Lately, there has been a lot of talk about “democracy,” such as the existential threat posed to “democracy” by the fact that voters in America and Europe increasingly are voting for restrictions on immigration, when elites of course know best.

Although H.L. Mencken said in 1915:

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

The Democrats believe in 2018:

“Democracy is the theory that the common people don’t know that they want more immigration, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

In practice, “Democracy” increasingly seems to be defined as “whatever is good for the Democratic Party and its analogs abroad, such as the government electing a new people.” From the NYT opinion page:

What’s Good for Democracy Is Also Good for Democrats

By Adam Bonica, July 26, 2018

Mr. Bonica is a political scientist at Stanford whose work sits at the intersection between data science and politics.

So, while Prof. Bonica may not look it, when you stop and think about it, he’s intersectional!

Amid the political turmoil of the past few years, there have been faint rustlings of a democratic revival. States have begun to take steps to empower citizens by making voting easier and more inclusive. …

These bright spots in an otherwise bleak political landscape hint at a path forward for American democracy. Seldom, if ever, have Democrats had so much to gain by increasing turnout. …

The Republican Party, after years of ascendancy, is about to fall off an electoral cliff. …

Once Democrats get serious about increasing turnout, there are a variety of effective means to do so. … To this end, Democrats should work toward granting statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico and citizenship to Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants. …

I’m fascinated by the changing iconography of Democrats when it comes to “democracy:”

The nation is at its best when democracy is on the rise. Many of our most celebrated figures — George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez — fought to enfranchise the disenfranchised and left a more inclusive republic as their legacy. Let’s finish what they started.

Notice that this Democrat has dropped from his list of celebrated figures of enfranchisement the two founders of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Absolutely nobody in the Democratic Party in 2018 seems to care anymore that Jackson symbolizes the elimination of property requirements for voting.

In contrast, the not very democratic at all George Washington is included. This is partly just patriotic boilerplate. But I think there’s another, more interesting reason: Washington is included as a proxy Washington’s righthand man, the contemporary Democrats’ new icon, the arch anti-democrat Alexander Hamilton, who has been retconned in the highest ticket price musical in the history of Broadway, as an intersectional Wall Street-knows-best immigrant POC.

Presumably, Prof. Bonica possesses enough knowledge of history to not list the currently super-glamorous Hamilton as one of those fighters for enfranchising the disenfranchised?

But how long until Hamilton’s name gets added to these lists of historic heroes of Democracy?