Democracy proved to be a terrible campaign concept in November, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats’ musings.
Speaking at the Obama Foundation Democracy Forum earlier this month, former President Barack Obama lamented that “(t)he election proved that democracy is pretty far down on people’s priority list.”
Apparently, Obama got numerous groans and eye rolls when he told friends the foundation would be hosting an event discussing pluralism and democracy.
I bet!
It’s easy to imagine why no one wanted to hear about alleged threats to democracy after a free and fair election. We heard about it for what seemed like an eternity during the presidential campaign, as “Save Democracy” was one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ key slogans in her battle with former President Donald Trump.
Appeals to democracy fell flat with voters first and foremost because people were more concerned with the cost of living than they were abstract concepts that seemed well intact. I’m not surprised they were done hearing about it.
Obama added in his speech that pluralism was about “forging alliances and building coalitions,” which is true enough. Successful candidates in competitive elections win by expanding their appeal beyond their opponents’.
But Obama added that it was important to “(make) room in those coalitions not only for the woke but also for the waking,” meaning he still isn’t following what happened.
Or, as The Free Press’ Nellie Bowles wrote sarcastically recently, “(i)n other signs that Democrats are learning deep, important lessons from the shellacking in this past election, they are still beginning meetings with land acknowledgments.”
The problem with using an abstraction like democracy to persuade voters is that it means many things to many people. Is it about citizens’ ability to vote? Or about citizens’ relationship to their government? Is it about the Constitution? A mix? Something else altogether?
Already we’ve given this more attention than a discerning voter usually will. “Make America Great Again” is still a very good, simple campaign slogan. “Hope” and “Change” were as well. They were good because they easily conveyed their meaning within the context of the time.
For “Save Democracy” to work, there would have had to have been a real, obvious threat to democracy and, as much as Democrats tried to speak it into existence, voters did not believe that Trump was that threat.
Further compounding matters is the left’s overuse of the term, and in ways that seem inappropriate. For example, a recent column in SF Gate argued against the recall of a San Francisco supervisor because it was “undemocratic,” which is a very strange way to describe a democratic process like an election.
For all their talk of the preservation of democracy, they seem to run from it whenever convenient. Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law, recently published a book called “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.” Apparently, the document upon which our democracy rests is a threat to democracy.
(Somewhere someone reading this is screaming that we have a republic and not a democracy and all I can say is you’re missing the point).
“I see an American government that is increasingly dysfunctional and that has lost the confidence of the people, in a society that is increasingly politically polarised,” Chemerinsky said, according to The Guardian. “I worry greatly for the future of American democracy.”
Chemerinsky is right that the American government is dysfunctional and has lost the confidence of the people. Congress enjoys a 19 percent approval rating. But to Chemerinky, the problem is that there’s not a “progressive interpretation” of the Constitution, which is really his way of saying the Constitution should mean whatever he wants it to mean.
State Sen. Scott Wiener recently introduced legislation to revoke California’s seven active calls for a constitutional convention, because it might end up “shredding the Constitution,” according to the New York Times.
Mind you, the Legislature, through a vote of its elected representatives, called for a constitutional convention, as outlined in our country’s founding document, because our founders saw such an event as a tool of democracy. The difference now is that Weiner and others are worried Republicans might have too much of a say in what happens. Threat-to-pluralism alert – someone call Obama!
It’s all so opportunistic and absurd. Pluralism and democracy are great values, but we can’t only appreciate them when we are getting our way.
Former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown took a different approach at a recent event hosted by the Public Policy Institute of California, pouring cold water on the idea that there are active threats to democracy. Brown noted that a turn towards the populist right was a global phenomenon, according to The Sacramento Bee.
Where Obama has routinely blamed sexism for Harris’ loss to Trump, Brown had a much simpler, and correct, assessment.
“Democracy has given us Trump,” Brown said, according to The Sacramento Bee. “(Voters) know this guy is vulgar, they know he tells lies and they thought that was better than the alternative.”
This is what Democrats are failing to see. Democracy is not at stake. Going “woke” is a fringe ideal. And voters know that what Democrats want is not to preserve democracy for democracy’s sake, but as one of many means to justify their ends.
If Democrats like Obama are truly interested in pluralism, they should consider being gracious in defeat and listening to the needs of voters instead of talking past them with abstractions like democracy.
Matt Fleming is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.