Is the defense of democracy rhetoric or real? [Video]

The 2022 US midterm elections are perhaps the second strangest contest in recent US political history. Pollsters on both sides got it quite wrong – there was no predicted “Red Wave”, let alone the more popularly talked about “Red Tsunami”. Instead, we are witnessing a repeat of 2020 – a slow grind towards Democrat victories and control over the nation’s course.

However, one of the “themes” that was harped on mostly by the Democrats apparently, was the theme of “protecting our democracy.”

Does anybody know what that loaded phrase actually means? It sounds rather dire, doesn’t it? Certainly it seemed so here:

“a fight for the future of democracy…”

It is in the lead, and it is in the graphic for this video. This is a pro Democrat example, but is there a pro-Republican example?

Some searching through Google and Youtube has come up dry for me as regards the midterms. However, it certainly was a thought among those of us in 2020 who suspected massive election fraud with the peculiar behavior of vote counting in several important states that election night.

I polled my social media world of contacts, both liberal and conservative. Here is what they had to say (pseudonymns replace the names)

Norma Rae – I am so cynical now. I believe nothing. I believe everything that is said to us is all deceit. Smoke and mirrors designed to keep us compliant and quiet.

John Wesley Hardin – To the woke regressive global cultural democrats “protecting our democracy.” really means protecting their Marxist ideology that will enslave us all to the 51% vote. America and its founders never called America a democracy. The woke regressive global cultural Marxist democrats must gas light us into believing a democracy is what the founders wanted. We are a Constitutional representative republic where the people rule and the government serves the people and protects our God given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Democracy = Marxism in the minds of the woke regressive global cultural democrats and they admit it in their gaslighting manipulative condescending pseudo compassionate way. IE government knows best, how to raise your children, how you travel, what you eat, where you work…Marxist enslavement.

Silenus of Black Forest and Far-Far-Away – It sounded more like protect our hegemony to me.

Meadowlark – Oh, Biden. Does he even know what he’s talking about? He gives every indication of cognitive decline. And considering that it’s his Party that has gone after free speech so aggressively – one of the cornerstones of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” – I’d like to suggest that, as with so much else about the Democratic Party, “democracy” means whatever they need it to mean at any given moment. It’s a Warm Fuzzy that presses all the right buttons for Americans, but it’s meaningless without the free exercise of those rights granted to us in the Constitution.

From Beyond the Barrier – To be fair, in general it is better to actually find them and ask them directly, because there’s always a pitfall in a third party, especially someone who disagrees with them, trying to get into their head and see what they mean. It often creates lots of misconceptions.

That being said I can try to guess. I think they percieve “those MAGA people” as a threat because it as a regressive and demagogic movement which goes against the conventional norms of the american political system.

The idea at least from the 70s onwards was that the republic party was the party of buisness and the democratic party was that of the working class, and that began to change.

I think it’s objectively true that the overton window shifted, i.e. Republicans moved further to the right and Democrats to the left.

But the social demographic changed too. With the MAGA movement, we see these Republicans, the core of the movement are not wall street tycoons in suits, even pre maga they already shifted to be this sort of rural blue collar culture. And the Democrats may be popular among minorities but demographically, look at most maps and what do you see, the cosmopolitan urban areas are blue and the rural areas red.

So I think a demographic shift contributed. And society in general has become more polarized, these sides are talking to each other less.

In general I think this can all be explained by the dangerous phronema of Dualism, people see everything split into black and white, “our” side are “the good guys” and the “other” are the bad guys.

To be honest members of both sides see the other this way. The MAGA people see New York or California liberals as evil commies trying to bring about the new world order, and the Democrats see them as dangerous alt right militia types. These are the kind of people that have never be around firearms and they see a black rifle and they have a heart attack and think it’s a dangerous “AK-15 assault weapon”. They probably are genuinely freightened of some of them especially after what they would call the “insurrection”.

To THEM it was a coup attempt. And so they see armed people who don’t share their values, who they percieve as mostly uneducated, who are from a very different demographic than them which they don’t regularly interact with and there is an element of fear here. To them it’s a dangerous minority based on the results of the popular vote that want to overthrow the norms of american government.

I think ultimately on both sides the mutual hatred is due to polarization and a lack of willingness to hear the other side, or conviction that it’s a black and white issue rather than different opinions.,

I don’t know of that was helpful at all, but that’s basically what I assume is going on here. People will percieve as a threat that which posses a radical change to their way of life, and instead of seeking a synthesis, political leaders today are moving towards stark opposition to each other.

Andrew Barnhouse – “Our Democracy” means “Our Woke, Marxist Agenda that will be frustrated by Conservatives.”

Joe Biden won the election because the Democrat political machine successfully exploited unengaged and un- or ill informed voters who vote Democrat because Republicans are racist, sexist, misogynist, trans-and homophobic bigots and they know this because they’ve been told to believe it and are obedient little voters.

The political points of view each person had were differing, to be sure mostly plain old American conservative – the liberals did not respond even though I posted on a site full of them, and I am not sure why. However, even among these answers there is not really one single understanding of anything more concrete than “whatever they want it to mean.”

This ought to say something, and I think it says several things:

1. We do not pay attention closely to what political figures say. Therefore they say just about anything with no accountability. That goes for both parties.
2. The people who say these things know that we do not care, but they have ‘the gift of gab'” and can put us to sleep with the smooth soporific sound of their voices.
3. Unity as a nation is no more, because each person has a different and deeply subjective understanding of what is said, and not a commonly held set of values across the vast majority of the population.

This is not to say that all these things are bad. In fact, it may be a blessing in disguise. “All politics is local” so the saying goes, and it may be that more and more people turn to the bread-and-butter needs in front of them and simply tolerate or ignore the federal government.

That is actually a LOT closer to America as founded than one might expect. Consider this: The Constitution of the United States of America is not a document saying what powers the federal government has as much as one that says what its powers are limited to. Most power, and really most responsibility for one’s welfare, lies with each citizen personally.

One of the observations in observing a great deal of international news stories over the last several months is that the narrative at least, if not the reality, is “The government needs to take care of us.”

Over and over and over I saw this point pounded home from all over the world: Africa. The United Kingdom. Germany. Italy. France. Pakistan. Iran…

But not so much from the United States, though there is plenty of criticism of Imposter Biden and his gasoline fun and games. It is still a little less in America, and that is a good sign – one that shows that many Americans have not forgotten how to be Americans.

It is a shame that our federal government no longer serves the people of the US. It may never do so again, at least not as the United States of America – perhaps as a new entity of seceding states, it might. But more about that in another piece.

The Midterm Election of 2022 seems not to be the wash it looked like at first. It may in fact be pointing to something new on the horizon.