Joe Biden’s warnings about the “peril” of democracy ring hollow as he advances an agenda that is rooted in the undemocratic elitism of his party. He is not afraid for democracy but afraid of democracy. After all, the threats to democracy come from his own plans to pack the court, increase voter fraud, erase a sovereign border, rely on international institutions, and cripple religion.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” said John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers. That is not Biden’s view. He supports liberal activists on the courts who stand athwart a moral and religious people. Biden believes judges should take issues such as abortion away from the people and decide them by fiat. The fulfillment of his vision of a fundamentally transformed America depends on that judicial despotism — liberal judges inventing bogus rights out of thin air and then blocking the people from passing laws against them. Whenever Biden refers to the “Constitution,” he is not speaking of the actual one. No, he means the very jurisprudence that has shredded it, the arbitrary decisions that have systematically deprived the people of democratic choice in order to separate them from the Judeo-Christian foundations of the country.
The corrupted democracy of Biden’s vision is government of, by, and for elites hostile to the conservatism of the people. These elites don’t listen to the people but propagandize them, and those who resist these lies are treated as domestic enemies. Biden’s hysterical blather about monstrous threats at home to democracy is reminiscent of Obama’s carping about the Tea Party movement. On closer inspection, these complaints amount to nothing more than the wish that America were a one-party state.
The corrupted democracy of Biden’s vision is government of, by, and for elites hostile to the conservatism of the people.
What’s undemocratic is the building of that one-party state through suppressions of freedom, which Biden and the Democrats enthusiastically endorse. Whenever Silicon Valley silences one of their political opponents, they cheer. On Memorial Day, Biden condemned dictatorships abroad. But are those one-party states much different than the one liberals seek to construct? They, too, seek to eliminate their political opponents undemocratically. By “threats” to democracy, they mean threats to their own power. Whatever augments it — everything from voter fraud to Silicon Valley censorship to amnesty — they favor.
It is hard to take Biden’s Memorial Day musings on democracy seriously given his unwillingness to take the most basic steps to protect it. His contempt for a sovereign people’s expectation of a secure border is palpable. His philosophy of amnesty — that illegal immigrants are “already Americans,” as he once put it — rests on an elitist rejection of democracy. What the Founding Fathers would have recognized as the people’s simple democratic desire to control their own country, Biden treats as “nativism.”
Biden’s instincts are those of an internationalist, not a nationalist. Those instincts make him ill-equipped to defend American democracy. His administration overflows with internationalists, such as John Kerry, who spend more time hobnobbing at the United Nations than traveling the United States. Biden’s State Department looks like an annex of the United Nations, as it busies itself with the boutique causes of the global Left. Most of those causes are inimical to the American people’s interests.
Biden scoffed at Trump’s nationalist reasons for rejecting the Paris Climate Accord. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Trump said. Isn’t that what we should expect from an American president? Isn’t that better than a State Department saturated with Parisian values? Last week, Biden’s embassies flew the Black Lives Matter flag. This week the U.S. embassy at the Holy See flew the LGBTQ flag. Biden’s reduction of the State Department to an extension of the UN and the Democratic Party smacks of a cosmopolitan contempt for ordinary Americans.
It is the pursuit of power in reshaping the country, not respect for America’s democratic traditions, that animates Biden and the Democrats. Hence, much of their energy is directed toward sapping the institutions that sustain a civilized democracy. Knowing that schools, families, and churches stand in the way of their envisioned liberal utopia, Biden and the Democrats seek to control and corrupt them. They can’t abide the rival authority those institutions represent. A one-party state isn’t possible unless they turn schools into propaganda mills, families into amoral blobs, and churches into servants of secularism.
In this light, Biden’s whole agenda — from the promotion of toxic critical race theory to forcing Americans to pay for abortions to requiring religious hospitals to perform transgender surgeries — stands as an audacious attempt to break down the “moral and religious people” to whom John Adams entrusted the Constitution. Biden’s goal is not to revive the “soul” of democracy, as he likes to say, but to corrupt it in service to a new political order that the Founding Fathers would not have recognized as American.
