By roibu @Shutterstock
In the catchall phrase “Our Democracy,” today’s progressives are alluding to one of their modern virtues – inclusion. But as any good progressive would say, that is a false narrative, Daniel Henninger explains in the WSJ.
Worse than Carbon Emissions
When progressives refer to “our democracy,” what they mean is their democracy. To be a member of their democracy, one has to share their beliefs. If you’re not in, you’re out. And if you’re out, they may come after you for being a threat to democracy. Other than carbon emissions, what could be worse?
In the Washington Post recently, Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat, wrote a piece titled, “Our democracy faced a near-death experience.” Four paragraphs in, Ms. Abrams places Republicans outside democracy: “Our democratic system faces extraordinary threats today because of sustained attacks from Republican leaders who throw up roadblocks to voting and, among the worst actors, stoke the flames of white supremacy and hyper-nationalism to cling to power.”
Which brings us to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia. Is Ms. Greene, asks Mr. Henninger, a member of our democracy, or not?
On Nov. 3, more than 300,000 Georgians cast votes in the state’s 14th Congressional District. Of these, Ms. Greene received 229,827 votes. One month later, 230 representatives, including every Democrat present, voted to strip Rep. Greene of her seats on the chamber’s committees. It was an act without precedent. In effect and result, House Democrats eviscerated the November election by imposing de minimis representation on the people of Georgia’s 14th District for two years.
This is an astonishing and destructive event. Republicans now say they may do the same when they regain House control, perhaps by stripping committee assignments from Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota for her anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that U.S. support for Israel is “all about the (Benjamin’s) baby.”
How does voting to demote the election in a Georgia congressional district, no matter how freakish its representative’s views, square with “our democracy”?
Within days of that House vote, an inevitable corollary event arrived, with a New York Times columnist suggesting that in light of “our [that word again] national reality crisis,” some academics were urging the creation of a federal “reality czar,” whose office would identify and presumably correct false thinking.
A More Cynical Interpretation
Correcting “false thinking” is just another weapon to win elections, continues Mr. Henninger. Make the post-Trump threat so cartoonishly large that no “serious person” can vote with the marching-moron Republicans.
Cynicism notwithstanding, Americans are living through a kind of informational dystopia. Some of it came from Donald Trump, who fed the postelection anxiety through Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. But that alone can’t account for the mass psychosis among progressives now about those who dissent from being shaped by their templates for “our democracy.”
Even more disturbing than Marjorie Taylor Greene (a whack job who ended up in Congress) are the many “once-liberal intellectuals, journalists and upper-middle-class urbanites who are becoming utterly alienated from normal—yes, normal—people throughout the country.”
