At Kamala Harris’s recent coronation at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, liberals enthusiastically displayed their core values. These were iconized by the mobile abortion facility parked outside the convention center and punctuated by the ominous-sounding motif that they had to “prevent the threat to democracy.”

As fellow Americans, we should probably try to understand the roots of such a dire imputation by asking the simple question: What exactly do they mean when they say “democracy”?

A preemptive warning: Please refrain from using reasoning in this exercise. The point on the ideological spectrum occupied by present-day American liberals is a place unencumbered by such trivialities as reason and logic. It is a place where they can remain dogmatically transfixed by what can be (relativism), unburdened by what has been (logic — the only ground where rational dialogue can take place).

Thankfully, you will not need decryption software or an enigma machine to decode their definition of “democracy.” The only requirement is listening to what they say it is, or rather what they say it isn’t.

In his book No Democracy Lasts Forever, University of California Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky summarized a widespread liberal belief in saying that the U.S. Constitution has become a “threat to American democracy … beyond redemption.”

To legitimize his theory, he also expounds on the idea that free speech “has itself become a threat to it [democracy],” that he is aghast at how the Supreme Court actually “looks … to the framers intentions at the time when it was adopted,” and that if we don’t go about “repairing or replacing [the Constitution],” the country could “drift to authoritarianism” due to “the Constitution’s undemocratic structure.”

Houston, we have a problem.

That Pesky Constitution

Building on Chemerinsky’s thoughts, New York Times reporter Jennifer Szalai recently reviewed his book under the eye-opening headline, “The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous? One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document.”

Szalai waxes adoringly about Chemerinsky’s work, adding that the Constitution is “dangerous” because it “created a situation where a minority held tyrannical power to thwart.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. Szalai expresses a distinct source of liberal acrimony, namely that the American Left is not just sick and tired of Oklahoma having the same number of representatives in the U.S. Senate as California, but rather that the very diffusion of central power through the federation of states gets in their way of making Oklahoma like California.

So what does all this tell us about the Left’s use of the word “democracy?” Thus far, we see that whatever it is, “democracy” opposes what is written in the U.S. Constitution, particularly the decentralized power architecture imbued therein.

The federation of states (especially equal representation in the Senate), the filibuster, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court all collude to “thwart” the progressive agenda.

Since the dictionary defines democracy as “government by the people,” it’s quite clear that we must stringently invoke the Inigo Montoya clause and declare to the Left, “You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means.”

Depends on What the Meaning of ‘Is’ Is

Thus far, Chemerinsky et al have merely provided what democracy is not. Much like asking for Kamala Harris’s policies positions, we must ask them to define what it is. But alas, the Left is in no hurry to provide the positive sense for their vision of democracy, which leaves us to further milk the meaning from the endless torrent of pejorative “threats to democracy,” which include, but are not limited to:

Challenging election fraud is a threat to democracy.

Indecorous statements (i.e., mean tweets) are a threat to democracy.

Voter identification laws are a threat to democracy.

The Dobbs decision is a threat to democracy.

Regarding Dobbs, UC Davis Law Professor Mary Ziegler provides us with this nugget: “Dobbs never really embraced democracy in the first place, and especially not a robust, modern concept of democracy that guarantees equality.”

The phrase “modern concept of democracy” is a euphemism for “a superior intellectual and moral vision for how we can plan your life.” Ziegler provides us with two important lessons:

1. Since Leftism is the spawn of atheistic theory, which holds morality to be a relativistic amorphous sliding scale, they actually see themselves as the elite who are the arbiters and shapers of “modern” morality.
2. It is once again clear that the word “democracy” has been egregiously abducted; nowhere in the actual meaning of the word does it contain a parachute clause stating – “modernity may invoke reconstituting this word to fit their whims.”

It also turns out that we should probably have read different books in school, like Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, in which he warned:

Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complex perversion of language.

Let’s take inventory of what we have learned so far.

While the “threats to democracy” list continues ad nauseum, it is unnecessary to follow the trail any further since a clear pattern has already emerged: The new definition of “democracy” shares the manifest idiosyncrasies associated with socialistic thought patterns. It is a collection of grievance-based generalities providing at best an indeterminable chowder of ideals and catchphrases that purposefully lack precision.

Just as the socialist construct offers no long-term blueprint for its opaque ride to Utopia, the neo-democracy of the American Left offers no substance explaining how greater government control of life via taxation and regulation, implementation of speech control, open borders, release of felons, obliteration of the filibuster, and spooning with China will all work together to produce a better life for Americans.

God Is Undemocratic

Not every conservative is a Christian, and not every liberal is an atheist, but rest assured that God is undemocratic in the true definitional sense of the word.

He does not give mankind a say in Truth. He is Truth. We do not get a vote on defining love. He is love. Man cannot bend morality to suit our whims. He is goodness.

The reason why the atheistically driven Left insists on a fluid definition of “democracy” is because they are attempting to be little gods – to wrest from the Lord His role as their Creator from Whom truth, love, and morality flow.

The implication is that they are not content with backstroking through life in their own ideological swim lane. No, your acquiescence is their vindication as kings and queens of Babel. Punch-drunk on pride and power, they want to be the arbiters of what you must think, what you must say, how you must feel, what you will eat, how you will vote.

A “threat to democracy” is therefore anything that threatens their power and more importantly, their ideology. The mere thought of bowing down before God is a transgression against their self-supremacy. This is why Christians will always be targeted – our worship, our prayers, our supplication, our confessions, and our lives given to Christ are a most dangerous affront to their justification for doing as they please, to and with whom they please, when they please. It is a dethroning of human pride, which places the very heartbeat of atheism at mortal risk.

It seems accurate to describe the Left as practitioners of what could literally be called democrazy. From the Greek: dēmos – “people”; and from the 1580’s English: craze+ -y – “broken, impaired, full of cracks or flaws” – a people who are fixated on a highly impaired view of human governance inevitably emerging from a grossly erroneous human origin theory which leaves them in the delirium of seeing themselves as their own first cause and unaccountable to God.

Theirs is a futile affair, because humans are derivative beings and trying to abolish God is like trying to ‘un-derive’ yourself.

“A creature revolting against a creator,” said CS Lewis, “is revolting against the source of his own powers – including even his power to revolt … It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower.”

The final outcome is known, so we must be even-tempered and grounded in the reality of eternal life because the Lord’s will is going to be done on Earth no matter who is elected in November.

In the meantime, Christians should not attempt to compartmentalize the Left’s strident intent to force upon us an atheistic socialism veiled under the obfuscatory linguistic veil of “democracy.” We must not try to jam it into a neat little box labeled “politics,” in an attempt to avoid it.

What we are facing is antithetical to creation and to our Creator. It is an immense Babelian construction project, and it’s in our own backyard.

Let us not be like the German Christians in the 1930s who chose to separate themselves from the so-called politics of their day as the horrors of socialism swept their country.

Beloved Christian, this is not a time for timidity.

 

Joachim Osther is a freelance writer focusing on the intersection of culture and Christianity. He holds a master’s degree in theological studies from Veritas College and Seminary, and two degrees in the life sciences, a field in which he works as a strategist, advisor, and published author. He is also an occasional contributor to RaymondIbrahim.com, chronicling the relevance of historical clashes between militant Islam and the West.