THE press, which tends to dislike Donald Trump, were keen to assert that there was no evidence to Trump’s claims about voter irregularities and headlines now proclaim the threat he poses to democracy itself.

The same “democrats” were less forthright, however, when they made hysterical claims for two years about Trump colluding with Russia to “steal” the 2016 election. Some facts, it seems, are better than others.

Rather than Trump’s reaction to the election being a peculiarity to this unusual populist politician, from the reaction to the 2016 US election, to Brexit and the pressure for another vote on independence, denying democracy has become all the rage, argues Frank Furedi in his new book Democracy Under Siege.

Since the emergence of democracy in ancient Greece, he notes, the aristocratic imagination has balked at the idea of the little people having an equal say in public life.

In the 19th century this elitist outlook was made “scientific” through the invention of crowd psychology that was used to explain why the masses could not be trusted.

In the post-war period, experts blamed the authoritarianism of Hitler and Stalin on the ignorant and easily led masses and attempts were made to insulate society from “too much democracy” through the increasing use of expert institutions such as the judiciary and transnational bodies like the IMF and the European Union.

Elites from left and right, including Labour Party intellectuals like Evan Durbin who advocated eugenics, believed that, “people were far more wicked, i.e. mentally ill, than was commonly supposed”.

More subtle ideas are used today, by experts like Professor Jason Brennan who invented the term “low-information white people”, a term that has been used to belittle Trump and Brexit voters.

The elitism of these aristocrats, experts and “democrats” means that they are unable to understand the beauty and importance of democracy as a thing in itself.

You cannot have too much democracy because it is the democratic process itself, the need to debate, struggle and to become public individuals, on mass, that allows society to develop real insights and to forge genuine solidarities.

In the end, as Furedi notes, how we view democracy depends on how we regard human beings. Whether or not Joe Biden thinks the masses who voted for Trump are a basket of deplorables or not will be key to the real meaning of this election and to American democracy over the next four years.

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