Restoring Our Language: Universities and the Media are Warping our Definition of Democracy to Strengthen Bureaucracy

A version of this article appeared on Restoration News, and is reprinted here with permission.

One of the biggest recent innovations in academia is scholars emphasizing the power of language—how the words we use define the way we think and act. It’s probably not a coincidence that this innovation has occurred as the types of bureaucratic institutions which sponsored it, joined by allies in the press, have begun aggressively using words to try to shape how we think and act about politics. Especially since the Trump presidency, no word has been more “shaped,” or warped, by these administrators, academics, and journalists than “democracy.” This summer, they’re at it again.  

The most recent push began at the end of July in The New York Times, which informed readers that if President Trump wins reelection he is “planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power …end[ing]…Justice Department independence” and exerting authority over “independent agencies” which are answerable to both President and Congress and so, in practice, answerable to neither. A second, simultaneous push came in Washington’s premiere establishment magazine, The Atlantic, in a “must-read” story by prominent journalist-intellectual Anne Applebaum asking “Is Tennessee a Democracy?” describing Republicans’ use of state government to secure favorable electoral maps.  Soon, established media headlines were proclaiming that democracy was in danger and accusing Trump and Tennessee of “authoritarianism” while Democrats protested that "[government] agencies keep this democracy in check…They provide the checks and they provide the balances!" A week later, in The Atlantic, academic authority weighed in: eminent historian of fascism Christopher Browning explicitly used both stories to argue that Trump is a fascist—the ultimate threat to democracy.  Soon after, in The Washington Post, another historian argued that overturning democracy and installing authoritarianism has been Republicans’ goal for fifty years.

But all these assertions and amplifications masked the fact that the definitions of “democracy” they were operating on were, at the very least, open to debate. Their first definition was impartiality—administrative agencies staffed by “independent experts” or “neutral arbiters” weighing issues and deciding on them. Their second was “equal access”—these “experts” or “arbiters” involving themselves in state politics to guarantee access to the vote. Do these definitions sound strange? They should. 

Those idealized definitions are nowhere in the Constitution, which secures democracy by allowing people a regular voice in their government based on checks and balances. At the national level, government agencies are answerable to a president elected by the people; a duly elected Congress allocates funds but doesn’t direct agencies; and the Judiciary rules on the constitutionality of government actions but doesn’t enforce them. Meantime, state governments regulate elections, health and morals, checking the federal government and keeping politics close to the Americans’ daily lives.  This is why our system was constructed and how it was understood. Democracy was the institutionalized will of the people—in this case through a republican form of government both modeled after and diverging from Britain’s monarchical-parliamentary regime—no matter whether a person believed in more government or less.

But The Times, Applebaum, and Browning are going off their own idea of democracy—one with much shallower roots. Those roots are in the Sixties and Seventies, when the administrative state expanded, and administrators, often with connections to universities or government-backed conglomerates, began pushing back on the President and Congress and overruling states in the name of ideals like “impartiality” and “equality.” These ideals got picked up by newspapers, since the administrators sourced reporters and columnists who were trying to shape Americans’ views. Though shifts this vast and quiet are hard to quantify, it’s not a coincidence that New York Times references to “civil servants” and “administrators” climbed sharply in the 1970s, as reporters started making the main players in their stories bureaucrats rather than the people’s representatives.   

Why are major newspapers and respected thinkers taking this line today? Because their power and influence are being threatened by the movement awakened by President Trump, whose Administration began restoring the older definition of democracy, using the Executive to reduce administrators’ power and appointing judges who push authority to the states, along with curbing the power of government-underwritten institutions like elite universities. In response, the university-and-media complexes have gone on the attack in support of the administrators, of which July’s are only the latest examples. Over the past six years, reporters have referenced “equal access” to the vote to justify national interference in states, and “experts” have regularly labeled Trump authoritarian, a label which, according to LexisNexis, has surged over the last decade. Meantime, unilateral and drastic actions of President Biden’s that expand the power of administrative agencies are reframed using "democratic" ideals of “impartiality” and “equality.” In this read, Biden’s attempted forgiveness of billions of dollars in student loan debt without the approval of Congress, which constitutionally holds the power of the purse, is an “agonized” but “target[ed]” decision empowering "expert" administrators to give young people an “equal shot.”    

The end stage of this vision of democracy is chilling, because it makes power subject not to Constitutional processes but to grants from unaccountable bureaucrats in partnership with politicians who want to give them more power: as Democratic Representative Linda Sanchez recently said, defending administrators’ policing of ‘vaccine disinformation,’ “No right given to the people of the United States is absolute...” That’s not what most Americans believe about democracy—but this is the definition being pushed on an exhausted public by institutions and their operators who claim intellectual authority. Republicans need to start boring into this definition and exposing its logical, inevitable dangers.