Chuckthefacts.org: Democracy is a racist tool

         Chuckthefacts.org, an arm of the well-endowed Assenberg Center, has provided (without prompting) its evaluation of a televison advertisment by People for the American Way in support of democracy.  The evaluation follows:

A new TV ad campaign by People for the American Way portrays the democratic process as a noble tool of American freedom.  Real-life democracy is another matter, however. It can be used for good or evil. In fact, segregationist Southern legislatures used democracy for years to enact the poll tax and opressive Jim Crow laws, including laws that required strict segregation of the races in transportation, public facilities, entertainment venues, hotels, sporting events, on sports teams, in schools, in restaurants, and the like.  Among the real-life practitioners of democracy were the late segregationist Senators Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi.

                    Analysis

This ad uses a persuasion technique that might be called "innocence by association." It associates democracy with the election of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Bill Clinton, some of America's favorite presidents, while ignoring the fact that democracy was used for a other dark purposes, such as the election of Adolph Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in 1933.  

                  "Save Democracy"

The People for the American Way Foundation says it is spending $5 million on the ad -- which comes in both 60- and 30-second versions. Their aim, according to the PFAW website, is to "save democracy" in order to block "a right-wing effort to found a theocracy" in the United States.  There's no actual proposal for such a theocracy at this time, but PFAW and other liberal organizations point out that, without support for a true democracy, such a proposal might gain footing and result in the suppression of the right of non-believers, or the non-orthodox, to vote, just as blacks were democratically denied the right to vote in the South in the past.  

Democrats have been seeking to build support for democracy to prevent the growth of support for an anti-democratic regime, such as a theocracy.  The ad makes no mention of the fight over religious issues.  Instead, it presents an idealized view of democracy that belies the sometimes sordid history of that institution.

We of course take no position on whether democracy should or should not be preserved or whether it would be wise to install a theocracy in the United States.  We merely note that a real-life democracy doesn't necessarily look like the fictional one shown in the TV ad.