Lacking a résumé of successful policies and actions to brag about, a desperate Biden campaign is focusing its narrative on an alleged threat to democracy posed by another Trump presidency and his MAGA Republican movement.
President Joe Biden put this theme front and center during the 2022 midterm election season when speaking at Philadelphia's Independence Hall he intoned, "As I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault."
Biden recently repeated this theme in opening his 2024 reelection campaign with a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, timed to mark the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot where he declared his predecessor is "trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election."
Charging that his predecessor and likely opponent is undermining U.S. democracy with false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, Biden said, "Whether democracy is still America's sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time. It is what the 2024 election is all about."
So, what after all, is "democracy" all about — most specifically a constitutional democratic republic we call America?
In general, democracy is broadly interpreted to mean "rule by the people"'... a system of government in which people vote to determine their elected representatives.
Or as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines democracy, "a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections."
But under our Constitution, America is also a republic, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as "a political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them."
In other words, our federal governmental structure is a mixture of the two. It is democratic because the people govern themselves, and it is a republic because the government's power is derived from its people.
According to The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, about half of U.S. adults believe democracy is working "not too well" or "not well at all."
Based upon the rated importance of 12 polling issues, those 67% who said the election outcome will be very or extremely important to the future of democracy in the U.S. ranked second only behind the economy (75%), and about tying with concerns about excess government spending (67%) and immigration (66%).
Sixty-two percent of respondents agreed that the future of democracy is on the line in the 2024 election, Democrats (72%) and Republicans (55%).
Among them, 87% of Democrats and 54% of independents believe a second Trump term would negatively affect U.S. democracy, while 82% of Republicans along with 56% of independents say the same about a 2024 Biden victory.
Another 19% thought U.S. democracy is "already so seriously broken that it doesn't matter who wins the 2024 presidential election," with Republicans (23%) more likely than Democrats (10%) to say this.
Relatively few in either party were reportedly optimistic that U.S. democracy is resilient enough to withstand the outcome.
Why the mutual pessimism and gloom?
Both sides obviously believe motivations and actions by the other seek to interfere with fair Democratic elections, nonpartisan equal justice, and constitutional checks and balances provided by three separate and co-equal branches of our Republic system of government.
As with Biden's Independence Hall and Valley Forge speeches, much alarm on the Democrat side appears to have been centered on liberal media echo chamber Jan.6 Capitol Trump "insurrection" trope which unfailingly seems to omit the part where he told supporters, "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
Then there's that hysterical hyperbole regarding an "admission" by Trump that, if elected, he will become an autocratic dictator on the first day, similarly cutting out the part where he had explained that on that "Day One" he referred to he would use his presidential powers to close the southern border with Mexico and expand oil and gas drilling ... policies reversed by Biden.
"After that," Trump told Iowa Fox News town hall host Sean Hannity, "I'm not a dictator."
Republicans have lost confidence in national election integrity involving opposition actions to prevent identity and residency checks on mail-in voters along with drop box ballet harvesting, and by allowing ballots to be counted after Election Day.
They have witnessed a false Trump-Russia collusion hoax perpetrated by his first presidential opponent followed by collaborative media-DOJ cover-ups of potentially scandalous items lurking in the famed "laptop from hell" of Trump's second opponent's son throughout the 2020 election period, and now again observe endless lawfare attempts to criminally disqualify and bankrupt Trump as their dominant current opponent.
We have all seen nearly successful Democrat legislative attempts to pack the Supreme Court with additional constitutionally revisionist justices and create new perpetually liberal Senate seats by admitting Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as states.
It's no exaggeration to assert that our entire constitutional democratic republic framework of national sovereignty and legal citizen voting is no longer assured as an incumbent Democrat president has intentionally opened our border to historic illegal mass migration while many members of his party push to permit foreign nationals to vote in local elections.
And without guaranteed sovereignty and protected voting rights of legal citizenship, all American definitions of democratic and republican foundations become meaningless.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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