The phrase “our democracy” has become a pervasive cliche in American politics. But who is the subject in this presumptuous expression? Although never defined explicitly, the answer is implicit in what it does not include. To a greater and greater extent, American politics revolves around black people, women, and immigrant populations from the Third World, which together form the core of the Democratic party. The remnants of the old country are now facing obsolescence, with only a weak vessel, the Republican party, to defend them.

The right, whether out of denial, cowardice, or a lack of imagination, has failed to grapple with the deep roots of its demise. Republicans ostracized “nativists” and helped facilitate the demographic replacement of their own voters with the delusion that cheap Third World day laborers are “natural conservatives,” overlooking the most naturally conservative constituency of all: white men. The right failed to conserve gender roles, as women left the home and became angry foot soldiers of a socialist revolution.
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The left isn’t wrong when they paint conservatives as natural enemies of “our democracy.” There is nothing conservative about the radically egalitarian system that governs the country, which turns politics into a race to the bottom, a game at which the left naturally excels. The left, in all times and places, has thrived on destruction and decay. The muddled, obese, foreign mass that is today called “the American people” has only a faint connection to the sturdy, adventurous Anglo-Saxons who founded the nation.
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Those who find the present state of things tolerable, or even good, will never be shaken out of their delusions. One cannot feel too sorry for them when they come face to face with the creatures vomited out of the belly of their beloved “democracy.” If there is any hope of leaving this cesspool of mediocrity and disorder, it lies not with soft and flabby conservatism but a politics that is willing to raise the bar.