The Death Throes of Democracy? ‘The Revolt of the Elites’ at 30

Democracy, the Washington Post warns in every issue and on its website, “dies in darkness.” Whatever does this mean? And who turned out the light? The newspaper adopted the slogan in February 2017. Did something significant happen shortly before then? Ah yes, a certain presidential election, which a certain candidate won in surprising fashion. The WaPo’s slogan seems to suggest that that event was a harbinger of a new Dark Age, one that could prove fatal for our democracy.

In a more direct salvo, George Scialabba writes in Commonweal (Feb.) that democracy “cannot survive a permanently, systematically deluded” electorate that would vote for such a candidate — three times, no less! The man is, after all, “the most immoral, even psychopathic human being ever to occupy the presidency,” he claims, “by many orders of magnitude.”

According to liberals like Scialabba (an apostate Catholic who calls himself an “ethical socialist”), the WaPo crowd, and other denizens of the chattering class, Donald Trump’s political ascendancy has put American democracy in grave peril. They have successfully advanced the notion that anything that runs counter to the prevailing political correctness (or anything Trump and his minions say or do) is an attack on democracy. Conversely, anything that advances the progressive agenda, specifically the interests of “underrepresented minorities,” is an act of democracy. Major news outlets, liberal thought-leaders, talking heads, and rival politicos repeat this theme ad nauseam. It’s basically axiomatic now. The ACLU, that sine qua non of liberal elitism, for instance, called Trump’s rolling back DEI programs “an immediate and sweeping threat to our multiracial democracy.” But it called the racially motivated riots in response to George Floyd’s death in 2020 “essential to protecting our democracy.”