“Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter. ... At least ninety-five Americans out of every 100 believe that this process is honest and even laudable; it is practically impossible to convince them that there is anything evil in it. In other words, they cannot grasp the concept of liberty.”
— H.L. Mencken, 1925
Love, as much as it may guide us to the zenith of life, can also blind us to the perilous paths we have chosen – and the perils of “Our Democracy” are more bountiful than that of any particular femme fatale.
Accordingly, 2024 appears to be another election cycle destined to break hearts en masse. Will democracy scorn her professed champions like she did in 2016? Word is, she may be getting back together again with an old flame, one President Donald J. Trump, and much to the dismay of democracy’s professional lovers, nothing seems able to extinguish that flame.
No matter how much the American elite abuse democracy to save democracy – the recent indictments of Trump being a naked display of the American oligarchy’s abject lust for power – a democratic passion still burns for Trump.
None of this is anything new. Ever since he descended that escalator, Trump has brought out the worst of the American elite’s jealousy and hypocrisy. Not only have elites called him every evil name in the book, they continue to project every single one of their own past and future abuses of American liberty onto him.
Take, for instance, the laments of neoconservative Robert Kagan from 2016. In his piece “This is how fascism comes to America,” Kagan claims that the populism which Trump “tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleased, the ‘mobocracy.’”
Kagan continues:
Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms.
I, too, take Tocqueville and other philosophers seriously when they warn us of democracy’s perils. But where was Kagan or all the other guardians of democracy in the years leading up to Trump’s rise?
Do the supposed defenders of America’s crumbling institutions really think the movements that backed Biden, Obama, W. Bush, and Clinton were friendly to liberty and refrained from stoking the fears, vanities, ambitions, and insecurities of the people?
Do they really believe the last 30 years of undeclared wars, unrestrained debt, unconstitutional mass surveillance, mass illegal migration, and a massive policy of inflation were healthy for American institutions?
Does this brood of vipers not understand that democracy was a danger long before Trump ever found success in electoral politics? Or that they, more than Trump, are the danger they warn against? And that they are more complicit in the bloody evisceration of America than any of Trump’s accused crimes?
Tragically, amid their moans for democracy, most Trump detractors still do not seem to grasp the concept of liberty nor know themselves. Most damn Trump, not because of their differences with him or their love of liberty, but because they see an aspect of themselves in the Donald –the lust for power over others.
In practice, like all forms of government, democracy has never lived up to its ideal. “Mobocracy” is not exclusive to our time or any particular political party. Playing on people's insecurities and fears of "the other" is not exclusive to America First. These are not flaws of a know-nothing populist reactionary movement but features of democracy itself.
As Oscar Wilde said of democracy in 1891 in “The Soul of Man under Socialism”:
High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising.
Compared to Kagan’s screed, Wilde’s assessment of democracy strikes me as a much more plausible exegesis of the Trump phenomenon: a spirit of revolt after years of being “violently, grossly, and cruelly used.”
That said, Trump’s revolt is not quite in the spirit of individualism either, but does that make him a unique threat to democracy?
No. As Pat Buchanan explained back in 2016, the Trump revolt is animated by a resurgence of American nationalism. But nationalism will not kill our democracy by any means.
American democracy has not only survived nationalist fervor throughout the nation’s short history; it has often encouraged it at the expense of individual liberty. When given the choice, democracy will usually side with nationalism against liberty, if necessary.
Yet, there is hope – hope that this current age of revolt and tumult has given us in the revolutionary spirit of 1776 another consequence the American elite did not intend – a growing population of Americans more in love with their God-given liberties than any promise Trump, Biden, or “Our Democracy” could ever offer.
Joey Clark is a native Alabamian and is currently the host of the radio program News and Views on News Talk 93.1 FM WACV out of Montgomery, AL M-F 12 p.m. - 3 p.m. His column appears every Tuesday in 1819 News. To contact Joey for media or speaking appearances as well as any feedback, please email joeyclarklive@gmail.com. Follow him on X @TheJoeyClark or watch the radio show livestream.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to Commentary@1819news.com.
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