Democracy at its Best

Currently, the left seeks to position itself as the true champion of democracy.

“As dissatisfaction with democracy grows, an appreciable number of Americans are open to autocracy, which the author defines as a form of government ruled by a person or group with no checks or balances on that authority,” said Michael Souzan, writing for American Progress.

Such affirmation for democracy itself has become commonplace throughout the periodicals of the left and their blogosphere. And, admittedly, it’s a good position to take, it’s the high ground, when you stake out a position against those impugning democracy. But is it the truth?

Buried in the New York Times of November 12 was a piece by reporter Lisa Friedman on the measures now being taken and the plans now being made to give permanence to the Biden climate policies, effectively Trump-proofing them. Among these is a rush to actually spend the funds allocated by the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate legislation and doublespeak defined. Is borrowing more from China and taking more from the pockets of ordinary Americans really the best way to bring down inflation? Only if you torture the numbers with Stalinite vigor.

Friedman’s piece opens as follows:

“Biden’s aides are rushing to award hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and finalize environmental regulations in an effort to lock in President Biden’s climate agenda before Donald J. Trump enters the White House, said John Podesta, the president’s senior advisor on clean energy.”

“‘There’s still more to be awarded, and we want to allocate as much of that money as possible, making it harder for the next administration to undo that,’ Mr. Podesta said.”

This is the gist of the piece, though the writer goes on to discuss the risk of waning international support for climate measures, deeds to soon be done by the dastardly President elect, and the politics of repealing the Inflation Reduction Act. The role of private organizations like Sierra and NRDC is discussed in reference to upcoming legal challenges to any pullback Trump may initiate from IRA or other climate directives.

So, here’s what’s striking in light of the events of November 5: It seems that the people, the demos, the ones democracy is putatively all about, told the left, unambiguously, what it thought of ideas like sending more hundreds of billions to climate mitigation. The commonsense folk of the American heartland just asserted themselves and spoke with one voice in rebuttal of the colossal designs of our globalist oligarchs. They at least knew that they each had better uses for their own money. But what would those simpleton corn farmers know about big picture stuff like this anyway?

Well, if nothing else, they know that the energy to run their farms and move their crops and cows now costs more than ever before, even while wind and solar farms now cover the Midwestern landscape. They know that they’re passing along produce costs that turn beef and watermelons into luxuries, due to those energy costs as well as to environmental mandates. The corn farmers of places like the Dakotas realize that there’s hundreds of years worth of fossil fuels locked in shale formations below their feet and they scratch their heads over why we’re not simply using that. They also scratch their heads over how people in cities, far removed from nature as they are, could ever be duped by a paradigm so self-evidently ridiculous as the current global warming mitigation efforts. They wonder why the desperation for action now over something that truly menaces no-one. They find it curious that dangerous natural gas pipelines must be stopped while dangerous carbon transmission pipelines must be run through their backyards. If nothing else, they’re often not sure that the men and women who make up their government are truly capable of or even interested in advancing the goals they proclaim, goals such as reducing greenhouse gases or advancing democracy. And if the literati of Washington were so truly committed to democracy, they might realize that the Midwestern farmers aren’t really such simpletons after all.

So, the election we all just watched play out should be read as one of the great populist uprisings—the turning-the-tables events that throw out incumbents along with their misbegotten and self-serving ideas. The people have spoken but the left still can’t hear them.