Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

BY KIM SHINKOSKEY

Democrats have been busy self-diagnosing themselves as to what went wrong in the 2024 election. They have aimed their recriminations at reasonable sounding stuff like Biden didn’t get out of the race soon enough; Harris was too progressive; Harris wasn’t progressive enough; there was too little focus on economy-related Democrat achievements like the infrastructure legislation; there was too much focus on a single issue like abortion. All those things likely mattered some, but not nearly as much as idealistic “Kamelot” Democrats think. There are much bigger issues underlying the Democrat party disaster.

We’re getting a little warmer when we realize that Democrats didn’t do their civics homework concerning historical civil rights restrictions placed on civil law wrong-doers and criminal law felons. The great democracies of antiquity like Rome and Athens never allowed such anti-civic troublemakers to run for office. On the contrary, they confiscated their estates and exiled them out of the country so they couldn’t infect others with their teachings and bad examples. Go to your search engine and type in “exile” or “banishment.”

Biden was so blithely unaware of the history of democracy that he even promoted Trump as the Republican presumptive nominee after only a single state convention, thinking he could more easily defeat a convicted felon than a solid traditional Republican. A convicted felon should never have been allowed to run and Democrats should have been working then and should be working now to establish that clearly in American law.

However, America’s long post-World War II embrace of libertarian philosophy has conditioned Americans not to care about character or morality or ethics any longer whether in private life or public life. It’s everyone for themselves, and economic and political force is how folks get things done in society today.

And another thing – what were Democrats thinking when they said they wanted to save democracy? Did Democrats figure that because their party name says “democracy” louder than the other party’s name does, they must know what democracy is? They don’t.

Democrats figure democracy is defined by policies like abortion rights and kindness to would-be immigrants. Democracy is not principally defined by policy. Never has been, never will be. It is defined by process, like who must take the lead in making the laws – Congress, or the President.

During the campaign there was considerable focus on the anti-democracy behavior of Donald Trump, but there was little to no focus on teaching and championing the fundamentals of American democracy.

Democrats got a little closer to the key principle of democracy when they wrung their hands over Trump killing the bi-partisan border bill. They proudly crowed he did so because “he wanted to run on the unsolved border issue.”

Folks, that is not why Trump did what he did. He killed Congress’ legislation because he believes that the executive department of government should be making all the laws, not the people’s representatives. To the contrary, the Constitution says the Congress shall make “all laws,” not the President. That is what defines democracy in this country and every other democracy from the beginning of time. Trump believes in autocracy and the rights and privileges of kingship, not democracy.

Democrats hardly ever focused on the incredible slippage in public school education over the past many decades. They couldn’t summon up any attention to the whole reason for public education in the first place, which is civics and history education, not STEM education – science, technology, engineering, and math – which is of secondary importance. Civility and respect for rule of law has slipped because honest and accurate civics education has disappeared in schools.

Another factor is the war in Gaza. The Democrat party lost the very thoughtful, humanitarian anti-war vote for a good reason. They refused to depart from their historical role as the foreign war champions of American politics. Democrat presidents from James Polk to Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson to Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden to (hopeful) Kamala Harris have long fallen prey to any number of war-fever inducements. Either they have an immature understanding of who America’s real enemies are; or they love winning elections with donations from the military-industrial-university-sports complex; or they have no earthly understanding of the harm that unjustifiable, non-defensive foreign wars do to a democracy; or they want religious freedom for Christians and Jews, but not for Muslims; or they just like killing civilians who dress, talk, and walk differently than they do.

(Robert Kimball Shinkoskey is the author of books on the history of democracy, the history of religion, and the history of the American presidency.)