Whose democracy?

On Sunday, President Joe Biden announced he would no longer seek the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. The news was not surprising. Party insiders and elected Democratic officials had been pressuring him in the weeks after his disastrous debate performance against former President Donald Trump. Trump’s rise in the polls and increased popularity in the aftermath of an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., only made the calls for Biden to step down more intense. If these had been merely noncoercive appeals to the president’s better angels, there might not be much to talk about.

The underhanded and seemingly undemocratic way that Biden’s withdrawal has been handled has understandably led to comparisons to palace coups of ages past. Press leaks and backroom dealings done over and against the votes of millions of primary voters understandably put a bad taste in those voters’ mouths, and they call into question the near-constant hand-wringing, particularly on the left and center-left about the fall of what is so often called “our democracy.”

Before the Trump era, calls for democracy were usually joined by warnings about the power of the state. Alan Moore’s novel V for Vendetta is a leftist fantasy about anarchic liberals overthrowing a reactionary government in a dystopian Britain. “People shouldn’t be afraid of their government,” Moore wrote. “Governments should be afraid of their people.” The state, therefore, could not presume to govern the people in democracies. The people govern themselves. The American people, not the government, are competent to address any trials and tribulations that come their way. John F. Kennedy said the American republic was “not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

For the past three years, the federal government has acted as if it is afraid of or even contemptuous of the American people. Promises about transparency have given way to obfuscation regarding President Biden’s health and his ability to govern. Calls for accountability after near-routine incompetence at the highest levels of government have been met with derisions and dismissiveness. President Biden taunted political dissenters, telling them they’d need F-15s to take on the government. “Our democracy” in 2024 looks increasingly like the governing clique’s desire to hold on to power no matter what the people think.

The modern governmental bureaucracy, ossified and bloated after years of unaccountability and decadence, fought Donald Trump tooth and nail for four years. That Trump was a deeply flawed politician—and an even more deeply flawed man—did not and does not give the government license to ignore the votes of millions of his supporters. Likewise, the palpable fear that these same agents of the federal government forced Biden to withdraw—disregarding the votes of his primary voters—should lead sober-minded people of goodwill in both parties to ask about just how real warnings about “threats to democracy” really are.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned about potential catastrophe for democracies: “Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate.” This procedural servitude, the Frenchman added, “does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

When modern politicians and their comrades in the modern mainstream media warn about “our democracy,” we should not take their statements at face value just because certain agencies or corporations deeply invested in secular liberal proceduralism say so. The American people are not sheep. What makes the candidacy of Donald Trump compelling is not his moral stature or even his vision for the country but his seeming willingness to treat the American people as agents of their own destiny. The lifted fist and the cry of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” resonate with people who believe they are free and their government must, should, and will eventually listen to them.

The truest democracy is not people appealing to electoral proceduralism and palace coups in the defense of a specific progressive and post-liberal regime headed by longtime federal players. Tocqueville said it was “difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.” The truest democracy is a republic of citizens who believe they have a voice and who believe they have the right and duty to fight for their own liberties.