“Democracy.” What does that term mean? The single biggest theme of the recent campaign of Democrats and of Kamala Harris was that we had to vote for them to save “Our Democracy.”

If I get to summarize the meaning of “Democracy” in 25 words or less, here is my effort: “The people periodically get the opportunity to vote the current authorities out, and replace them with new authorities who will implement new policies.” (That’s 23 words.)

Here in the U.S. we admittedly do not have a pure Democracy, but instead a constitutional Republic, with various limitations on government powers and also power sharing among the government’s branches. However, the element of Democracy — that is, the ability of the people to demand a change of direction by exercising their power at the ballot box — is a very big part of the system, at least in theory.

And yet, during my post World War II lifetime, despite the theoretical promise of Democracy, the ability of the people to get some change in direction of the government through exercise of the franchise has been extremely limited. Maybe the majority approved of what they were getting, but most often when there seemed to be a vote for change, little changed. The biggest change agent by far in this period was Ronald Reagan; but to be honest the Washington establishment fought him mostly to a draw. Nixon and the two Bushes largely continued the status quo. Trump in his first term was far less effective at “draining the swamp” than I would have hoped.

But now we have Trump in his second term suddenly showing us what Democracy can mean in our system. Trump promised fundamental change on many important aspects of government policy, and he is following through quickly on those promises. It’s a big change of direction, decisively approved by the voters at the ballot box. In other words, Democracy.

And now I find that the writers at the big legacy media outlets seem to have meant something completely different when they talked during the campaign about saving “Our Democracy.” Among many examples, I’ll pick two for today’s analysis: (1) An op-ed by Ruth Marcus on February 4 in The Washington Post with the headline “Trump 2.0: the most damaging first two weeks in presidential history”; and (2) A February 6 piece by Susan Glasser in The New Yorker headlined “Elon Musk’s Revolutionary Terror.”

Marcus has basically made her entire career as an editorial writer and columnist for The Washington Post. You have to figure that boiling in that stew for a few decades can do some serious damage to your brain. Marcus’s piece is full of one howler after another. From the opening:

No president in history has caused more damage to the nation more quickly. . . . The country survived Trump 1.0. Now, it faces a real threat that the harm he inflicts during his second term will be irreparable. The United States’ standing in the world, its ability to keep the country safe, the federal government’s fundamental capacity to operate effectively — all of these will take years to repair, if that can be achieved at all.

The “damage,” it seems, consists of imposing the policies of a newly-elected President upon an entrenched bureaucracy that wants to do things its own way:

And it is a piece of a larger presidential power grab. . . . The onslaught against government itself has been the most alarming. Some of it involves the operations of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” operating with unclear legal authority as a kind of roving strike force to terrorize the bureaucracy.

In Marcus’s kindergarten-level constitutional analysis, seeking to have a bureaucracy that implements the policies the voters voted for is now a “power grab” and an “onslaught against the government itself.” Doesn’t the Constitution give the elected President the power to set the policies, and the bureaucracy no policy-setting power at all? Don’t expect Marcus to address such deep questions.

Over the weekend, DOGE operatives forced out a senior Treasury Department official and gained access to the government’s highly sensitive centralized payment system, potentially exposing vast amounts of personnel data.

Is there any organization in the country where the CEO and his staff don’t have access to the “central payment system” and the “personnel data”? How can any organization operate without that?

They executed a hostile takeover and the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development, an agency that was established by Congress and that can’t be disappeared without congressional action. “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die,” the unelected Musk asserted. . . .

Implementing the policies of the newly-elected CEO is now “executing a hostile takeover” of the government. The newly-elected President’s closest associate is supposedly disqualified from carrying out the new boss’s wishes because he is “unelected.” It’s all a whole new concept of “Democracy” where the permanent bureaucracy gets to call the shots by some kind of holy writ from God, while the democratic election as provided for by the Constitution of a new guy with new and different policies just doesn’t count for anything. Marcus seems to have no self-awareness of what she is saying or advocating.

Over in Glasser’s New Yorker piece, new policies brought in by newly-elected leadership go under the category of “revolutionary terror.”

In its short existence, Musk’s small occupying force has gained access to the entire U.S. Treasury federal payments system—to what end, no one yet knows—and has seemingly orchestrated the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., the decades-old federal agency in charge of distributing American foreign aid around the world.

I love the concept that our elected leader should be prohibited from having access to the “federal payment system.” Sure the voters elected him, and only him, but we absolutely must not allow him or his people to find out what the money is being spent on! That would allow chaos to break loose! Give that argument an obvious nomination for stupidest constitutional argument of the year.

Let the record show that, at 3:59 a.m. on day sixteen of the Trump restoration, . . . Democrats sputtered ineffectually about an unelected billionaire’s illegal power grab. . . .

So Glasser joins Marcus in thinking that there is some significance to the fact that Musk is “unelected.” Do they not realize that the federal executive branch consists of only one elected person and another several million all of whom are un-elected?

And then there is the idea that Musk’s actions are an “illegal power grab.” Could you be troubled to tell us what about those actions is “illegal,” let alone a “power grab”? As far as I know, in legal form DOGE is just a re-named and re-purposed agency formerly called the U.S. Digital Service, which was duly created and funded by Congress. From Trump’s January 20 Executive Order “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency,” Section 3:

Sec. 3.  DOGE Structure.  (a)  Reorganization and Renaming of the United States Digital Service.  The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President.

Nothing illegal there as far as I can see. So, Ms. Glasser, if you are going to be tossing around accusations of “illegality,” I think you owe us an explanation of what you think is the legal issue. As it is, it looks like you don’t know what you are talking about. And as to the “power grab,” how can it be a “power grab” if the President was duly elected by the people and is exercising powers granted to him by the Constitution?

In summary, these people have been reduced to meaningless sputtering. They desperately want what Trump and Musk are doing to be an “illegal power grab,” but they can’t even think of or articulate a reason why.