On the morning after elections, many voters wake up and instinctively quote Dorothy Parker: “What fresh hell is this?”
“Will of the people!” is the correct answer—at least if a Democrat won the election. Actually, the notion that election results represent the “will of the people” is one of the most audacious triumphs of democratic propaganda.
Ever since the Civil War era, presidents have periodically invoked “will of the people” to sanctify their own power. President Andrew Johnson declared in 1867 that “the appointing power”—i.e., himself—“represents the collective majesty and speaks the will of the people.” Johnson’s “majesty” took a wallop two months later when he was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives. Johnson, a notorious drunkard, barely survived a Senate vote that would have ended his reign.
Almost a century ago, President Calvin Coolidge rolled out religious buncombe to consecrate the worship of vote counts. In a 1926 speech on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, President Calvin Coolidge added God’s ballot to the election returns, declaring, “We hold that the duly authorized expression of the will of the people has a divine sanction.” Unfortunately, God forgot to tell Coolidge to run for re-election.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was perhaps the first president to invoke “the will of the people” to sanctify every power grab. In a 1937 fireside chat, he denounced the Supreme Court for thwarting “the will of the people”—which FDR supposedly incarnated because he had been re-elected the previous year. The Court had struck down several New Deal laws as unconstitutional in part because they vested vast arbitrary power in federal bureaucrats. FDR sought to pack the Supreme Court with appointees who would rubberstamp his policies, sparking a backlash that hobbled him until he pulled the nation into World War II.
FDR also bastardized “will of the people” to sanctify tyranny by American allies. At the 1945 Yalta Conference, FDR co-signed a communique with Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that “pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people” in the former Axis nations and liberated countries of Europe. The secret deals cut at Yalta guaranteed that a hundred million lives in eastern and central Europe would be blighted by the Soviet boot.
Invoking the “will of the people” is the Washington version of elevator music. In 2015, a Barack Obama White House webpage declared, “Our government provides online resources to help you learn more about how it works to enact the will of the people of the United States.” The page listed links to a dozen other federal sites, including one not slavishly devoted to popular approval—the Central Intelligence Agency.
In a December 2020 speech after being certified the winner of the presidential election, Joe Biden invoked “will of the people” four times, proclaiming that “the will of the people prevailed” in the 2020 election. But where was the “will of the people” discovered? At the bottom of an unmanned mystery ballot drop box in Kenosha, Wisconsin? The 2020 version of “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”’ is being deduced simply from the sum total of pieces of paper with a blot near Biden’s name that happened to mysteriously turn up in a government bin or mailing address within a few days after the election.
The January 6, 2021 Capitol Clash quickly became permanently linked to crimes against the “will of the people.” In his 2021 inaugural address, Biden castigated “a riotous mob [that] thought they could use violence to silence the will of the people.” But politicians invoked that same mob to justify silencing protesters for miles around the inauguration. Biden invoked the will of the people for a ceremony in which all Americans except a handful of political poohbahs were excluded. Biden prattled about his popular mandate while surrounded by barbed wire and thousands of National Guard troops.
After Biden’s victory, the Washington elite talked as if there was practically a “Holy Ghost of Democracy” hovering above the Oval Office. Many of the pundits who echoed Biden’s or Kamala Harris’ “will of the people” invocations are also champions of Leviathan. They hail “democratic” processes that enabled politicians to capture nearly unlimited government power to impose policies favored by the elite. Unquestioning submission has always been the most important commandment of the Beltway version of “civic religion.” “Democracy requires faith,” declared Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, who yelped “God Bless the ‘Deep State’” a couple years earlier during the first Trump impeachment.
Biden continued to milk “will of the people” for all it was worth. In an August 26, 2022 Maryland campaign rally, Biden scoffed that “MAGA Republicans…refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace—embrace—political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.” Biden also denounced them for “semi-fascism.” A few days earlier, Biden had sent a small army of heavily-armed FBI agents to raid Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, searching for government documents that Trump allegedly wrongfully possessed. The Biden administration and its allies used every smarmy lawfare trick in the book to seek to jail Trump to prevent him from running for re-election.
