Ever since the election of Donald Trump, we have heard ad nauseam about the threat to democracy from Trump and his "enablers."  Meanwhile, the Democrats plan to pack the Supreme Court, the Biden administration rules by executive fiat, and Big Business and the media — now firmly behind the despotic Democratic agenda — silence all dissent.

The anti-American left, under the banners of equality, anti-discrimination, and inclusiveness, have unleashed their dream of an all-out war against whom they anticipate being the future minority of the country: white, Christian, and conservative Americans.  Everything they loathe, once hallmarks of American democracy, is recast as vestiges of white male supremacism and racism permitting their execution at the hands of executive action: the filibuster, the Second Amendment, religious liberty, 1776, and the list goes on.

The left doesn't care about American democracy.  It only hoists up the banner of protecting democracy when it suits leftists' lust for power.  And that's what leftists understand: politics is about power, and they are never afraid to wield power when they have it.  Even when they don't have it, they are willing to fight tooth and nail to gain it — through force or the ballot box.

Leftists, when they rampage through cities, destroy private property, and storm state legislatures, claim that this is "democracy in action."  Liberals always give cover to their own and excuse the vandalism and barbarism of their fellow travelers who "have their heart in the right place," while people on the right always denounces itself while self-flagellating, at the same time hoping to appear acceptable by people who otherwise hate them and will continue to hate them even after death.

The lurch toward this dictatorship of the presidency isn't surprising.  In fact, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his magisterial study of democracy in the newborn republic, wrote that there may well come a time when the presidency would assume "royal prerogatives" and govern dictatorially in the name of American democracy.  But no one needs to read Tocqueville anymore, since he was a white European and Christian male and is persona non grata on all of those counts.

Tocqueville's celebration of American democracy was in its localized vibrancy.  Tocqueville lauded that America hadn't the apparatus of a federal state: "Nothing is more striking to an European traveller in the United States than the absence of what we term the Government, or the Administration."

In place of that central administration governing everything, Tocqueville marveled at the localities, municipalities, and small townships teeming with democratic life and civil society: "It is not the administrative but the political effects of the local system I most admire in America."  Tocqueville goes on, in succeeding chapter after chapter, to detail the municipalities and local communities he traversed as the beating heart of "democracy in America."

However, Tocqueville was also a shrewd observer of the nature of political tyranny and the lust in men to wield such power — however they dress it up.  The American Constitution, Tocqueville noted, was designed with checks and balances deliberately to safeguard democratic vibrancy, pluralism, and differences.  However, there might come a time when these democratic pluralisms would be seen as a threat to the state, to the central union, which would necessitate centralization and dictatorship.

The purpose of dictatorship, Tocqueville noted, is to stomp out difference, individual action and activity, and socialized uniformity: "Centralization imparts without difficulty an admirable regularity to the routine of business; provides for the details of the social police with sagacity; represses the smallest disorder and the most petty misdemeanors; maintains society in a status-quo alike secure from improvement and decline; and perpetuates a drowsy precision in the conduct of affairs, which is hailed by heads of the administration as a sign of perfect order and public tranquillity: in short, it excels more in prevention than in action."

At the heart of this dictatorship of centralization would be the presidency.  The executive powers of the presidency, Tocqueville predicted, would render the Congress (and the individual states) irrelevant.  The Courts would, in turn, abdicate their power as a check against the Executive and largely consent to the presidential dictatorship.  This is why the Democrats want to pack the Court with the Biden presidency; now is their time to crush, once and for all, the check of the Supreme Court on executive dictatorial power.

Moreover, the key to destroying American democracy, Tocqueville sharply noted, would be in the name of saving American democracy: "If the existence of the Union were perpetually threatened, and if the chief interests were in daily connection with those of other powerful nations, the executive government would assume an increased importance in proportion to the measures expected of it, and those which it would carry into effect."  This is the precise rhetoric we hear from Democrats: that they are "unpacking" the Supreme Court and advancing democracy through their Court schemes, which are really about affirming presidential dictatorship.

Tocqueville's prediction is frightening.  If the Union were "threatened" — and we constantly hear now about how it's threatened: threatened by domestic terrorism, threatened by white men, threatened by Donald Trump, threatened by "lies," threatened by right-wing extremism, threatened by anything that isn't the anti-American left, etc. — then the presidency would assume its supreme prerogative and powers and govern dictatorially.

Get ready, folks.  With the Democrats back in the White House, we will hear, constantly, how America is threatened by something just so the dictatorship of the Democratic presidency can rule without checks and balances, without pushback, without consent or accountability.  (So much for democracy.)

The real enemies of democracy are the Democrats and their cronies all over the media, Big Business, and destructive activism.  Conservatives need to understand this and call them out on their anti-democratic agenda.  We are the real guardians of democracy, the rule of the people, and the sanctity and importance of civil society against the encroachments of the totalitarian and parasitic bureaucratic state.  And we mustn't be afraid to use power to check power.  That was the original purpose of the Constitution and why the power and vibrancy of civil society and the courts must be crushed by the Democrats to make us all subservient to the federal state.

Image via Max Pixel.

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