The Subjugation of Democracy Part I

On November 2nd, six days before the American midterm elections, President Joe Biden gave an emotional speech where he warned that Americans “can’t take democracy for granted any longer.” He claimed that unspecified candidates for “every level of office” allegedly refused to “commit to accepting the result of the elections.”

Even though he did not spell it out, the president was referring to Republicans loyal to former President Trump. If the president had wanted to make sure that his speech was non-partisan, he could have made clear that he was equally worried about election skeptics from both parties (It is well known, namely, that Democrats have refused to accept Republican presidential-election victories for over 20 years.) Biden also could have made a special mention of the Democrat members of the January 6 committee, which is charged with investigating the aftermath of the 2020 election. Some of those Democrats voted against certifying the 2016 presidential election, simply because they didn’t like the fact that Trump beat his Democrat opponent Hillary Clinton.

President Biden’s ominous reference to ‘democracy in danger’ is not unique. It is part of a new, troubling trend on the left side of the political spectrum. The term ‘democracy’ is less and less often used as a reference to a system of government held above ideological bias. Increasingly, it is being misused as a synonym for an election where ‘the preferred ideology’ won. 

That ideology is socialism. The American left calls it ‘liberalism’ or ‘progressivism,’ but behind the Potemkin rhetoric, they are all branches on the same tree.

The efforts to synonymize democracy with socialism are not limited to America. The European Union is involved in an Orwellian campaign to delegitimize democracy in Hungary. The reason is not that there is anything wrong with the democratic system of government in Hungary; on the contrary, Brussels has never published a single report that shows how Hungarian democracy is not democratic. 

The reason is instead that Hungarian voters keep expressing their satisfaction with their conservative government, in election after election. But before we take a closer look at the magyarophobia among the European leftist elite, let us quickly return to America for one more, illustrative example of Orwellian leftist newspeak. 

According to the Washington Examiner on November 6th—two days before the U.S. midterm elections—the Democrat candidate for governor in Arizona, Katie Hobbs, explained to a group of voters that if “the right people” were not elected, the midterms were “possibly the last election in our lifetime.”

This comment, which has been widely quoted and Hobbs has never denied making, is worrisome given that it comes from a gubernatorial candidate. But it becomes downright shocking when we consider the fact that while running for governor, Hobbs was holding the position of secretary of state for Arizona. This position, which is elected separately from governor, oversees the very integrity of the election system in a state.

In other words, these words of warning were spoken by a person who stands to benefit from an election that she is overseeing—an election for which the integrity and impartiality she is personally responsible. While she did not spell it out, Hobbs did make it seem as though her victory in the gubernatorial race was essential to the very preservation of democracy!

If she thought that her winning the gubernatorial election was of such importance, how can voters in Arizona be sure that she was not abusing her position as secretary of state to help herself become elected governor? If she really believed that democracy as it is actually defined, was in danger if her Republican opponent won, then would Hobbs not have an obvious incentive to use her position to cheat? 

Katie Hobbs, who went on to win and become the next Governor of Arizona, never presented any evidence that her opponent, Kari Lake, would ever put democracy in danger. Therefore, the only way that Governor-elect Hobbs could rationalize her otherwise slanderous comment, is by using a different definition of democracy. Instead of referring to a system of government, Hobbs has to equate ‘democracy’ with her own leftist ideology, by which she intends to govern the state of Arizona. 

All of a sudden, her reasoning makes sense: if “the right people,” meaning leftists like her, are not elected, then Arizona will not be governed under the principles of her leftist ideology.

We need to understand Eurocratic attacks on Hungary in the same way. In fact, it is essential to do so: if conservatives fail to confront the Left on their perversion of the concept of ‘democracy,’ then sooner or later the Left will replace democracy with socialism. 

Yes, it is that serious. To see why, let us again consider who are talking about conservatism as a threat to democracy. Those words are being spoken by people in important elected positions: the president of the United States, the Secretary of State, a gubernatorial candidate in Arizona; a large number of members of the European Parliament, EP.

We should be on high alert when people in positions responsible for the integrity of our government openly ideologize that same government.

To see just how far this transformation of the term ‘democracy’ has gone in Europe, consider the EP’s most recent condemnation of Hungary for not being a democratic country. This resolution was of such a radical nature that the signatories de facto established that they no longer believe in parliamentary democracy. Hungary, they say, is non-democratic not because of its election system—which they for good reasons have never found any problems with—but because of the policies this very system of elections produces. 

