The Patriot Post® · About That Threat to Democracy...

It’s so obvious. When politicians, pundits, and media all suddenly start saying the same thing using the same words, you can be pretty sure that it’s a well-orchestrated push.

In this election season, as Donald Trump’s nomination becomes more and more likely, the Left has revised its democracy-at-risk narrative as follows: don’t worry about Joe Biden’s age, allegations of corruption, or even whether he’ll run in ‘24 — they don’t matter; the problem facing the nation is Donald Trump. Given another term as president, he’ll become a full-on dictator, the greatest threat to democracy our nation has ever seen. He must be stopped.

That spin has dominated liberal media — New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, others — for the past two weeks. The Atlantic dedicated an entire issue to it.

OK, I’ll bite. Democracy, by which I mean the freedom of citizens to choose our leaders, is the glue that has held our Republic together for two and a half centuries. It’s central to our survival. But before we obsess about the hypothetical horrors of another Trump presidency, let’s think about what’s been happening to democracy in recent years.

Effective democracy demands free and fair elections. Have we had any problems conducting free and fair elections lately? The answer, of course, is yes. The 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, and the one taking shape in 2024, reveal a frightening trend.

A closer look:

• 2016: Three years of the Trump administration were hijacked by demonstrably false allegations that the 2016 election was won through collusion with Russia. That concerted effort by members of our own government to undo the Trump presidency was the closest our nation has ever come to an actual coup — and it very nearly succeeded.

The collusion narrative grew out of a fictional piece of opposition research purchased by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, then co-opted by receptive individuals in the DOJ and FBI, leading to three years of government turmoil, shaken public confidence, and widespread expectation of impeachment, conviction, and worse.

All that evaporated when the celebrated investigation came up dry. But the damage — including new heights of hyper-partisanship at all levels — was done.

• 2020: That was the truly messy election, resulting in a statistically unlikely win by Joe Biden, fiercely contested by President Trump. Although the election was (and continues to be) touted by Democrats as “fair and transparent,” it was neither. In particular, the 2020 election result was clearly impacted by substantial repression by social media of information important to voters, operating in concert with anti-Trump elements of government to a degree still coming to light.

Prior to the election certification, Trump’s efforts to overturn the results were not particularly unusual — in closely contested elections, candidates on the losing side routinely fight for reversal. On the other hand, his subsequent refusal to accept the election results was reprehensible; his own slap at democracy was harmful to the nation (although it’s far from clear that it fomented Insurrection, as popularly claimed).

But it all started with an election that raised more questions than answers.

• 2024: The truly extraordinary circumstance is that right now, at the heart of the 2024 election season, we have federal and state government entities leveling the full force of government prosecution — so far yielding four indictments with 91 felony charges — against the sitting president’s number-one political opponent.

We’ll spend years debating the necessity, merits and fairness of the legal actions taken against Trump. But there can be no question that those actions and their timing constitute extreme and unprecedented interference into our democratic processes, sure to influence the election outcome one way or the other.

The point of this column is not to support any 2024 presidential candidate; rather it’s to confirm out that the American system is in fact vulnerable, and in recent years it has been abused in plain view and in very harmful ways.

Moreover, while there is room to spread some blame to the GOP, the hard truth is that in each of the three cases outlined above, the election disruption has been instigated by Democrats — the ones who so loudly claim that the proximate threat to American democracy is another Trump term.

The bigger picture, as I see it, is this: Politicians think democracy is terrific — as long as they can get enough people to vote for them. But as soon as the unwashed masses stop buying what they’re selling, they’ll do whatever it takes to hang on to power.

But don’t believe that the threat comes from only one side; and when members of either political faction put their fingers on the scale, don’t reward them with your votes.