Democracy
August 28, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Democrats fret endlessly about Our Democracy™️, but who is undermining our actual democracy? They are. For example (via InstaPundit): In the past 24 hours: -Dems force RFK Jr. to stay on the ballot-Dems remove Cornel West off the ballot-DOJ files an upgraded Trump indictment -Facebook admits they censored posts in compliance with Biden-Harris requests. Saving democracy by ending it. — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 27, 2024 And of course that
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June 17, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Liberals claim to be in favor of democracy–or, at least, Our Democracy™️–but if someone actually runs against them, they take it as a personal offense. Consider this tweet by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom I take as a good exemplar of contemporary liberalism: People everywhere need to understand how disgusting and abnormal it is for special interests to dump nearly $15 million to unseat a member of Congress in a primary. This
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June 9, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
On Thursday, during the Celtics-Mavericks playoff game, Joe Biden ran an ad attacking Donald Trump and claiming “the promise of American democracy will not break.” As viewers may have noted, “American democracy” marks a shift from “our democracy,” a euphemism that derives from the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. In 1965, his mother Ann Dunham married Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro, and in
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February 14, 2024 — John Hinderaker
More evidence that when Democrats talk about Our Democracy™️ they don’t mean democracy. They mean not having to deal with those pesky opponents that sometimes, God forbid, win elections. Thus, Rasmussen finds that 78% of Democrats approve of “state officials removing Trump’s name from the ballot.” Well, that’s one way to make it easy to elect Democrats. In a parallel finding, 77% of Democrats say that the January 6 protest
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February 10, 2024 — John Hinderaker
We live in a corrupt environment in which, increasingly, words are used to signify the opposite of their actual meaning. Thus, Democrats often use the word “democracy” to mean its precise opposite. This is a fine example: Democratic Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold has denounced the Supreme Court as "not friendly to democracy" after the cold reception to Colorado's effort to block Trump from the ballot. https://t.co/wFgWfhAmtd That now
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January 11, 2024 — Steven Hayward
With the Civil War back in the news—both the first one in 1861 (one of the items that will be a major focus of this week’s Three Whisky Happy Hour podcast coming Saturday morning) and the prospective one today because of Trump’s supposed “Threat to DemocracyTM” (let’s start calling it Civil War 2, or Civil War2), it seems to me worth re-upping the column I published in the New York Post
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November 23, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Some readers may recall my earlier announcement that next semester (starting in January) I’ll be filling the very large shoes of Prof. Ted McAllister at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. (Ted sadly passed away after a long illness last winter.) I gave a talk to the incoming class of graduate students back in August, which I turned into a podcast here (in case you were living in a cave
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September 12, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Earlier today, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. released this indictment of the Democratic National Committee. Why, he asks, is the Democratic Party opposed to democracy? Why is it rigging the primary process? I am not certain whether what he says about the DNC’s machinations is correct, nor am I sure what he considers to be real democracy. (For example, it has never been true that the candidate who gets the most
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May 3, 2023 — Steven Hayward
John wrote here Sunday about the “National Vote Compact” (NVC), the proposal of the goo-goo (“good government”) reformers to get around the electoral college by having a majority of states agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. I agree with John that it is a loopy idea, though I’d love the spectacle of California someday having to cast its electoral votes for a
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April 6, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
Victor Davis Hanson joined Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night to react to New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Donald Trump. Hanson characterized it as “the worst example of third-world election tampering” and said, “We are in the middle of a revolution that we don’t even know we’re in.” We’re seeing war clouds gather abroad, and I think the United States’ economy, politically, foreign
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October 20, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Miranda Devine’s New York Post column revisits the 51 intelligence officers whose letter bore all the earmarks of a dirty political intelligence operation taking advantage of their former offices. Let us not forget that Politico acted the media arm of the operation. Devine’s column — “It’s been two years since 51 intelligence agents interfered with an election — they still won’t apologize” — confines itself to the Dirty 51. Having
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August 15, 2022 — Scott Johnson
You can’t help but notice that the absurdly named Inflation Reduction Act has been reborn in the press as a health care and climate bill. Performing its usual public relations work for Minnesota’s DFL, the Star Tribune celebrates the faceless Senator Tina Smith. Washington correspondent Hunter Woodall leads his story on the bill this way: After a series of setbacks over the last year, U.S. Sen. Tina Smith’s work on
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February 1, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
This past weekend, Donald Trump claimed that Mike Pence, as vice president, had the power to change the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump said: “Unfortunately, [Pence] didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election.” This claim is wrong and disturbing. It’s wrong because, as discussed below, once the states submit their slates of electors in compliance with state law and with no alternative slate authorized by an
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January 6, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
Of the articles I read yesterday and today about the events of January 6, 2021, I found two that are most closely aligned with my views. The first is a Wall Street Journal editorial called “Democracy isn’t dying.” Among the points it makes are these: On all the available evidence Jan. 6 was not an “insurrection,” in any meaningful sense of that word. It was not an attempted coup. The
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January 3, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
E.J. Dionne advises Democrats on how they can avoid a “thumpin'” in this year’s congressional elections. Notice that Dionne isn’t offering a prescription for retaining a majority in the House. He’s merely talking about how not to “get crushed.” Dionne thereby exhibits realism. However, the same cannot be said of his strategy for escaping a shellacking. Dionne says the Democrats’ best hope is to make the 2022 election about democracy.
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June 13, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I just finished reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for the first time. I read it over the past two years or so in weekly lunch meetings with my friend Bruce Sanborn. Carleton College’s Professor Larry Cooper, also a friend, served as our preceptor. We used the terrific edition translated, edited, and introduced by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop that is published by the University of Chicago Press. Like
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August 2, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Late Thursday one of Tucker Carlson’s producers invited me to come on the show this past Friday night to talk about Ilhan Omar’s campaign spending in the impending primary election. The invitation gave me all day Friday to study up. Having caught up with much of the recent news on the primary race, I want to offer a few notes on a race that merits national interest. Minnesota’s Fifth District
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