Real Threats to the Democracy

After Tuesday, November 5, it will become clear who had a sufficient number of electoral votes to win the 2024 presidential election, former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. The election, we have been repeatedly told by pollsters, is “too close to call.”

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Political commentators, of course, are not content to wait on certainty. It is speculation, some of it improbable, not certainty, that sells newspapers.

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On the Republican side, Trump and Vice President Nominee J. D. Vance appear to be gathering momentum in the two weeks before the election, but momentum is not always dispositive. Money and positive coverage are also important in elections.

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If Harris wins the presidency in November, the attempt by Democrats to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a popular vote may well succeed. The Electoral College was first introduced by the founders because they did not want populous states to push smaller states out of the running. And, even today, if presidents were to be chosen by popular vote – 50% of votes cast plus one – presidents will be elected by large states and cities only. Or, to put it in other terms, nearly all of the country will be denied an effective presidential franchise. This, one may reasonably suppose, will not disturb the consciences of Democrats, who control most of the larger cities in the nation.

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The Electoral College is not an institution whose time has passed. It is a necessary part of what neo-progressive Democrats might call in their sunnier moods “the democracy,” under constant threat, so we are told, by presumptive “fascists” who wish to impose upon the country a new political order that would effectively abolish democracy’s guard rails. The move to eliminate the Electoral College is profoundly undemocratic.

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Neo-progressives have yet to explain why any measure that would extend the voting franchise to citizens of foreign countries is “democratic,” however one chooses to define the term. Secure borders prevent those who illegally cross into the United States from polluting the voting franchise. Those who have dismantled guardrails that prevent the unvetted passage into the United States of citizens of Venezuela, to choose one country among many, cannot reasonably claim to uphold democracy. Open borders are profoundly undemocratic, because they introduce into the country illegal unvetted immigrants under false pretenses. The Biden-Harris administration has now shown its disdain for border security by facilitating illegal entry. Planeloads of illegal migrants may now thumb their noses at a border-in-name-only as they are transported across vanishing borders by politicians who, when elected to office in November 2024, may conspire to readjust laws and borders that protect their constituents’ inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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Commentators, in the meantime, have turned their attention to “What if?“ questions. What if Trump loses the election? What if Trump wins the election? If he wins by a sufficient majority, will the down-ballot vote be sufficient to pull Republican majorities into the national legislature, state legislatures and, where applicable, state executives offices?

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This possibility, rattling in the synapses of Democrats, has set brains afire.

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In a column printed in the Hartford Courant, Jonah Goldberg, addresses one of these questions and concludes, in “A Republican rebound, if Trump loses, seems likely,” that the Republican Party will survive the loss. Goldberg is the past senior editor of National Review, the Bill Buckley inspired magazine that, early in Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, devoted an entire issue to “Never Trump.” Goldberg rightly doubts that the Republican Party will disappear if Trump wins or loses the 2024 election.

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Can Trumpism survive Trump? Goldberg tells us, “… other [Republican] candidates who sought the party’s nomination this year generally spoke the Reaganite language of the traditional GOP because that is where their instincts remain. There will be a battle for the future of the party, to be sure. But Trump’s departure from presidential politics would presage the end of the Republican identity crisis, not the beginning.”

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Goldberg is skeptical concerning a recent claim by Axios: “Axios predicted that the party would be plagued by an “identity crisis,” a “brutal power struggle” and “years in the wilderness.” Why? Because “never before has a party’s identity been so deeply entwined with the fate, fortunes and flaws of one man.” On the bright side, the US survived two World Wars and a Cold War with the now kaput Soviet Union, showing that the country has remarkable powers of regeneration.

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Should Trump win election, Americans will find that at the end of his single term in office the pillars of the Republic will still be standing.? Venezuela just now, under the thumb of a hapless socialist/communist regime for the past 22 years, finds itself in danger of reverting to its once vibrant capitalism under pressure from one of the most courageous women of the new century, the indomitable Maria Corina Machado.

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This writer praised Machado in July: “The propaganda has worn very thin in Venezuela, once the Venice of South America, now a communist-Stalinist ash heap. The country’s current Stalin, Nicolás Maduro, president of Venezuela since 2013, is holding on to power, but a vigorous populist opposition led by Maria Corina Machado, is inching forward. Maduro has his terror and his bullets and his jail cells, still effective methods of persuasion within South American communist countries. But Machado, called the ‘Iron Lady of Venezuela,’ has her rosary beads and a truly revolutionary message. According to a report in The New York Times, ‘On the campaign trail, she has promised to “bury socialism forever” and create a nation where “the criminals and the corrupt go to prison.”

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The whole notion of Trump turning the United States into a corrupt authoritarian state like Venezuela – and in four years too! -- is campaign claptrap. So is the notion that Trump is a fascist. Asked to define fascism, the founder of the fascist movement in Europe, Benito Mussolini, said – everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state. Mussolini was a socialist journalist before he invented fascism. The fascist description of fascism is hardly compatible with American conservatism. ?

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People in the United States are very good at making proper distinctions between sense and nonsense. Trump is not Maduro or Hugo Chávez, both socialists. Neither is Harris a moderate version of President Joe Biden. Her career path in politics points left, feints to the middle notwithstanding.