The “End of Democracy” Scam.
Posted by Ed Folsom, November 4, 2022.
An Associated Press story in today’s Portland Press Herald reports that Benjamin Netanyahu “appears set to return to power as head of Israel’s most right-wing government ever after winning this week’s national election” for Prime Minister. But, in the current vogue of declaring that the end of democracy is nigh unless the political left wins all the elections, the story contains this very strange passage:
“The election focused heavily on the values that are meant to define the state: Jewish or democratic. In the end, voters favored their Jewish identity.”
So, the Israelis held an election in which they voted for prime minister, and the person with the most votes won. That sounds like a very democratic process. Nobody is apparently alleging election fraud. But as the writers of the A.P. story frame it, Israeli voters faced an either/or choice between two values “meant to define the state.” The state can be Jewish or it can be democratic. Were you even aware that this binary exists? The writers strongly suggest that, because Israeli voters “favored their Jewish identity,” they rejected democracy.
In this paradigm, “democracy” and “democratic” have a very different meaning than the meaning traditionally held in this country. It isn’t enough to hold an election in which the person who gets the most votes wins, leaving the same process in place for future elections. No, no — Under the definition of the term that’s in widespread current use, whether democracy lives or dies, whether democracy is affirmed or is rejected, depends on whether the left prevails. This comes closer to the meaning that the term “democracy” had in the “peoples’ democracies” of central Europe during Soviet times: The German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc. In that place and time, “democracy” was The Party, in control.
Anything else would have been fascist.
Photo of the Berlin Wall. The German Democratic Republic and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collaborated on this wall, which they called an “antifascist” wall. From the high moral plane of the “antifascist,” they found the righteousness to shoot people who attempted to escape from the German Democratic Republic to the territory of the evil oppressors who dwelt beyond.