The only tangible policies that the EP has a problem with are Hungary’s bans on homosexual adoptions and the spreading of sexually explicit material to children.

It may very well be that the majority of the Members of the European Parliament who voted to vilify Hungary did not consider the apparent ramifications of their own re-definition of democracy. If we look beyond the apparent magyarophobia in their resolution, the EP has now effectively established that a dictatorship can be democratic. 

How? Simple: all the dictator has to do is grant full marital and adoption rights to gay couples and let LGBT activists expose children to pornography. Whether or not there are free elections is irrelevant under this new definition of ‘democracy.’

Brussels has been criticizing Budapest for several years now. Their metamorphosis of the concept of democracy has been going on for at least as long. In 2018, e.g., the European Parliament passed a resolution listing all their grievances with Hungary’s democratic system of government. In an attempt to look as if their assault on Hungary is really about democracy, and not about ideology, the EP divides its grievances into two categories. The first consists of issues that are related to a nation’s form of government (quoted verbatim from the source):

–The functioning of the constitutional and electoral system;

–The independence of the judiciary and of other institutions and the rights of judges; and

–Corruption and conflicts of interest.

The second category is concerned with what policies government pursues:

–Freedom of expression, association, and religion;

–The right to equal treatment;

–The rights of persons belonging to minorities, and protection of said minorities against so-called hate speech;

–The fundamental rights of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees; and

–Economic and social rights.

Again, the issues in the first category concentrate on how to govern, while the issues in the second category are about the ideological intentions and policy outcomes of governing. 

The term ‘democracy’ belongs under the first category, yet the new leftist definition has moved it over to the second category. According to them, ‘democracy’ is no longer a prerequisite for policy making—it is an outcome of policy-making. 

In some instances, the abuse of the term is thinly veiled by a prefix. As we explained back in June, several organizations that are ideologically aligned with the Eurocracy and with the United States government have launched a campaign to spread “liberal democracy” across the Balkans. The true purpose, which is not difficult to unmask, is to prevent the proliferation of conservatism across this southeastern corner of Europe.

We can expect the campaign to distort, and eventually destroy, the concept of democracy to continue. One reason for this is that the political campaign is getting backup from various segments of the academic world. Whenever activists from colleges and universities take an interest in an issue, they tend to make a long career out of it.

In the case of ideologizing democracy, the term of choice in academia is ‘political epistemology.’ The concept itself has deep roots all the way back to Aristotelian philosophy, but the legacy of the great Greek philosopher has been distorted into a primitive shell of what it once was. The term ‘political epistemology’ is a degenerate version of the dynamics between what political theorists of the mid-20th century referred to as the “politics of epistemology” and the “epistemology of politics.” 

Back then, the Aristotelian legacy was still intact insofar as its theoretical application is concerned. The analytical combination of political theory and epistemology was part of the methodology with which political scientists and philosophers understood our society. For a representative example of how it was treated in political science, see Albert Lepawski’s article “The Politics of Epistemology” in The Western Political Quarterly, September 1964, for an excellent overview, concentrated on political science. 

Stanley Rosen takes a more philosophical approach to the same conceptual dynamic in “Political Philosophy and Epistemology,” published in the Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, June 1960. 

More recently, academics have morphed ‘political epistemology’ into a conceptual structure for defining the policy output of government. In other words, it has been changed from a political prerequisite into a political outcome. 

This conceptual reform, which mimics the change to the ‘democracy’ concept in politics, has not happened without painful compromises. What used to be a respectable, even intriguing exercise in political and philosophical theory has been downgraded to the crude levels of punditry. 

German philosopher Martin Ebeling offers a prime example in an article called “Epistemic Political Egalitarianism, Political Parties, and Conciliatory Democracy” in the October 2016 edition of Political Theory. Ebeling argues, in effect, that individuals are unable to formulate perfectly informed opinions of a kind that is necessary for participation in a parliamentary democracy. To do so, he says, individuals need political parties, which he refers to as “collective epistemic agents.” Only when individuals allow their opinions to be formed by the parties can they make rational choices in elections. 

The obvious question, then, is what opinions these academic pundits believe are rational. In the second part of this analysis, we will take a deep look at exactly how the academic Left hijacked democracy and perverted it into a seal of approval for their socialist ideology. For now, here is a teaser in the form of a video from a conference at the Institute for Philosophy in London.

Take a few minutes and watch how a large group of academics forms a rhetorically coherent circle around their fears of voters who supported Trump and Brexit.