If you are a graduate of Yale University, you can vote every spring for a member of the Yale Corporation, which selects the school’s president. However, you can only participate if you vote for one of the two candidates nominated by the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee, a group of university officials and graduates. There’s no way to write in a name or, if you don’t favor either candidate, to cast a blank ballot. You must vote for one of the insiders’ choices or not vote at all.

Now Yale is a private institution, and no one is obliged to have anything to do with it (except perhaps the governor and lieutenant governor of Connecticut, who are ex officio members of the corporation). However, the Yale example has a certain similarity to the way governmental elites restrict the choice of voters in European nations, even while deeming themselves guardians of “democracy.”

On March 11, Romania’s constitutional court removed presidential candidate Calin Georgescu, who finished first in the first round of voting last year, from the May 4 runoff ballot. It was alleged that he benefited from TikTok accounts paid for by Russia and that he “violated the very obligation to defend democracy.”

On March 30, a court in Paris convicted National Rally party leader Marine Le Pen of embezzling European Union funds and barred her from running for office for five years. She finished second, with 41% of the vote, in the 2022 presidential election and was leading in the polls for the 2027 contest, which incumbent Emmanuel Macron is constitutionally barred from running in.

On May 2, Germany’s Verfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution) designated the Alternative for Germany party as a right-wing extremist group, which could lead to it being banned from participating in elections. The AfD finished second in the Feb. 23 election, with 21% of popular votes, behind the Christian Democrats’ 29%.

The excuse for excluding Georgescu, Le Pen and the AfD from the political process is that they threatened to shut down democracy. Which brings to mind the communist playwright Bertolt Brecht’s comment in 1953 when his fellow East Germans rioted and demanded a new government.

“Wouldn’t it be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” he asked.

It brings to mind Vice President JD Vance’s Feb. 14 speech at the Munich Security Forum, which shocked many European elites.

“I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns, or, worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy,” he said.

German elites would ask you to understand that their nation’s history imposes special burdens. The postwar Bundesrepublik banned publication of Nazi propaganda and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” for obvious reasons — measures forbidden by ou