In the last two years, the defense of democracy has been central to the Democratic Party's attempt to portray itself as the last line of defense against Republicans' alleged authoritarianism. But as recent events in Nashville showed, Democrats' alleged fealty to democracy and abhorrence for agitators and mobs seeking to disrupt the legislative branch of government is more a matter of situational ethics than actual principle. As the career of a new Democratic idol, Tennessee State Rep. Justin Jones, demonstrates, they're only against anti-democratic rioters when they're seeking to silence Republicans.
Jones became a national celebrity when, along with two other Democrats—Reps. Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson—he disrupted a March 30 session of the Tennessee legislature to demand that it consider anti-gun rights laws that he supported. Acting in conjunction with a mob of demonstrators that had flooded the state capitol in Nashville, the trio, armed with bullhorns, seized the podium and shut down the assembly, ranting about Republicans being complicit in mass shootings. The demonstrators were kept outside the chamber but harassed both legislators and cops who were present. Eventually, order was restored and days later the legislature voted to expel Jones and Pearson. Johnson escaped the same fate by only a narrow margin.
At that point, the national media and leading Democrats like former president Barack Obama treated the state legislators' expulsion as the only salient part of the story, ignoring the events of March 30. In that way, they turned Jones into a martyr and used the episode as more proof of the GOP's supposed authoritarianism.
The hypocrisy and dishonesty of this narrative is staggering.
The excuse for the Tennessee Democrats' demonstration was a mass shooting at a Christian school where a woman who claimed to be a transgender male murdered three nine-year-old children and three adults. But instead of the focus being on an anti-Christian hate crime, the corporate media and Democrats treated the tragedy as an excuse to promote anti-gun legislation. Jones and his colleagues demanded that the legislature consider such laws. But the Tennessee House of Representatives, in which Republicans outnumber Democrats 75 to 24, disagreed.
Yet rather than treating the trio's contempt for the will of a democratically elected majority—and by extension, of Tennessee's voters—Democrats think Jones, Pearson, Johnson, and the mob they egged on were doing the right thing.
This reaction is a complete contradiction of everything the Democrats have been preaching to us for the last two years.
The events of January 6, 2021, have become Democrats' rallying cry—that day's "insurrection" was, depending on the speaker, the moral equivalent of the firing on Fort Sumter, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.
Those who broke the law by entering the Capitol on that day and disrupting the ritual counting of the votes of the Electoral College were branded as "insurrectionists." But soon, as the farcical partisan witch hunt conducted by the House January 6 Committee showed, that label was expanded to include anyone who took part in the legal demonstration about alleged election fraud that day in Washington or who raised questions about the vote count in Congress. Anyone who didn't agree that the riot was a coup d'état led by former president Donald Trump was also lumped into the "insurrectionist" category.
The Democratic talking points then expanded to falsely label those Republicans who passed voter integrity laws as not merely bigots but also, in President Joe Biden's words, "semi-fascists" waging a war on democracy.
It's true that the Democrats' disgraceful behavior in Nashville was not as bad as Jan. 6. But the difference is one of scale, not principle. Both were attempts to disrupt the working of a democratically elected government body by using force and intimidation. The difference is that in one the people seeking to overturn democracy were Democrats, while in the other Republicans were the guilty parties.
But these aren't the only instances in which mobs sought to have their way without respect to the law.
The summer prior to Jan. 6, the "mostly peaceful" Black Lives Matter riots resulted in billions of dollars in property damage, injured more than 2,000 police officers, and cost the lives of 25 people. Yet Democrats still act as if those riots were mere peaceful protests.
One of those who took part in violence during the Black Lives Matter summer was Rep. Jones, who can be seen in a video assaulting a driver while attempting to disrupt traffic outside of the Tennessee Capitol.
Nothing does more to undermine a nation's democratic culture than evidence of a two-tiered justice system in which laws are enforced against some people while others violate them with impunity. The way the national media and Democrats cheered on Black Lives Matter rioters and gave them a pass for their behavior, even when it involved attacks on cops and government buildings, was disgraceful. That doesn't excuse the lawbreaking and violence that took place on Jan. 6 but, like recent events in Nashville, it's proof that the Democrats' reverence for democracy and opposition to political violence is entirely selective.
A party that makes Justin Jones a hero or lauds BLM rioters can't pretend to be the guardians of our democratic institutions. But that's the line Democrats and their press cheerleaders expect us to swallow. That big lie may be accepted by blue-state America where Republicans are really believed to be fascists. But the more they repeat it, the less the rest of the country will be ready to believe in the fairness of our media or justice system. That is the real threat to democracy.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
