“There is no sense in avoiding or diluting the magnitude of
this turn in our story: One major political party no longer accepts democracy.”
The author of this sentence is former Obama White House
speechwriter Ben Rhodes, writing recently in The Atlantic, but it could have
flowed from the keyboard of a hundred different writers in the post-Trump,
post-January 6 era. That conservatism and the Republican Party have turned
against government by the people, that only the Democratic Party still stands
for democratic rule, is an important organizing thought of political commentary
these days.
اضافة اعلان
So let us subject it to some scrutiny — and with it, the
current liberal relationship to democracy as well.
First, there is a sense in which conservatism has always had
a fraught relationship to mass democracy. The fear of mob rule, of demagogues
rallying the masses to destroy a fragile social order, is a common theme in
many right-wing schools of thought, showing up among traditionalist defenders
of aristocracy and libertarians alike.
To these general tendencies, we can add two specifically
American forms of conservative anxiety about the franchise: the fear of corrupt
urban-machine politics that runs back through the 1960 presidential election to
the age of Tammany Hall and the racist fear of African American political power
that stamped the segregation-era South.
Because all these influences touch the modern GOP,
conservative skepticism about mass democracy was a somewhat normal part of
American politics long before Donald Trump came along — and some of what has
changed in the Trump era is just an events-driven accentuation of existing
tendencies.
Republicans have long feared voter fraud and noncitizen
voting, for instance, but the fear — and for liberals, the oft-discussed hope —
that demographic change could deliver permanent Democratic power has raised the
salience of these anxieties. Likewise, Republicans have long been more likely
to portray America as a republic, not a democracy, and to defend our system’s
counter-majoritarian mechanisms. But today this philosophical tendency is
increasingly self-interested, because shifts in party coalitions mean that
those mechanisms, the Senate and Electoral College especially, advantage
Republicans somewhat more than in the recent past.
But then things get complicated, because the modern
Republican Party is also the heir to a strong pro-democracy impulse, forged in
the years when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won crushing presidential-level
majorities but conservatives felt themselves constantly balked by unelected powers,
bureaucrats and judges especially.
This experience left the right deeply invested in the idea
that it represents the true American majority — moral, silent, what have you —
while liberalism stands for elite power, anti-democratic forms of government, the
bureaucracy and the juristocracy and the Ivy League.
And that idea and self-image has remained a potent aspect of
the right-wing imagination even as the old Nixon and Reagan majorities have
diminished and disappeared: With every new age of grassroots activism, from the
Tea Party to the local-education revolts of today, the right reliably casts
itself as small-d democrats, standing boldly athwart liberal technocracy
singing “Yankee Doodle”.
Against this complicated backdrop, Trump’s stolen-election
narratives should be understood as a way to reconcile the two competing
tendencies within conservatism, the intellectual right’s skepticism of mass
democracy and comfort with counter-majoritarian institutions with the populist
right’s small-d democratic self-image.
In Trump’s toxic dreampolitik there is actually no tension
there: The right-wing coalition is justified in governing from a minoritarian
position because it deserves to be a true electoral majority, and would be if
only the liberal enemy were not so good at cheating.
So seen from within the right, the challenge of getting out
from under Trump’s deceptions is not just a simple matter of reviving a
conservative commitment to democracy. Trump has succeeded precisely because he
has exploited the right’s more democratic impulses, speaking to them and
co-opting them and claiming them for himself. Which means a conservative rival
cannot defeat or replace him by simply accusing him of being anti-democratic.
Instead, the only plausible pitch would argue that his populism is
self-limiting, and that a post-Trump GOP could potentially win a more sweeping
majority than the one his supporters want to believe he won already — one that
would hold up no matter what the liberal enemy gets up to.
But if that argument is challenging to make amid the smog of
Trumpenkampf, so is the anti-Trump argument that casts American liberalism as
the force to which anyone who believes in American democracy must rally.
Because however much the right’s populists get wrong about their claim to
represent a true American majority, they get this much right: Contemporary
liberalism is fundamentally miscast as a defender of popular self-rule.
To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in
favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the
mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than
on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.
But when it comes to the work of government, the actual
decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not
exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts
claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from
the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.
This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called
“undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not
only in the US but across the Western world. One question after controverted
question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who
decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the
high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process.
Who should lead pandemic decision making? Obviously, Dr.
Anthony Fauci and the relevant public-health bureaucracies; we cannot have
people playing politics with complex scientific matters. Who decides what your
local school teaches your kids? Obviously, teachers and administrators and
education schools; we do not want parents demanding some sort of veto power
over syllabuses. Who decides the future of the European Union? The important
stakeholders in Brussels and Berlin, the people who know what they are doing,
not the shortsighted voters in France or Ireland or wherever. Who makes
important US foreign policy decisions? Well, you have the interagency process,
the permanent regional specialists and the military experts, not the mere whims
of the elected president.
Or to pick a small but telling recent example, who decides
whether an upstate New York school district gets to retain the Indian as its
high school mascot? The state’s education commissioner, apparently, who is
currently threatening to cut funds to the school board that voted to keep it
unless they reverse course.
Whereas the recent wave of right-wing populism, even when it
does not command governing majorities, still tends to champion the basic idea
of popular power — the belief that more areas of Western life should be subject
to popular control and fewer removed into the purview of unelected mandarins.
And even if this is not a wise idea in every case, it is a democratic idea
whose widespread appeal reflects the fact that modern liberalism really does
suffer from a democratic deficit.
Which is a serious problem, to put it mildly, for a movement
that aspires to fight and win a struggle on behalf of democratic values. So,
just as a conservative alternative to Trump would need to somehow out-populist
him, to overcome the dark side of right-wing populism, American liberalism
would need to first democratize itself.
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