Should We Have Faith in Democracy?

By Dr. Kevin Barrett

Mainstream media presstitutes are aghast at President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to concede the 2020 election. They say they aren’t worried that Mr. Trump might win any one case and remain in office. Instead, they say he is “damaging democracy.” How so? Peter Baker of The New York Times, among many others, charges Mr. Trump with “undermining public faith in the electoral system.”

So, President Trump is committing a crime against faith? Should he be impeached for heresy? That is the unspoken implication. Does Peter Baker really think democracy (rule by the people) is a religion? If he does, he is not entirely wrong. Democracy, like other religions, is a widely shared faith-based system of symbols and rituals that unites (and occasionally divides) a people.

The dominant religion of American elites might be described as liberal-progressivist secular humanism. Within this larger dispensation, “democracy” has been elevated to the status of an idol, a false god, and an official state religion.

Patrick Buchanan and others have persuasively argued that the Founders of the American Republic did not particularly care for “democracy.” Be that as it may, the religion of democracy has gradually come to dominate American public life. Today, it is a shared article of faith. And according to the high priests of democracy, we are supposed to have blind, unquestioning faith not only in the eternal goodness and justice and superiority of “rule by the people,” but also in whatever particular machinery is currently being used to count the votes.

The democracy inquisitors are charging Trump with heresy on two counts: 1) He seems to like authoritarian strongmen better than democratically elected leaders; and 2) he has been screaming from the rooftops that the vote-counting machinery in America is crooked.

Most of America’s elite wants to burn Trump at the stake. But it could be argued that by undermining blind faith in our “democracy” and its black box voting machines, he is performing a public service. Faith is appropriate in the domain of religion. Having faith in God, or in the messages of Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, or others considered divinely appointed prophets or messiahs, is normal and expected. But faith in a political system is misplaced. And faith in ostensible results spat out by voting machines whose proprietary software is owned by extremely rich people of questionable character is worse than misplaced.

Unfortunately, though President Trump is performing a public service by undermining faith in American elections, he is making a mistake in his manner of doing so. As always, he is making it all about himself. Instead of pressing Georgia state officials to “find me 11,780 votes” and generally behaving like a sore loser, Mr. Trump should be telling the American people:

“I believe I won this election. But this isn’t about me. It’s about our country. Our vote-counting procedures are terrible. Our election system appears to have been set up deliberately to make it possible for powerful people to steal elections. And this isn’t our first stolen presidential election. Kennedy’s people stole the 1960 election. Richard Nixon stole the 1968 election by having insiders sabotage Lyndon Johnson’s peace negotiations with Vietnam. Bush Sr. stole the 1980 election for Ronald Reagan by paying off Iran to hold onto the American hostages, which politically destroyed Jimmy Carter. Bush Jr. stole both the 2000 and 2004 elections through massive voter suppression, crooked voting machines that stole far more than 10 million votes, and much, much more. Karl Rove was about to steal the 2008 election for John Mc-Cain when his chief vote-rigger, Michael Connell, was suddenly hauled into court and threatened . . . then murdered on the eve of testifying against Rove. Then, in 2012, Rove’s people were on the verge of stealing the election for Mitt Romney, when the other side pre-empted them using mafia tactics.

“I’ve already said that Hillary Clinton stole a whole lot of votes in 2016. I still believe that. But I want to level with you today: My own son-in-law cut a deal with Netanyahu to have Israeli intelligence and its ‘Russian’ mob hack voting machines to make sure I won the swing states in 2016. Sure, Hillary stole some votes too, but not enough. And one more thing: Anybody who can do simple math and compare polls to ‘results,’ can see that a whole lot of Republican House and Senate candidates ‘won’ rigged elections in 2020.”

If President Trump did that, we wouldn’t need “faith” in democracy anymore.

Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions. Since 2007, Dr. Barrett has been informally blacklisted from teaching in American colleges and universities. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, public speaker, author, and talk radio host. He lives in rural western Wisconsin.