“We, the People” Versus Lawfare

“We, the People” Versus Lawfare

The recent lawfare against the French conservative leader Marine Le Pen, just after the polls predicted her solid advantage in the upcoming elections, confirms a pattern that has occurred in the United States, Israel, Brazil, and various European countries. This pattern consists of weaponizing unelected bureaucrats, as well as the justice system, in order to demonize democratically elected leaders and prevent them from serving their terms.

Ben Shapiro summarizes the problem:

A French court has now banned Marine Le Pen, who is highly likely to win the next election in France, from seeking public office for five years. The court convicted her of misusing European Union funds….

[T]his is part and parcel of the broader attempt by Left-wing judiciary activists across the globe to stop “populist politicians” from being able to run.

We saw it with President Trump, where the DOJ went after him for supposed crimes, the same crimes for which they let Joe Biden off the hook. We saw it in New York, where a New York attorney general filed a civil fraud lawsuit in an attempt to stop then-candidate Trump.

We have seen it in Brazil, where the entire judicial apparatus has been brought down on the head of Jail Bolsonaro…. We’ve seen it in Romania, where Călin Georgescu won the election in 2024 and then the judiciary decided the election had been rigged by the Russians and annulled it.

We have seen it in Israel, where the attorney general has been targeting Benjamin Netanyahu on specious charges for literally years….

And now we are seeing it in France.

The Left is notorious for pretending to espouse the tenets of democracy, while, in fact, it uses ever-multiplying “victim” groups and ever-changing social categories to consolidate its power and advance its anti-Western agenda, often at the expense of these groups’ wellbeing. The American public received a sobering reminder of the profound contempt Democrat Party leaders felt for the tens of millions who supported Donald Trump—contempt that culminated in memorable outbursts such as “deplorables” and “garbage.”

This disdain, however, is nothing new for leftist ideologues, although they have become more arrogant and less careful in their attempts to conceal it. As early as Karl Marx, leftist intellectuals have despised various racial and social groups.

In Chapter 8 of The Road to Wigan Pier, written almost a century ago, George Orwell eloquently exposes the hypocrisy of socialist elites and their disgust with the working class:

Look at any bourgeois Socialist…. Comrade X, it so happens, is an old Etonian. He would be ready to die on the barricades, in theory anyway, but you notice that he still leaves his bottom waistcoat button undone. He idealises the proletariat, but it is remarkable how little his habits resemble theirs…. I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists, I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners. Yet, after all, why not?… It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting. So you see he is still responding to the training of his childhood, when he was taught to hate, fear, and despise the working class.

In contrast, one of the reasons for Trump’s astonishing popularity has been his honest interest in ordinary people and his genuine ability to listen and relate to them. There is no moral contradiction or behavioral dissonance between his wearing a finely tailored designer suit and eating a cheap burger or serving McDonald’s fries.

The Left has usurped the language of democracy but cares little about democratic principles. It may be useful to point out that the very term democracy, which is a well-known ancient Greek word meaning “power of the people,” can denote two different concepts. One is a simple majority rule, which is closer to the ancient concept, often criticized by philosophers for its potential to morph into a mob rule.

That is why the Founding Fathers created a constitutional republic as opposed to a simple democracy. They devised mechanisms whereby pure democracy was to be balanced by intransient higher principles that would allow better protection of individual rights. This was a major impetus behind instituting the Electoral College—to protect the rights of the minority and the individual against the tyranny of the majority, which is what happens when “two wolves and a lamb vote on what’s for dinner,” as this wonderful aphorism attributed to Benjamin Franklin explains.

The Founding Fathers knew that democracy killed Socrates, for example, and realized that the will of the majority ought to be curbed by the principle of inalienable human rights in the best traditions of human history, including Classical Antiquity, Judeo-Christian values, and Lockean philosophy—only then can democracy be something inherently good. This is the second, broader, and modern meaning of the term democracy, which has positive connotations involving individual freedom and consent of the governed.

If the totalitarian Left succeeds in achieving its vision of society, then democracy, in both its meanings, will cease to exist. We must resist the ever-increasing attempts to impose this “brave new world” of unelected rulers and powerless citizenry and keep reminding the self-appointed “masters of the universe” that “we, the people” are still in charge.

[Featured Image: Robert Mueller House Testimony, via YouTube]

Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.

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