SNA (Tokyo) — The mainstream US liberal-left has gone so far down its own ideological rabbit hole in its desperate effort to prevent a second presidential administration of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump that they are openly undermining the democratic system they profess to defend.

The alleged defense of democracy has been a recurring theme of the incumbent Joe Biden administration both abroad and at home. Liberal interventionism (or what might be more harshly called Liberal Imperialism) has guided its public foreign policy appeals in confrontations with Russia, China, and more recently, Hamas. In each case, military action or threats have been portrayed as moral necessities from which dissent is not only wrong but even enabling of evil.

A similar campaign of demonization of the opposition has been undertaken within the United States. The main thrust of this campaign has been aimed at Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans, but a smaller offshoot has also targeted the other end of the ideological spectrum—anti-imperial progressives, who are accused of enabling the far right whenever they fail to deliver unquestioning support to the governing liberal elite.

The Democratic Party in some US states is insisting on a coronation of Biden, refusing even to let others contest the Democratic nomination. The primary schedule was also rearranged with the goal of preventing any other Democrat from having a strong showing in the early days.

Nevertheless, just this past weekend, President Biden gave a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in which he declared: “I make this sacred pledge to you; the defense, protection, and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency.”

While all of these tendencies have been fully apparent for several years, the campaign has entered a shriller and more hysterical phase, driven by the fact that most public opinion polls find that Trump is on track to win the elections in November; the former president is ahead in almost all of the key battleground states.

Faced with the prospect that a majority of Americans might actually vote to return Trump to power—and beginning to catch on to the fact that all of the legal charges laid against him have only made Trump seem a martyr to most Republicans and increased his popularity—the alleged defenders of democracy are now beginning to openly question whether or not democracy is actually a good thing if it returns results which the liberal elite disapproves of.

This past weekend, New York Times columnist David French made this argument fully explicit, asserting that even if a majority of the American people want to return Trump to the office of the president, they should be denied the right to do so.

French argues that courts should rule Trump ineligible under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, which bans from public office those who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion… or given aid or comfort to the enemies.” He says this amendment was always designed to be undemocratic, and properly so—”when a person criticizes Section 3 [of the 14th Amendment] as undemocratic or undermining democracy, your answer should be simple: Yes, it is undemocratic, exactly as it was intended to be. The amendments’ authors were worried that voters would send former Confederates right back into public office. If they had believed that the American electorate was wise enough not to vote for insurrectionists, they never would have drafted Section 3.”

This New York Times columnist addresses two of the key objections to his approach. One of them is that Trump has not been legally convicted of having engaged in “insurrection or rebellion.” Certainly, there are many Americans who regard Trump’s encouragement of his followers on January 6, 2021, to “fight like hell” as somehow being an order for the storming of the US Capitol Building later that day (in spite of the fact that he also said in the same speech that protests should be conducted “peacefully and patriotically”).

French’s view is that a determination that Trump engaged in insurrection “doesn’t require a court conviction.”

But if the 14th Amendment’s public offices ban can be applied to Trump (or, for that matter, anyone else) in the absence of legal conviction, then what is the practical standard of application? Logically, the only criterion that remains is that a US citizen becomes an “insurrectionist” banned from holding public office whenever a sufficient proportion of the incumbent political elite decides by itself that it is justified—even when a majority of the American public disagrees with this elite view.

Today, it may be Trump and the MAGA movement that are deemed to fall afoul of this constitutional standard. In the future, who knows? Much of the political right regarded the George Floyd riots of 2020 as an “insurrection” against constituted authority. Perhaps the next time people on the political left take to the streets, they and those who offer them “aid or comfort” through social media posts could be deemed subject to the ban on holding public offices under the 14th Amendment. After all, the law is the law, right?

This is the dangerous precedent that the mainstream US liberal-left is now prepared to set. Those who forge new weapons of lawfare can never be assured how those same weapons will later be employed by others.

But the New York Times columnist and many others are now calling for this weapon to be employed without hesitation. French writes: “Enough. It’s time to apply the plain language of the Constitution to Trump’s actions and remove him from the ballot—without fear of the consequences. Republics are not maintained by cowardice.”

One wonders, in response, how republics fare when most of their citizens are disenfranchised by a corrupt and failing elite?

This article was originally published on January 8, 2023, in the “Japan and the World” newsletter. Become a Shingetsu News supporter on Patreon and receive the newsletter by email each Monday morning.