Just as liberals in the last twenty years have conflated the terms "equality" and "equity", they are confused about the meaning of "democracy".
Conservatives understand that America is founded on a very basic concept: equality of opportunity. While it has never achieved the perfection of that ideal, as enslaved blacks and native Americans can attest, it has striven mightily toward that goal, including eventually fighting a Civil War costing 600,000 lives.
Now the United States represents for its entire population, and for the larger world, a system of governance grounded on the idea that everyone is afforded an equal opportunity to succeed, or fail, based on their own innate talents, industry, and resourcefulness. In short, everyone has equality of opportunity.
That was up until academic theorists embracing "Critical Theory" turned that concept on its head and substituted "equity" for "equality". The crux of critical theory is that everyone should realize equal outcomes, not equal opportunities. (That also happened to be the basis of Communism, with resulting failure.)
The basis of all Western civilization has really been, until recently, equality of opportunity. However, the new mantra of equality of outcome has gained traction, particularly in Europe and the political arena.
The Europeans herald the virtues of "democracy", but as Wall Street Journal opinion writer, Walter Russelle Meade, described in an excellent essay recently, liberal European elitists only like "democracy" when it produces the outcomes they like. Just as American elitists have rejected equality of opportunity for equality of outcome in the economic and academic arenas, Europeans have done the same in the political arena.
In his column, titled “Why Democracy Is in Retreat,” Meade describes his recent attendance at the “Democracy Summit” in Copenhagen, Denmark. He recounts the sense that participants there viewed the greatest threats to “democracy” to be Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin. Speaking of democracy-advocates, Meade writes, “Too many of them, especially in Europe, conflate democracy as process–free elections with a free press to determine who gets to run a particular country, with electoral outcomes. They define a democratic election as one in which the right people win.”
Of course, the “right people” in the eyes of those about whom Meade is writing are liberal-leaning elitists. The “wrong people” are the likes of Donald Trump and those European politicians of a more conservative bent.
Take the example of Romania. Romanians elected a conservative, Trump-supporting president, Calin Georgescu, last December. Through their democratic processes, he is the man the people wanted.
However, the liberal elitists in that country could not abide the thought of a Romanian version of Donald Trump, so they nullified the election, with spurious claims that Russia somehow interfered in the election on Georgescu's behalf. That sounds very similar to what Democrats tried to do here to Donald Trump after his surprising 2016 election, with utterly bogus claims of “Russian collusion”.
As Meade goes on to write of the European elitists’ view, “An electoral victory by a party that wants to crack down on illegal immigrants? A failure of democracy. Victory by a party that refuses to rework society around the preferences of people who feel they were born into bodies of the wrong sex? A gain for authoritarianism. Victory by a party that rejects green-energy mandates as too expensive and impractical? An attack on everything that democracy is about.”
That is precisely the mindset behind the drive by the Left in the United States for the past two decades to re-engineer American society so that it achieves equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity in all spheres of endeavor – academia being among the most prominent. It is embodied entirely in the policies of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – previously known as Affirmative Action, until that term became too toxic. It was simply renamed and re-imposed, but with added pseudo-academic balderdash that elevates people based on immutable characteristics, like melanin levels in the skin. And it disregards merit, actively seeking to punish people who do not fit into certain “protected categories”, such as white, heterosexual males.
Claptrap about the “heteronormative framework”, “the “patrimony” and “white privilege” not only sought to favor certain groups over others unjustly, but actively sought to demonize those in the disfavored groups.
Europe – particularly in places like Germany and the UK – is arguably even further along than the United States on this societally destructive path in terms of both equality of outcome in academic and professional realms, and in the disfiguring of the term “democracy”.
This was the essence of the superb address given by Vice President Vance at the Munich Security Conference last February (audio and transcript available here).
America firmly rejected the European elitists’ notion of democracy as a “proper outcome” in November 2024 in their election of Donald Trump. If we are to continue to defend the European members of NATO, they too should return to “democracy” as the will of the people.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for 38 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has been a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, The Federalist, American Greatness, and other publications. His work has been featured on CBS News' 48 Hours Mysteries and NBC News' Dateline. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)