Posted on Tuesday, December 31, 2024

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by Aaron Flanigan

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One of the most significant yet also most overlooked takeaways from 2024 is voters’ loud and indisputable rejection of Democrats’ outrageous insistence that Donald Trump and his conservative supporters pose an existential threat to American democracy.

According to CNN exit polls, voters who believe that democracy in the United States is “very threatened,” a group that makes up 39 percent of the electorate, backed Trump by a margin of 52 percent to 47 percent—a development that sent Democrats and their acolytes in the corporate media into a frantic tailspin.

“Americans said they were worried about democracy. Then they voted for Trump,” one liberal columnist inveighed. Weeks after the election, an Atlantic columnist wrote a piece entitled, “Does Democracy Even Work?” Another left-wing activist wrote on X that in the 2024 election “people traded Democracy for lower prices on eggs.”

It’s easy to see why the left is so distraught. Liberals have spent most of the past decade building their political brand around rabid opposition to Trump as a “threat to democracy,” insisting that he is a “fascist” and “literally Hitler.” In doing so, actual policy and improving the lives of voters has taken a back seat to personal hatred of Trump and his America First brand.

Democrats’ entire identity as a party is now inextricably linked to Trump and the threat that he supposedly poses to the republic. Not only has this strategy failed to win over voters, it has backfired in spectacular fashion. Most Americans who indeed believe democracy is at risk believe it is Democrats, not Republicans, who are threatening it.

But outside of the bubble occupied by Democrat Party operatives and political class elitists, it has long been overwhelmingly clear that the left—not the right—is the entity in American politics most actively hostile to our nation’s democratic institutions and traditions.

A look at the past four years leaves no doubt about the left’s willingness to violate any norm and even the rule of law to punish their political enemies and cling to power.

For the entirety of Biden’s term, for instance, Democrats, while branding themselves “defenders of democracy,” opposed basic election integrity measures like Voter ID on the grounds such policies are somehow “racist.” At the same time, the Biden administration allowed in millions of illegal aliens with no safeguards in place to ensure they were not able to illegally cast ballots and influence the outcome of our elections.

The Biden administration also openly colluded with Big Tech to censor conservatives on social media, used the FBI to target Catholics and parental rights activists as domestic terrorists, and tried to deprive states of their power to run their own elections.

In undoubtedly the most glaring example of the left’s anti-democratic tendencies, Democrat prosecutors and the Biden administration conspired to keep Trump – their top political opponent – off the ballot through a relentless lawfare campaign. How could Democrats ever expect voters to take their democracy claims seriously when they tried to allow the courts rather than the voters to decide the 2024 election?

Donald Trump himself actively campaigned on the absurdity of the left’s “democracy” narrative throughout his campaign. “Biden and his radical left allies like to pose as standing up as allies of democracy,” he told supporters in a December 2023 speech. “Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy, Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.”

In one of the greatest ironies of the 2024 election cycle, reports have indicated that some Congressional Democrats now will not commit to certifying Trump’s victory on January 6, 2025, the day that Congress counts its electoral votes. Given that House Democrats impeached Trump under the pretense that he opposed the certification of electoral votes in 2021, it remains unambiguously clear that when the left appeals to “democracy,” in reality, they are appealing to unchecked progressive power—and, in many cases, actively thwarting the leaders, policies, and political vision that voters have democratically supported.

In a January 2024 essay, conservative scholar Victor Davis Hanson summed up the Democrats’ playbook with the following slogan: “We had to destroy democracy to save it.” The left, he continued, is “tearing apart the country in a manner not seen since the Civil War era—apparently convinced democracy cannot be trusted and so itself must be sacrificed as the price of destroying Donald Trump.” Those words would prove prophetic for what the country would witness over the rest of this year.

Even after Trump’s landslide victory, most Democrats continue to lack the self-awareness to recognize that it is them—not conservatives, Republicans, or Trump supporters—who put American democracy on life support. Furthermore, it was always a Trump victory, not a Trump defeat, that was necessary to “save democracy.”

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.