If you’ve listened much to what Democrats have been saying over the last few years, you’ll know they are supposedly very concerned about our democracy and its direction. They’ve even used it as one of their main talking points in the past few months leading up to this past week’s midterms.
According to them, ‘mega MAGA Republicans’ are threatening the very existence of democracy in the United States. And thanks to events like last January’s capital incursion, some might have even begun to believe those lies.
However, that talking point has become a bit moot as time continues, with the Democratic Party controlling the White House, the US Senate, and the House of Representatives.
Why?
For starters, voters realized there were more pressing things to discuss ahead of the elections. You know, things like rising crime rates, exploding inflation, and far too open borders. That’s not to say that voters don’t care about democracy or if it is intact in the US.
On the contrary, it’s everything. If we don’t have democracy, there is no voting to be done. And that means putting the issues’ we, the people,’ care about in the forefront is crucial.
Of course, the Democrats, with the very word ‘democracy’ supposedly implied in their name, aren’t about to let that be known.
Instead, they’d like you to believe that democracy has an entirely different meaning.
Take a speech by sleepy President Joe Biden, for example.
Just before the midterm elections, he took one last stab at saying that democracy was being threatened and could very well be snuffed out by voters putting the GOP in charge. He told the audience, “We must vote, knowing what’s at stake is not just the policy of the moment, but institutions that have held us together as w have sought a perfect union are also at stake. We must vote to know who we have been and what we risk becoming.”
Supposedly, we risk becoming something other than a democracy simply by holding criminals accountable, lowering inflation, and bolstering education.
But as more than a few have pointed out, that’s not what makes a democracy a democracy.
If you are familiar with the entomology of the word, you will know that it comes from the Greek demokratia, with demos meaning ‘people’ and Kratos meaning ‘rule.’ The word means “rule by the people.”
Dictionary.com also defines that word as “a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or their elected agent under a free electoral system.”
This means the people are in charge. We get to decide who leads us, our laws, and even how we decide upon those laws.
Democracy is not putting specific policies in place or leaning one way. The vote is a democracy, the fact that the people are choosing.
It’s also important to point out that over the centuries, even the most communist countries have claimed to be ‘democratic.’
Take the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” known as North Korea. As Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently noted, Kim Il Sung called the murder of any that opposed his rule in 1946 “democratic reform.” And his grandson, Kim Jong Un, still runs his so-called democracy that way.
History class might have taught you that the Bolsheviks also thought of themselves as democrats with a bit of d. they even promised “more democracy” when they came into power in 1917. But what they created, the Soviet Union, was anything but democratic, as you well know. East Germany was also called a democracy at one point – as was North Vietnam, Albania under Enver Hoxha, and Ethiopia under Mengistu.
And yet, we all know that their version of ‘democracy’ isn’t precisely ‘rule by the people.’ Instead, one person or party rules under the guise of giving freedoms and being merciful. They might still have elections, but it’s only to make it seem like the people are making decisions. Behind closed doors, those leaders and criminals are already chosen.
So when Biden says, “Democracy is on the ballot,” that’s not true. As long as the people still control who wins, democracy is still alive and well, and the results just might not be to Biden’s liking.