On Wednesday, President Joe Biden took his last stab at making “democracy” a midterm issue.
So far, that feint hasn’t worked. For a few weeks, the administration’s saber-rattling about “mega-MAGA Republicans” and the threat they posed to the American people got a little bit of traction.
Then, people realized that inflation, crime, the economy and illegal immigration were still real things and the whole “threat to democracy” piffle was discarded as quickly as it was trotted out.
But this week, seizing upon the attack on Paul Pelosi as a thin pretext for bringing out the leftovers, Biden tried again, this time telling America that “democracy is on the ballot” and that we could only vote for the Democrats if we wanted free and fair elections in the future.
“I appeal to all Americans, regardless of party, to meet this moment of national and generational importance,” Biden said. “We must vote, knowing what’s at stake is not just the policy of the moment, but institutions that have held us together as we have sought a more perfect union are also at stake. We must vote knowing who we have been, what we’re at risk of becoming.”
Vote for one party, else we’ll become a one-party state. Solid rhetoric, that. But it wasn’t just the transparency of the president’s argument, Tucker Carlson told his audience on Fox News Thursday night. Instead, we should all be worried about what Joe Biden thinks “democracy” is.
As he noted, communist countries believe they’re “democratic,” too. Just look at the name of what’s arguably the world’s most repressive nation: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, better known to the rest of us as North Korea.
“In his very first speech as leader of North Korea in 1946, Kim Il Sung described the total destruction of any opposition to his rule, the killing of his political opponents as ‘democratic reforms,’” Carlson noted. “Almost 80 years later, his grandson, Kim Jong Un, continues to run North Korea as a ‘democracy.’”
Is ‘democracy on the ballot’ this Tuesday?
Yes: 41% (43 Votes)
No: 59% (63 Votes)
They’re not the only communist state that legitimately believed this, either: “The Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917 by promising a lot more democracy,” Carlson continued. “The country they created, the Soviet Union, became the most oppressive police state in history. Yet it was, you should know, a democracy. That’s what they called it. East Germany was a democracy, too, so was North Vietnam, so is Ethiopia under Mengistu, so was Albania under the madman Enver Hoxha.”
“In their version of democracy, all decisions are made by a shadowy oligarchy, usually fronted by a strongman,” Carlson said. “Elections still take place, but the point isn’t to find out what the population thinks or wants. The point is to lend an aura of legitimacy to the criminals already in charge.”
Biden is hardly Stalin, Hoxha or any of the Kims. However, even if the leader is sleepier, more confused and less repressive than a Soviet bloc ruler, the tactics are the same — if constrained in what they can accomplish by the American system of democracy, in which “you get to elect anyone you want because it’s your government.”
That’s why, Carlson says, we should all be concerned about rhetoric like “democracy is on the ballot.”
“No, Joe Biden. The names of candidates are on the ballot,” Carlson said.
“Democracy is not on the ballot, because democracy is not determined by the outcome of an election, Democracy is the election itself,” he continued. “Democracy is the process by which citizens choose how they will be governed according to their own desires.
“That’s their choice. It’s not yours, but Joe Biden is telling you the opposite, and you should know that.”
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“He’s telling you that unless you arrive at a very specific outcome, the very outcome he commands you to arrive at, the system itself is illegitimate,” Carlson continued.
“We control the system. We have a moral right to control the system. Therefore, if we lose control of the system, the system itself can no longer exist.”
It’s not as if Biden is alone in echoing this inane point. Barack Obama warned that, while voters might not see “democracy” as “a top priority right now,” failing to vote for the good guys ends with dissenters being “put in jail” or with reporters being silenced.
For big-D Democrats, therefore, America needs to be a one-party state to save little-d democracy in the United States. Anything less and it’s no longer a democracy.
“A rejection of Joe Biden’s party, from their perspective, is the end of the system itself and they clearly believe that. They mean it,” Carlson said.
Just know that when they use the word “democracy,” they don’t mean it the same way your civics teacher did. If our American democratic system throws the bums out of power, Soviet-style faux democracy has lost.
That’s the “democracy” that’s on the ballot. Don’t feel bad about voting against it, no matter how loudly the Biden administration beats the drum. In fact, our system of actual democracy depends upon America rejecting it this coming Tuesday.
