Overthrowing The Republic: The Plot to Control Democracy

“A constitutional republic not a democracy. The ideal of a democracy is universal equality. The ideal of a constitutional republic is individual liberty. A democracy always degenerates into dictatorship, which promises government guaranteed equality and security, but it delivers nothing but poverty and serfdom for the people it robs and rules. America was founded as a constitutional republic to safeguard the liberties of the people against the tyranny of democracy or of one man dictatorship. In this century, great strides have been made toward the goal of subverting our Republic into a democracy. The foremost tactic of the subverters is subversion of language by calling America a democracy, until people thoughtlessly accept and use the term, the totalitarians have obscured the real meaning of our principles of government” Excerpt from “A Republic, Not A Democracy” by Dan Smoot, Apr 18, 1966

The Plot to Manage Democracy

By: Jacob Siegel, City Journal Magazine / Politics and law Autumn 2024:

What T. S. Eliot said of humankind, that it “cannot bear very much reality,” must be doubly true for Americans. It’s a feature of being a providential nation, protected by two oceans and mostly spared the harsher existence that habituates other societies to corruption and tyranny, while left free to cultivate its uniquely optimistic political culture. The drawback of this good fortune is that, at decisive moments, a hopeful people can be blind to self-inflicted disasters. The reality facing America now is that of widespread, coordinated efforts to control our politics, carried out by a self-interested elite grown openly disdainful of the nation’s traditions.

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If not for a last-minute postponement, a Manhattan judge would have sentenced Donald Trump for the former president’s conviction last May by the time this article appeared, in what could fairly be characterized by an objective observer as a politically motivated trial, intended to hamper his 2024 presidential campaign. The charges pushed the “outer boundaries of the law and due process,” according to a former federal and state prosecutor, now working as an analyst for CNN—not exactly a bastion of conservative bias. The judge in the trial, Juan Merchan, previously violated New York State ethics rules by donating to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and to a group called Stop Republicans. The judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, a professional political operative, has done campaign work for both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. After repeatedly refusing to recuse himself over such conflicts of interest, Merchan barred Trump’s lawyers from arguing that the trial might be politically motivated. He had originally scheduled the sentencing for September 18, roughly six weeks before the election. (In late August, Trump was also reindicted on election-subversion charges by special counsel Jack Smith, in what Politico described as “an attempt to recalibrate the case after the Supreme Court’s immunity decision” in July.)

All of which is to say that current efforts to manipulate the American electoral system are not subtle or restricted to working around the law. The Democratic Party’s strategy to win the presidency in 2024 hinges in large part on preventing a normal election from taking place. Procedural and voting irregularities that would have triggered alarm across the political spectrum until recently have become an accepted feature of the landscape. The party has pursued this strategy since 2016, when the Obama White House and the Hillary Clinton campaign worked with U.S. intelligence agencies to frame Trump falsely as a Russian agent. The strategy aims to preserve the ceremony of voting, while constraining its influence, in the same way ideologically motivated bans on “hate” and “misinformation” uphold the appearance of a right to speak, while dictating what can or can’t be said.

The assumption that voting in national elections is a neutral process that belongs to neither major party but allows American citizens to choose freely between them is, at this point, inaccurate. Americans casting their votes in November will do so within the guardrails of an increasingly managed democracy, designed to grant party elites control over its outcomes. This does not mean that the election’s results are already determined, or that individuals should not vote. No one knows what will happen; even a “managed” election could still come down to narrow margins in a few states. Much space remains between what the elites want and what they can accomplish.

A decade ago, this might all have been dismissed as the ranting of some far-left or LaRouchean political conspiracy. Today, it describes public events extensively covered by the mainstream press. Shortly after the 2020 election, a breathless article in Time celebrated the “Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” The article detailed “a vast, cross-partisan campaign” that “got states to change voting systems and laws” and “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation.” More recently, we saw the orderly replacement of President Joe Biden—no longer the “sharp as a tack” geopolitical mastermind depicted in yesterday’s propaganda—with a new Democratic nominee, whose glaring political liabilities were once captioned in a headline by the liberal Atlantic, “The Kamala Harris Problem,” but is now heralded as a political genius. More recently still, in late August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that his company faced regular pressure from senior Biden administration officials to censor Covid-19-related Facebook content, even satire, that the government didn’t like. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” Zuckerberg also admitted that Facebook had throttled discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, after the FBI warned the firm—in a deliberate falsehood—that it was Russian disinformation. (The point person for the administration’s pressure campaign against Meta and other social media platforms was Rob Flaherty, the former Biden White House director of digital strategy, who is now the deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris.)

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