If democracy means rule by the people, then democracy must include the risk that the people will choose something progressives oppose. But what happens when a political movement comes to believe that permitting certain outcomes is itself anti-democratic? That is, what if the left has come to believe that protecting democracy requires preventing voters from making the wrong choice?
The modern left, and in particular the Democratic Party in the United States, has embraced a contingent theory of democracy, one in which democratic legitimacy is upheld only so long as it delivers outcomes acceptable to progressive sensibilities. Under this model, democracy is not an end in itself, but a system to be preserved only if it remains ideologically compliant. The defense of democracy becomes, paradoxically, the rationale for curtailing it. By framing dissenting voters or disfavored candidates as existential threats to the system, the left justifies intervention by bureaucrats, courts, and party elites, thereby subordinating the will of the electorate to the judgment of political custodians.
We begin with a small story, as these things often do. David Hogg, a Gen-Z activist with considerable clout, was elected vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee earlier this year. His victory came through the normal process, reflecting the votes of younger party delegates seeking generational renewal. And yet, the DNC elite rejected the outcome. Not overtly, no one said “we don’t like him”, but via procedural challenge, a challenge that came not hours or days after the election, but weeks later. Only after it became clear that Hogg intended to use his position to primary incumbent Democrats who were out of step with the party base did the leadership scour the rules for a pretext to undo the result. Eventually, they located a technicality, declared the election invalid, and forced a redo. Hogg, now aware of the underlying dynamics, declined to run again. The party claimed adherence to rules. The reality, evident to any honest observer, is that the rules were mobilized selectively to override an undesirable outcome. Thus, the decision of the voters was not final, it was subject to review by the custodians of the institution.
To be sure, political parties are not governments. But parties are the gatekeepers of electoral democracy. If internal elections are not respected, why expect their general-election commitments to be? And in this case, the justification was revealing. Party leaders believed the vote produced the wrong kind of leadership, the wrong kind of message, and that the institution had a duty to correct the choice.
A similar logic applied at a vastly greater scale in the summer of 2024. Despite Joe Biden having won the Democratic primary handily, party leadership had grown increasingly uneasy with his candidacy. Concerns over his age, cognitive sharpness, and lack of enthusiasm among voters led to mounting internal pressure. On July 21, Biden withdrew from the race. But instead of reopening the process to voters, the DNC decided not to hold a new primary. There was no contest, no campaign, no debate. Delegates were not given the option to write in a candidate, nor were any other names permitted on the ballot. They were allowed to vote for Kamala Harris and only Kamala Harris. The party simply installed her by acclamation, despite her persistent unpopularity among key constituencies. What might have been a moment for renewal through democratic participation became a managed succession, coordinated not by the people, but by political operatives behind closed doors.
One might object: primaries are not constitutionally required. This is true. But the same can be said of many things we consider essential to democratic legitimacy. What the left once called transparency, participation, and accountability are now viewed as dispensable formalities when they might produce an inconvenient nominee.
This, we are told, is pragmatic. We cannot risk a contested primary when the Republican candidate is Donald Trump. We cannot risk intraparty division when the stakes are existential. This is the logic of state emergency: exceptional circumstances require exceptional measures. But unlike a hurricane or a war, the alleged emergency here is the electorate itself. That is the difference. The threat is not external, it is democratic.
Rush Limbaugh warned of this years ago. His forecast, often dismissed as hyperbole, now seems prophetic. He argued that Democrats, convinced of their superior intelligence and moral virtue, would one day revoke the right of citizens to choose candidates they disapprove of. It is not that Democrats hate voting, they love it, provided the outcome is managed. But when the people vote the “wrong” way, the reaction is not reflection. It is containment.
And so we come to the events surrounding Donald Trump himself. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, several blue-state officials, invoking Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, sought to remove Trump from the ballot. The claim was that his actions surrounding January 6 constituted insurrection. The legal merits were ludacris and the Supreme Court agreed ruling 9-0 that states could not unilaterally disqualify a federal candidate. Yet again, the underlying premise is revealing: some voters cannot be trusted, and therefore, their choices must be restricted.
