Like free speech, democracy, too, is a fundamental principle that the Left has jettisoned in its embrace of identity politics.
‘Democracy’, the word and concept, comes from the ancient Greek words ‘demos’ (the people) and ‘kratos’ (power or control).
The Bolsheviks’ meritorious stab at a socialist democracy involved the workplace election of delegates who elected further delegates from their number and so on up to the highest national level, a ‘soviet’ system that made elected representatives truly accountable and recallable by the grass roots. In the absence of this model, however, democracy’s best working definition in a capitalist parliamentary political system is the right of a majority within a nation-state to determine that nation-state’s political, social and legal nature by electing legislators or directly determining specific policies through referendum and plebiscite. At the core of democracy is a trust in and respect for the will of the people.
Yet, the two major, democratic political resets in 2016 - BREXIT and President Trump’s election - continue to be widely and feverishly rejected by both Western political, economic, cultural and academic elites including mainstream politicians, the liberal left and the radical identitarian hard left.
If you lose an election because your open-borders, globalist, free trade, Diversity/Identity policies lost out in a contest of ideas, if your policies to scrap democratic national sovereignty for dictation by a bureaucratic, unaccountable, undemocratic supra-national body are rejected at the ballot-box, then there is something wrong, or unpopular, with you political ideas/policies/vision, not something wrong with the people who rejected them.
The Left, however, with its ceaseless, roiling torrent of rage and resentment against Brexit and Trump, has aligned itself with the capitalist, anti-democratic establishment in its age-old class warfare and elitist, anti-democratic contempt for the working class who made those two momentous, democratic decision which the contemporary Left shallowly dismisses as somehow illegitimate and driven by nothing but racism, xenophobia, nationalism, demagogic populism, Russian meddling, or ‘wrong’ results delivered by ‘low-information’ (dumb) voters.
Democracy is inherently risky - there are no guarantees that any parliamentary election, plebiscite or referendum will deliver the outcome the left desires. Any result will be determined by a political contest of ideas and what should matter in a democracy is that public opinion should be sovereign – let the populace (the demos) rule (kratos). Where the Left’s ideas do not prevail in a democratic contest, there can be no recourse to non- representative, non-accountable authorities to overturn a ‘wrong’ democratic result.
Democracy is not the political establishment’s ‘checks and balances’ , such as parliamentary upper houses/Senates, government bureaucracies, technocratic bodies, supra-national institutions, etc. whose aim was, and is, to limit or stifle popular democracy.
Democracy is not the ‘kritarchy ‘of unelected, politically-interventionist judges who interfere with the decisions taken by legislators elected by the people. The judiciary should be kept out of politics - Judges should not be able to ‘legislate from the bench’ whether by blocking laws from being enacted or by rewriting them entirely. Judges should be confined to adjudicating the law in individual cases where legal interpretation is required. A judge who wants to legislate should resign from the bench and run for political office. It is through the voting booth, rather than the courtroom, that democratic decision-making should prevail.
By rushing off to politically sympathetic judges to salvage a losing policy, the Left also sets a precedent for the Right to undemocratically do the same. It is not the role of the courts to protect the Left or the Right’s agenda from the consequences of the democratic process.