If you think the American public no longer has the brains or judgment to select their leader we have bigger problems than Trump.
Voting isn't a perfect system but it's better than letting a few elected officials or judges decide what's right for 300 million voters (who might not get the chance to vote).
I fear Trump will be our next President. We'll survive that (it won't be pretty). What we won't survive is Americans believing their right to vote means little or nothing.
Trump vs. the Woke: Let the People Decide
Both might be disqualified as a threat to democracy. Leaving it up to the voters seems the only option.
By Lance Morrow, WSJ
Jan. 2, 2024 12:54 pm ET
Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, has ordered Donald Trump’s name removed from the Republican primary ballot. Invoking Section 3 of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment, Ms. Bellows claims Mr. Trump engaged in insurrection against the U.S. when he did whatever he did, or didn’t do, on Jan. 6, three years ago this week. Recently, Colorado’s Supreme Court ordered Mr. Trump’s name deleted from that state’s Republican primary ballot for the same reason. Other states have been toying with the idea. It’s up to the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether the disqualifications are constitutional.
The justices may decide the matter on narrow or legalistic grounds—by a close parsing of the 14th Amendment, and of the term “insurrection.” They must rule on whether Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, actions or failures to act on that day amounted to a violent uprising against the American government. Two powerful lines of argument clash:
1. In such a dispute, a democracy must revert to its essential idea: the sovereignty of the people. It isn’t for unelected judges, or provincial officials, to make such a decision. The people themselves, in their millions, must render their verdict in the voting booth.
2. Wait. Mr. Trump attempted to subvert American democracy by encouraging his followers to seek to overturn the people’s verdict in 2020. He summoned them to Washington, and, while he watched from the White House, his people, at his urging, marched to the Capitol; they became a mob and invaded democracy’s sanctum sanctorum. People died. Was that not insurrection? Wasn’t Mr. Trump actionably slow to do anything or say anything as the attack went on and on through the afternoon? A man who has so menaced democracy itself has disqualified himself from the privilege of democratic process. He carried America back to 63 B.C., when Catiline, having been defeated in Rome’s consular elections, tried to overthrow the duly elected consuls, Cicero and Gaius Antonius Hybrida. For such a deed, Mr. Trump’s enemies only want to take him off the ballot—or, via special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution, maybe put him in prison. Catiline and his co-conspirators died for what they did.
Argument No. 2 escalates; it conjures monstrous possibilities. Should a demagogue be permitted to use the rules of democracy (let the people decide) in such a way that, once he has been legally elected to office, he might turn dictator, declare an “emergency” and dismiss the democratic process that brought him to the White House? Hitler did that, the anti-Trumpians will say, after being legally installed as Germany’s chancellor in 1933. He demonstrated that a democratic election may be the path to dictatorship and national ruin—just as, the Trump side will respond, a “people’s revolution” on the left almost always ushers in a totalitarian regime. The result in either case is the same: the destruction of democracy and soon, of freedom.
In America in 2024, who, or what, is the real threat? Mr. Trump? Or the left? It’s a harder question than either side will admit.
The justices should entertain the possibility that the ambitions of the progressive woke and the soft-left elites have introduced an intolerant ideology—and a habit of mob behavior—that has done lethal damage to freedom of expression and thought, to say nothing of excellence, in American universities, public education, corporations, cultural institutions, big media and government. Their doctrine, damning Mr. Trump’s MAGA as the Bad America—Mr. Hyde to the left’s virtuous Dr. Jekyll—tolerates no viewpoint that disagrees with its own. Self-righteous progressives, needless to say, don’t recognize themselves in that reading of their saintly program.
It’s Mr. Trump who lies, the left will say. It’s undeniable he does. But, the Trumpian right replies, progressive America has become an entire culture of lies: Nothing is true except “my truth”—and the party line. Men aren’t necessarily men and women aren’t necessarily women. Doctors or midwives merely “assign a sex” to a newborn. Mediocrity gets an upgrade; a student worthy of a C-plus under the old regime may now graduate summa cum laude. One must never hurt the feelings of mediocrities. An appeal to excellence is racist oppression. Western Civ has got to go.
The Trumpian threat emanates from one egregious man and his massive following, citizens who, however, don’t consider themselves or their leader to be a threat at all but, rather, the better bet under these dreary circumstances. The faithful of the progressive left, every bit as cultish as Trumpians are alleged to be, consider themselves and their doctrines as the path to righteousness.
There’s the problem: The case for disqualifying both the flawed and tainted Mr. Trump and his flawed and tainted opponents on the left (including Mr. Biden) is strong. In a perfect world, that’s what would happen. But in such a bind as this—in this depressing equilibrium of negatives—a decision for one side or the other would require the Supreme Court to disenfranchise half of the country. The sane course is to disqualify neither. Let the people vote on it. And let all sides hope that by 2028, the country will have brought forth a new generation, offering a better choice of leaders and, let us say, more grown-up ideas.
Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism.”
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