Shortly after the 2022 congressional elections, Biden tweeted, “The recent elections made an emphatic statement that in America, the will of the people prevails.” But was it the will of Millennials and Gen-Z voters to be bamboozled by Team Biden and the Democratic Party? Hopes for a red wave of Republican victories on Election Day were shattered by the 28% advantage that voters in the 18-29 age group delivered to Democratic candidates. Legions of young voters were energized to vote Democratic by Biden’s August 24, 2022 announcement that he was forgiving up to $20,000 of student debt per person; federal courts nullified that handout shortly after Election Day. Briahna Joy Gray, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 press secretary, believed that Team Biden intentionally betrayed young people with a bailout “knowing it wasn’t going anywhere [because] they relied on faulty legal authority.”
In a 2023 White House speech on the second anniversary of the Capitol Clash, Biden wailed that “a violent mob of insurrectionists…vandalized sacred halls,” seeking to “overthrow the will of the people and usurp the peaceful transfer of power.” By that point, federal judges had struck down an armload of Biden’s policies for trampling federal law or the Constitution, including his illegal COVID vaccine mandate for 84 million American adults.
Vice President Kamala Harris followed Biden’s rhetorical footsteps. In January 2022, Harris demanded Congress enact a bill to effectively and permanently outlaw traditional precautions against election fraud: “Make no mistake: There is nothing normal about laws that prevent the American people from exercising their constitutional right to vote. Two landmark voting rights bills sit before the Senate. The Senate must act to protect the will of the people.”
In a teleprompter speech near the White House just two weeks ago, Harris denounced Donald Trump as “the person who stood in this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the Capital to overturn the will of the people in fair and free election that he knew he lost.” But that mob was unarmed compared to the heavily-armed police forces on Capitol Hill. Harris also perennially lied about several police being killed that day; the only person killed was pro-Trump protestor Ashli Babbitt, shot at point-blank range by a cop who the media turned into a hero.
In a television interview, Harris declared, “I cannot imagine any scenario where I would ever try to upend or undo the will of the American people.” Asked about election result challenges, she replied, “I mean we’ve got a lot of lawyers.” Harris did not divulge how lawyers became the ultimate guardians of the will of the people. Nor did Harris reveal why it was the “will of the people” that she refused to answer almost any questions in press conferences or interviews about how she would use the vast power she sought to capture.
Exalting “the will of the people” is another sign of American democracy’s downward spiral. The Founding Fathers designed the Constitution to perpetually trump periodic vote counts and leash every winning politician. At the time of the American Revolution, elections were viewed as tools to defend against rulers—kings, ministers, or any other petty tyrant. Law professor John Phillip Reid observed, “Eighteenth-century representation was primarily an institution of restraint on governmental power.” Presidential candidates in the early 1800s competed by fervently pledging fealty to the Constitution. But nowadays, rather than serving as leashes, elections are propellants.
The “will of the people” encourages the delusion that ballots have magical powers to constrain politicians in the subsequent years. Americans are encouraged to believe that their vote on Election Day somehow guarantees that the subsequent ten thousand actions by the president, Congress, and federal agencies will embody their wishes, spoken or otherwise, known or unknown. In reality, the more edicts the feds issue, the less likely that the decrees will have any connection to popular preferences. Political campaign promises are even less legally binding than a Tinder tryst’s pledge to stay in touch.
The “will of the people” is often simply a measure of how many people fell for which campaign lies, how many people were frightened by which campaign ads, and which red herrings worked on which target audiences. Rather than the “will of the people,” election results are often only a snapshot of transient mass delusions.
“Will of the people” provides pre-absolution for any abuse of power by a winning politician. It is a political flag of convenience for aspiring despots of every creed and party. It is a deference-inducing phrase to make people think “you are doing it to yourselves.” Ironically, politicians never discover that the “will of the people” ordains that they should have less power over everyone else.
“Will of the people” is one of those intellectual circus-shell games in which freedom almost always loses. Pious prattle aside, “consent or be shot” is still the prevailing notion of democracy in Washington.
If Kamala Harris wins on Tuesday, Americans will endlessly be told they must submit because her decrees are the incarnation of the “will of the people.” And if Trump wins, Americans will be hectored about their duty to resist Hitler. The only certainty is that cynics will win either way.
