By Issues & Insights Editorial Board | October 16, 2025
How many times have we heard over the last decade that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy? That we were going to lose our democracy if he isn’t restrained (and maybe even eliminated)? That our democracy is in peril because Trump and his supporters are fascists, Nazis, and worse, if anything can be?
The Democrats and their media allies hammer the term far beyond the point of absurdity. What is their obsession with “democracy,” a word that appears neither in the Declaration of Independence nor in the Constitution?
Because, as has been pointed out many times, but clearly not enough, the U.S. is not a democracy.
Our nation is a republic. The Constitution guarantees in Article IV to “every state in this union a republican form of government.” The founders were skeptical of democracies. James Madison called democracy “the most vile form of government.”
“Democracies,” he said, “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with the personal security or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
There’s a clue right there. What Madison described is the U.S. in 2025. “Spectacles of turbulence and contention” have been created by Antifa takeovers, anti-ICE violence, and Black Lives Matter riots. An incompatibility “with the personal security or the rights of property” is manifest in the rising crime that the Democrats have ignored and at times nurtured, as well as their lust for other people’s money through punitive taxation and wealth redistribution.
In our current era, classicist Victor Davis Hanson has warned us about the dangers of “Athenian-style democracy,” in which the “insidious growth in power of the new citizen Assembly, which made, interpreted, and enforced laws — usually without many executive or judicial checks and balances.”
Democrats want to convince the nation that we are a democracy because they fear “John Locke’s trilogy of the rights to life, liberty, and property.” They know their power is limited in a republic, that stirring up a mob in a nation where three separate branches keep the government in check won’t yield the same results as it would in a system in which a majority of voters directly make the laws.
“Regardless of the outcome of elections,” says Washington Times columnist Don Feder, “Democrats intend to use the mob to retain and expand their power.”
Feder wrote those words in 2023 after a trio of Tennessee state legislators took over the well of that state’s House chamber and led “chants to encourage the mob.”
The Democrats are playing a game based on the Cloward-Piven strategy. They want to use the “democratic” mobs to create instability and trigger a political crisis, which they promise only they can fix if we just give them more power and money.
Is it possible the defenders of “muh democracy” are simply historically ignorant and are merely parroting Woodrow Wilson’s plea to make the world “safe for democracy”? That could apply to a few. But a defense, even a weak one, of the system our brilliant founders left for us cannot be found anywhere in the Democratic Party’s agenda. Since the 1960s, Democrats have been agitating for another revolution, one that would put them in power for a thousand-year rule.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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