(Oil & Gas 360) – A hallmark of democracy is that, after an election, the losing parties accept the results and become the “loyal opposition”. As such, they accept the results and loyally support the government with alert scrutiny of its actions to guide their informed criticism expressed within customary procedures of civil discourse.
Occasional heated expressions of unacceptable language do exist but those can be dismissed as caused by passions, or human failings, of the moment. Attacks on personal character or family are only acceptable if those affect matters of state.
Other premises of electoral government success include the rule of law, tolerance, freedom of expression, equality of opportunity, employment, housing, and education, and lack of corruption.
These principles no longer apply in political affairs in the United States. Various Democratic senators and congressmen have pledged all-out efforts to defeat any and all initiatives, legislations, and actions by the Trump Administration, with full heated support by many media personalities and state and local government officers. These actions are in direct opposition to the requirements for elected government stability.
The Obama and Biden Administrations violated the principles of elective government in several ways:
- Using law enforcement agencies to investigate, tie up in kangaroo courts, withhold and suppress evidence, falsify and manipulate evidence, harass, and imprison political opponents as was done repeatedly against Trump.
- Using government agencies to pressure media to censor communications and public announcements by political opponents.
- Intensely harassing a sitting President with legal actions, media attacks, and opposition from government agencies and officials.
- Threatening Supreme Court judges.
- Advocating packing the Supreme Court to influence opinions. Advocated strongly by Chuck Schumer, Democratic leader of the Senate.
- Using government regulatory agencies against opposing political parties. As done by the Obama Administration using the Internal Revenue Service to scrutinize and investigate conservative groups.
- Corrupting the election process as was done by expanding mail-in voting, allowing voting by non-citizens, extending the voting period over several weeks, and opposing voter ID requirements as done in several states for federal, state, and local elections, attempting to remove opposition candidates from ballots.
- Opening the borders for unrestricted immigration to corrupt the election process.
Despite all this, or in concert with these acts, the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) continues its campaign of publishing essays and interviews depicting Donald Trump as a threat to democracy – obviously doing its part to undermine the results of the election. Its essayist, Francis Fukuyama, was joined after the election by his colleague at the Hoover Institution, Larry Diamond, in this campaign. Fukuyama claims that “all the wrong people” voted for Trump. The “wrong people” it should be noted are a majority of the American people. He carries this argument further with a world-spanning review of “backsliding” and “receding” democracies. His review presents the instability of democracies convincingly for everyone except himself. He also seems to think the wrong people voted against democracy everywhere.
As I noted previously, Fukuyama wrote a book over 30 years ago with the thesis that after the defeat of Soviet Communism in the Cold War the world had accepted democracy as the dominant form of government it would follow until the end of time. He ignored a few small facts:
– that most of the world was not democratic at the time,
– that Communism was not defeated. China, a much larger country than the Soviet Union ever was, remained Communist,
– and that democracies are inherently unstable and do not last more than about a century.
Fukuyama’s thesis was a bad idea at the time and events have borne that out. Nevertheless, Fukuyama continues undismayed to proclaim he was right, and the rest of the world is wrong not to follow his forecast.
Fukuyama and Diamond are now joined in the CFR campaign against Trump by Omar Encarnacion, a professor of political science at Bard College. Encarnacion compares US governance with that of Brazil’s (“A Tale of Two Caudillos”, 16 Jan 2025). He accuses Trump and Brazil’s former President, Jair Bolsonaro, of “attacking the press, undermining judicial independence, promoting Christian nationalism, persecuting political foes, sowing doubts about the legitimacy of the electoral system, and attempting to stay in office by undemocratic means”.
Encarnacion describes these actions as attacks on democratic institutions. He notes that Bolsonaro was not re-elected in Brazil. He laments the American people re-elected Trump because he thinks Trump is a threat to democracy.
Encarnacion attributes this difference of re-election results to a much stronger support for democracy as a form of government in Brazil than in the US. This may be the case, but he misinterprets the reasons. A large percentage of American voters lost faith in the integrity of Encarnacion’s “democratic institutions” over the past few years because of the violations listed above. They considered Donald Trump not a threat, but a victim of institutional political corruption and elected him as the man most likely to correct the situation.
Encarnacion notes with chagrin that a majority of his US students do not believe in democracy as a legitimate form of government. This result is consistent with the lack of overall American voter confidence in the integrity of US democratic government.
I would like to point out to Messrs. Encarnacion, Fukuyama, and Diamond that our Founding Fathers did not believe in democracy as an effective form of government, either. That is why, as Benjamin Franklin is so famously quoted, they gave us a republic. Madison explained they did it because republics are more stable and last longer than democracies. Union soldiers in the Civil War marched to the Battle Hymn of the Republic which was played at Trump’s inauguration. His, and our, responsibility is to save our republic from democracy.