These cases are not mere outliers; they reflect a broader worldview. For instance, Marine Le Pen in France was barred from running due to a criminal conviction for misusing EU campaign funds, a charge stemming from events over a decade ago, which only resurfaced after she began leading in the presidential polls. It was no coincidence. The EU, working in tandem with Macron’s government, deliberately revived the case to engineer the conservative candidate’s disqualification. The result was a five-year ban from seeking office, eliminating the leading challenger to the French establishment. Similarly, Jair Bolsonaro the conservative former president of Brazil was disqualified for criticizing electoral institutions just as polls showed him leading for the next presidential election. In Romania, Calin Georgescu won the preliminary vote and led polls until foreign interference allegations led to the conservatives disqualification. These are not isolated incidents in unstable regimes but patterns in established democracies, where judicial and bureaucratic mechanisms are increasingly used to keep conservative candidates out of democratic processes.
In each case, voters were not consulted. Courts and commissions decided. The rationale is consistent: conservatives pose too great a threat to be left to the people. And while this might be tolerable if such decisions were rare and bipartisan, they almost never are. It is the populist right that finds itself excluded. It is those who question the left’s moral authority who become dangers to the republic.
Historical analogies help clarify the stakes. In Czechoslovakia, 1948, the Communist Party used legal powers and procedural control to transform a democracy into a dictatorship. There was no dramatic seizure of power. There was merely a redefinition of what was permitted in the name of the people. Likewise, in Venezuela, elections continued in form long after their content was vacated. The illusion of democracy is easy to maintain when courts, commissions, and media agree on which outcomes are valid and which are not.
To be clear, I am not equating Democrats with Maduro or Stalin. I am pointing out a shared mechanism: the replacement of electoral legitimacy with procedural discretion. The left today does not abolish democracy; it redefines it. Participation is good, but only when paired with oversight. Expression is good, but only when filtered through acceptable discourse. Candidates are good, but only if they affirm liberal norms.
It is worth asking: what is democracy, if not the right to be wrong? If the meaning of democracy is narrowed to exclude certain views, certain candidates, and certain voters, then it ceases to be democracy in anything but name. It becomes managed pluralism, a technocratic oligarchy with ritualistic voting.
This is not an idle fear. Many on the left explicitly advocate for this shift. Think of those who argue that misinformation must be suppressed for democracy to function. That voters must be protected from false narratives. That platforms must throttle certain kinds of speech for the good of the polity. These arguments are not fringe. They are mainstream in academic, media, and bureaucratic circles. The European Union’s Digital Services Act now threatens Elon Musk’s platform, X, with billions in fines for failing to adequately censor users who challenge official narratives. In effect, unelected regulators are attempting to dictate the boundaries of permissible speech across the digital public square, punishing platforms that refuse to conform to progressive standards of information control.
Indeed, there is a curious irony here. The left accuses the right of wanting to end democracy, even as it pursues policies that functionally erode it. It is a preemptive justification: because we believe the other side would be authoritarian, we must adopt authoritarian methods first. But the logic is circular. How does one prove the right is anti-democratic? By preventing it from winning.
In truth, democracy is always at risk, but rarely in the way elites claim. The danger is not that people will choose poorly. It is that elites, convinced they know better, will choose for them. The founders of the United States understood this. They built checks and balances not to empower experts but to restrain them. They vested sovereignty not in a class of credentialed overseers, but in the people themselves.
If the left wishes to preserve democracy, it must first recover its meaning. That means accepting risk, tolerating dissent, and trusting citizens to make their own choices, even wrong ones. Anything less is not protection. It is preemption. And preemption, once normalized, becomes the default.
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Democracy is of no consequence. As was known thousands of years ago …
“Democracy leads to anarchy, which is mob rule.” – Plato (429-347 BC)
As was known by the Founders of our republic …
”Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%.” .”—Thomas Jefferson
and
“We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.” – Alexander Hamilton