “democracy” in drafting the resolution:
Berch has built his entire public persona on the idea that he represents the people rather than parties or special interests. Yet Berch is a leftist through and through, supporting abortion and every other plank of the Democrat platform. He spends most of his time on Twitter complaining about the Idaho GOP.
Earlier in the same hearing, Berch complained that HCR 116 didn’t dwell on America’s “mistakes” such as “slavery, sweatshops, the history of immigration, McCarthy era, internment camps, civil rights movement, and so forth.” Like so many leftists, Berch cannot conceive of the United States as a great country on its own terms, but rather a nation that has been evil for most of its history.
This is the ideology that leads to the toppling of statues, not only of Confederate generals but of our Founding Fathers themselves.
This is what democracy means to the left: the triumph of the liberal world order over a racist and misogynistic past. When they talk about protecting “our democracy” they mean their revolution, their regime that supplanted the America our Founders created.
Consider a tale of two protests in Washington DC:
On May 29, 2020, BLM and Antifa rioters stormed the White House, injuring dozens of Secret Service agents and forcing President Donald Trump into a bunker. They set fire to numerous buildings, nearly burning down St. John’s Church. Media briefly covered the event, with most outlets mocking Trump for escaping to a bunker.
This attack on the White House, which resulted in significant damage and numerous injuries, is not considered an attack on our democracy.
On January 6th, 2021, several thousand Trump supporters protested at the Capitol. Some broke glass while others scuffled with police, but the vast majority simply attended. Some were allowed into the building by police. The only person directly killed by the events of that day was Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter who was shot by a Capitol policeman without provocation.
Media coverage called this the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War, and some even said it was worse than Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
Why is 1/6 worse than 5/29? Why was there no May 29 commission established by Congress to get to the bottom of that attack?
You know the answer. Left wing protests, no matter how violent or even deadly, operate with the tacit approval of the regime. They riot in support of this democracy, while right wing protests are against the liberal political order. Under this definition, Donald Trump winning election in 2016 was a subversion of democracy while attempts to remove him from the ballot in 2024 are defending democracy.
Once you understand this paradigm, the actions of the left make a lot more sense. When President Joe Biden calls half the country enemies of democracy, it does no good to call him a hypocrite, because he’s not talking to you. He’s talking to his people, those that support the leftist revolution that runs our country today. To him, you are an enemy, a saboteur, an insurrectionist, a kulak.
The constitutional republic that our Founders created has been almost entirely supplanted by this new democracy of the left, one in which the role of government is to do as much micromanaging as necessary to achieve the progressive utopia of diversity, equity, and inclusion. They have reinterpreted the Constitution to support this new regime and dismiss any thought of returning to the old ways. Progressives believe that history is always marching forward, even if it means erasing the past behind them.
Paid subscribers head over to Substack for a bonus note! Not a subscriber? You can do that here!
