These days one periodically hears about how someone or something is a “threat to democracy,” often from people who are also in favor of things that go against the democratically enacted constitution, laws, safeguards, popular votes, etc. of their nation. The curious thing is that they’re not hypocrites: they’re just using a different definition of democracy than you are. But it’s not a new one.

What they mean by democracy is, roughly, that their guy is in power. But not in a self-serving way. They genuinely believe that the overwhelming majority of people agree with them and so anything which goes against what they want is thwarting the will of the people.

This kind of thinking is nothing new. You see it in all of the communist dictatorships which called themselves “Democratic.” This was not mere branding; they actually believed it. The essence of democracy, they said, is not voting, but rule by the people. Wherever you have voting the people get hoodwinked, lied to, cheated, etc. Wherever they elect representatives, the representatives are bribed, lied to, etc. etc. Thus the will of the people is never enacted, but often things that they do not want are. True democracy is doing the will of the people, which requires a strong leader who is not beholden to special interests, who is immune to the lies of the rich, etc. etc.

This is the sense in which the people who scream about threats to democracy use the word “democracy.” This is in strong contrast to the understanding that the rest of us have, which is the sense that Winston Churchill was talking about when he famously said that democracy is the worst form of government, aside from all of the others that have been tried in this world of sin and woe. This sense of democracy is, basically, using voting as a non-violent proxy for war. This is why it has things like a constitution which is difficult to change which provides safeguards against the worst vicissitudes of short-term victories. If people are to agree to be bound by this proxy for a war with real weapons they may be able to win, they must be guaranteed a limit to what the people who win by voting are allowed to do. Those limitations and safeguards make no sense to the democrat who only cares about the will of the people, because they can only mean, to him, the thwarting of the will of the people.