House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just spent half a million dollars to defeat a rare Republican who dared to call out former President Donald Trump’s election conspiracy theories. Her Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent big to make sure conspiracy theorist John Gibbs became the Republican nominee in Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District.
This is not how you behave if you believe that conspiracy-theorizing Republicans are a profound threat. No, this is the way you behave if you cynically believe it is worth risking empowering conspiracy theorists in order to increase Democrats’ election chances.
Pelosi might sincerely believe that the only way to save democracy is to elect Democrats. She was saying such things long before Trump entered the scene and made election fraud conspiracy theories the norm.
“Our democracy is on the ballot” was Pelosi’s slogan for the 2012 election, when Mitt Romney was the leader of the Republican Party.
#cbcfalc2012 Rep. Pelosi surprise appearance at Voting Rights Town Hall “Our democracy is on the ballot” #votingrights pic.twitter.com/LwoRYZET
— bcscomm (@bcscomm) September 20, 2012
Again and again, for a decade, Pelosi has argued that electing Republicans ends democracy. The only answer is a one-party state.
We should take her at face value and understand that her party’s claims to be “saving democracy” are nothing more than standard partisanship cast in particularly cynical terms — terms that academia and the media largely buy into.
It’s cynical — because it is an effort to declare Republicans not merely wrong or harmful but illegitimate. It’s an attempt to declare all conservative or GOP positions beyond the boundaries of permissible debate.
As I wrote in January, “Democrats’ 2022 strategy is to declare that Republicans’ positions and candidates are not merely opposing positions and candidates but are in fact attacks on democracy itself.”
The question, once again, is not why Pelosi runs a dishonest campaign in order to maximize her own power. That’s obvious. It’s why academia and the news media play along with their “democracy teams” that attack democracy and their pledges to take sides when “democracy is under attack.”
It’s pure partisanship, aimed not merely at winning elections but at giving the government, the media, and academia an excuse to drop any pretense of impartiality.
