Joe Biden and the word salad that is democracy.

A short piece in Bloomberg this afternoon briefly laid out U.S. president Joe Biden’s strategy for beating possible Republican Party nominee Donald Trump in the November 2024 general election. Sharing a quote from Mr Biden’s campaign manager as cited by Bloomberg:

“We are treating this election like it will determine the fate of American democracy – because it will. The threat Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire since then. He is running a campaign on revenge and retribution – and at the expense of Americans’ freedoms.”

The Bloomberg article cited no specific transgressions on the part of Mr Trump toward American democracy. Nor does the article define ‘democracy” which I did not expect. The pervasive lack of defining terms whether by the media or the consumer of political news is commonplace. I believe the decibel level of political debate would decline sharply if we had a better idea of what we were actually arguing over.

According to Black’s Law Dictionary, democracy is that form of government in which sovereign power resides in and is exercised by the whole body of free citizens directly or indirectly through a system of representation, as opposed to a government by monarchy, aristocracy, or oligarchy.

By sovereign we mean, according to Webster’s New World Dictionary, above all others, chief, supreme. By this definition, the constant calls by Mr Biden and his supporters to ‘save democracy’ means saving that form of government in which that supreme or chief power resides in the whole body of free citizens. This power would be exercised through a system of representation.

Calls to save democracy would not raise a red flag for me were it not for the fact that the U.S. Constitution does not provide a democratic form of government for its citizens. Rather, according to Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, what is guaranteed is a republican form of government. It is a form of government headed by a president in which power is exercised by officials elected by voters.

“Democracy” sounds warmer and fuzzier than “republic.” I assume that republic is a turn off for those on the left who may align the word with the Republican Party. Republic, in my opinion, provides a better description of America’s form of government and if Mr Biden were to claim that the republic needed to be saved from the behavior of Mr Trump, Mr Biden and his Democratic Party would have to describe how Mr Trump was adversely affecting the ability of citizens to vote for the officials that exercise government power.

The 91 charges brought against Mr Trump (44 federal, 47 state) are an attempt to say that he was a threat to the electoral system. But were his actions an attack on democracy? 

The Electoral College selects the president of the United States. Democracy implies a one person, one vote scheme. The Electoral College is not a democratic institution. If anything, it serves to put a check on democracy. State political parties select the electors who, in most cases, are pledged to vote for a particular presidential candidate during the meeting of electors on the 6th of January following the general election. Is this the “democracy” Mr Biden wants to save? 

Yes, it is the democracy that Joe Biden wants to save.

Mr Biden, like his fellow old heads in the Congress, love the Constitutional institutions. Mr Biden, a descendant of slave owners himself, may have had passed down in his DNA the insight into crafting a narrative that persuades the mind that it is free when in actuality the mind is not. By painting an anti-democratic institution such as the Electoral College as a democratic process that needs saving, Mr Biden sells freedom by getting his supporters to buy tyranny.

Alton Drew

22 December 2023

For more of my take on the American political economy, buy my book at amazon.com/author/altondrew.