“If we don’t get it right, it could be the last election,” Swalwell said.

There is no honest and intelligent person who believes what Swalwell says. Whether he believes his own hysterics, I don’t know, but it’s notable that Democrats are sending him out with this message to start the election year.

What is the purpose of all of these hysterics? Maybe it’s just the same old Democratic messaging. Democrats know that nothing riles up their base as much as scare stories that their right to vote is being taken away. It’s cynical, but it’s politics.

But when you look at the media’s role and the commentary of academics, you see a more extreme agenda.

Two liberal activists at a group called Free Speech for People wrote in USA Today that Congress or the courts should ban all sorts of Republicans from even running for office. Any “elected officials who helped facilitate or otherwise engaged in the insurrection would also be disqualified from office.”

We know that many Democrats believe anyone who voted against certifying any of President Joe Biden’s electors counts as an insurrectionist. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has tried to blame Sen. Ted Cruz for the Capitol riots, so she would surely say he “helped facilitate” the “insurrection.”

Democrats and liberals in media and academia search desperately for any disagreement with Republicans that can be stretched into a “Democracy versus its enemies” framing.

We have spent a year with Democrats and the media freaking out about Republicans rigging the House through gerrymandering. While GOP gerrymanders are real in places such as North Carolina and Texas, the notion that Republicans were somehow pulling off some unprecedented power grab was always just a scare story, and now, even liberal journalists admit that the congressional map will become a little more Democrat-favorable next decade compared to this past decade.

“Voting rights” is the other issue that’s plausibly about Republicans “destroying democracy.” Swalwell says Republicans want to make voters “crawl through glass and run through the fire to get to the ballot box,” pointing at states such as Georgia.

Pretending that a Republican voting law that expanded early voting and loosened some identity checks on absentee voting was “Jim Crow” made for good speeches for Biden, but it was hokum. The New York Times’s Nate Cohn argued persuasively that “the law’s voting provisions are unlikely to significantly affect turnout or Democratic chances. It could plausibly even increase turnout.”

So, the supposed Republican offenses against democracy are basically made up or, at the very least, pulled way out of context.

But we know for sure that liberal academics and media types believe anything that reeks even slightly of conservatism is de facto an attack on democracy.

Check out this Twitter thread by a Georgetown teacher.

If you are conservative, or in Zimmer’s words, attached to “traditional hierarchies,” you are anti-democratic.

You may think this is just about Trump and his lackeys. That’s the argument from some:

But I’m old enough to remember that very 2012 election, when Mitt Romney was the GOP nominee and Nancy Pelosi’s slogan was “Democracy is on the Ballot.”

This isn’t new. If you are on the other side of the political divide, you are against democracy. That means you are not covered by the rules of democratic fair play.

It’s shocking how much of the media has bought into this. Left-wing media critics Margaret Sullivan and Jay Rosen have fretted that the media would be way too “both sides” and not acknowledge, in effect, that the GOP is, at its very essence, a threat to democracy.

When you boil it down, it’s pretty clear, and it’s what Eric Swalwell said. You can’t tolerate Republicans or conservatives. They aren’t simply wrong. They are enemies of democracy. This is a permission slip to skip the rules of evenhanded media, open debate, and even — dare we say it — democracy. It’s declaring that the other side isn’t simply wrong but illegitimate.

That’s scary.