The real threat to democracy comes from above

When a former US president and current presidential candidate is being loudly denounced everywhere from the media to academia, as not just wrong but a fascist, an authoritarian populist and a threat to American democracy itself, it suggests that there is more at stake in this election than the cost of living.

Amid all the ongoing uncertainty about the result of the US presidential election, the campaign has made one thing crystal clear: America’s political and cultural elites, clustered around Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris, don’t like democracy. Because they fear and loathe the demos, the people.

This election campaign has raised bigger issues than the unimpressive choice between vice-president Harris and the Republican Party candidate, former president Donald Trump. It has confirmed that the real threat to democracy today comes from above, not below: from the forces of the left-liberal establishment whose global crusade against ‘populism’ is a thinly veiled attack on those large parts of the populace who refuse to think and vote as instructed.

In the through-the-looking-glass world of contemporary politics, these elitists can even claim to be ‘defending democracy’ by trying to contain and restrict it. They see the two classical elements of democracy – as defined by the ancient Athenians as demos, the people, and kratos, power – as in conflict, and aim to keep one as far away from the other as possible.

They mobilised the courts in an effort to bar Trump from even standing for election, to deny Americans the democratic choice to vote for him. They removed the doddery President Joe Biden from the Democratic Party ticket, in defiance of the 14million Democrats who selected him in the primaries, and replaced him with Harris, who precisely nobody voted for. Now they are seriously and publicly discussing how to subvert the election result if the unthinkable happens and ‘he’ wins. You need not be an admirer of Trump to recognise this as the big danger to democracy.

As election day looms and the polls show Trump doing better than expected, the left-liberal attacks on him and his supporters have become increasingly hysterical. Democrats have tried to wave away President Biden’s instantly infamous declaration last week that Trump supporters are ‘garbage’ as some sort of misquote. In fact, it was entirely consistent with the establishment’s view of many American voters, going back to Hillary Clinton branding Trump voters as the ‘deplorables’ in the 2016 election.

Across the liberal media, Trump has been constantly demonised as an ‘authoritarian populist’, a ‘threat to democracy’ and, increasingly, a ‘fascist’, a nonsensical view backed from Harris and Biden downwards. Trump’s New York rally last month was compared by mainstream media to those held by Adolf Hitler, even though, as spiked argued, there was nothing remotely ‘fascist’ or ‘Nazi’ about it. But then, the commentators weren’t interested in accurate historical comparisons. They were simply appalled by the very idea of a mass political movement of people outside of the establishment’s control, with views that Britain’s ITV News looked down upon in snobbish horror as expressing ‘a theme of racism and vulgarity’. Which do they think is worse?

(Of course Trump has also, on occasion, called his opponents ‘Marxists and communists and fascists’. The difference is that this shrill rhetoric is seen as proof that he’s a threat to democracy, while calling Trump a fascist is supposedly proof that you are a defender of it.)

Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man and doyen of liberal American academics, rather gives the game away in the cover story he has written for a dull UK journal, headlined ‘Make no mistake: Donald Trump is a demagogue’. The label ‘demagogue’ is here brandished as the Greek oligarchs used it, to mean a dangerous rabble-rouser. Its actual original meaning is simply ‘leader of the people’, a dangerous idea to an oligarch, but hardly anathema to democracy.

At the end of the article, Fukuyama comes clean and declares it is a ‘most distressing’ and ‘depressing’ sign of the state of US democracy that, despite all the best efforts of the fear-mongers over the past eight years, still ‘just under 50 per cent of voters say they are willing to support Trump in this election’. In other words, for these elitists the trouble with democracy is that people can vote for the wrong thing! The Obamas have even felt moved to attack disobedient black voters for daring to consider not supporting Harris.

What if Americans refuse to follow orders, do the unthinkable and vote the ‘wrong way’? The elites are now openly discussing how to sabotage a second Trump presidency.

Last month, the New York Times, bible of the liberal clerisy, published a remarkable essay by two professors of government at Harvard University. For Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Trump is a fascist who ‘poses a clear threat to American democracy’. The trouble with democracy, they learnedly opine, is that ‘Good ideas don’t always win out’ in elections. So, what to do if the people get it wrong and the bad man wins?

The Harvard professors outline several non-democratic ways to deal with such a shortcoming of American democracy. Their favourite option appears to be what they call, with a neo-Orwellian twist, ‘militant democracy’ – basically wielding the power of state institutions to forcibly constrain the exercise of the misguided people’s will. But they sadly conclude that this door has been temporarily closed by the refusal of the Supreme Court to kick Trump off the ballot paper.

This leaves them to propose a strategy of ‘societal mobilisation’ against a Trump administration as ‘democracy’s last bastion of defence’. This would apparently involve the elites using extra-democratic means to move against the elected president. Or as they put it, ‘influential groups and societal leaders – chief executives, religious leaders, labour leaders and prominent retired public officials – must speak out, reminding citizens of the red lines that democratic societies must never cross. And when politicians cross those red lines, society’s most prominent voices must publicly and forcefully repudiate them.’ The professors express their frustration that religious and business leaders have not started to mobilise against Trump even before the election. ‘The US establishment is sleepwalking toward a crisis’, they warn. ‘What are they waiting for?’

So here we have two Harvard professors of government, using the platform of the New York Times effectively to call for an elite-led revolt to overthrow a Trump election victory – all presented as ‘democracy’s last bastion of defence’, of course. To save US democracy from itself, then, we need the elites to hold it in check. Which might sound a bit like that US army officer in Vietnam infamously explaining how ‘It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it’.

The elitists are terrified of the prospect of millions of people refusing to do as they are told and instead voting as they see fit. ‘Democracy’ is all very well so long as it suits the interests of those with the kratos; but if the demos take democracy too literally and seek to assert their will, that’s an entirely different matter. As one former member of Barack Obama’s administration put it, the elites believe that you can have ‘too much of a good thing’ and that Western society ‘might be a healthier democracy if [it] were a slightly less democratic one’. For some liberals in high places these days it seems that, where popular democracy is concerned, less really could be more.

And this is far from restricted to America, of course. We might recall how 2024 began with a stream of top-level warnings about the global ‘year of democracy’, in which billions were due to vote worldwide, with doom-laden headlines such as ‘2024 is the year of elections and that’s a threat to democracy’ (Bloomberg) and ‘Can democracy survive 2024?’ (Financial Times). As the year ends with the global elites prepared to use their power to thwart the popular will from the US to the EU, the future of democracy is on the line.

Mick Hume is a spiked columnist. The concise and abridged edition of his book, Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?, is published by William Collins.