Surely, any pretension of protecting democracy was fatally undermined by a call to rewrite the entire Constitution and related musings on why the military leadership hasn’t done more to undermine the Commander in Chief.
Anyone who thinks irony is dead should consider the current progressive positions on the nature of democracy. On one hand, they claim to be staunch defenders of the sacred bond between voters and their government. They decry authoritarianism at every turn and see fascism in every shadow including denim ads. In April, NPR reported that the US “is sliding into authoritarianism” according to hundreds of scholars. “A survey of more than 500 political scientists finds that the vast majority think the United States is moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism. In the benchmark survey, known as Bright Line Watch, U.S.-based professors rate the performance of American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After President Trump’s election in November, scholars gave American democracy a rating of 67. Several weeks into Trump’s second term, that figure plummeted to 55.” “That’s a precipitous drop,” explained John Carey, a professor of government at Dartmouth and co-director of Bright Line Watch. “There’s certainly consensus: We’re moving in the wrong direction.” Last week, CNN reported on President Trump’s seven “most authoritarian moves so far” in an analysis by Aaron Blake. “The story of President Donald Trump’s first seven months back in office is the consolidation of power. He has bulldozed the obstacles that often stood in his way in his first term and constantly tested boundaries, in an almost single-minded pursuit of more authority. Whether you think that’s a good thing (because that’s what the country needs) or a bad thing, that’s objectively the state of affairs. Trump has for years made no secret of his disregard for the limits of his power, and he’s governing accordingly.” In Mr. Blake’s view, the authoritarian moves include putting the “military on US soil,” tariffs, investigations of his political opponents, “MAGA-fying the government’s independent functions,” “coercion of the media, universities and law firms,” “ignoring” Congress in regards to legislation passed banning TikTok, and “skirting due process and the rule of law on deportations.” In between these two efforts, the said to be prestigious London School of Economics and Political Science opined that “Trump fits the bill of an authoritarian” and sought to understand how such a person could be elected democratically, not surprisingly finding it to be essentially a white-person thing. “In rhetoric and now in action, Donald Trump has been called an authoritarian by many commentators and even by those who have previously worked with him in the White House. While many Americans have supported Trump because of these authoritarian tendencies, in new research, Kayla Wolf, Chaerim Kim, Laura Brisbane and Jane Junn determine that the appeal of authoritarian values is different across people’s race and gender. They write that those who enjoy some degree of advantage based on their race and/or gender, such as white men, are more likely to have authoritarian tendencies, while those who are doubly disadvantaged, such as women of color, are the least likely to do so.”
Under these circumstances, one might think progressives are all in on democracy, the brave defenders of our institutions and processes against the threat of Donald Trump and others would be authoritarians everywhere. To be sure, they frequently claim that is the case. There is, in fact, an actual website, Democrats Defending Democracy, literally www.democratsdefendingdemocracy.com that claims “From the silencing of the voices of everyday Americans in our elections by the flood of dark money unleashed by the Citizens United decision and extreme partisan gerrymandering to the erosion of voting rights by a corrupt Supreme Court, the attacks on our democracy have damaged the public’s trust in our government and created the tinderbox that led to the insurrection [on January 6th]. It’s imperative that we take action to protect our democracy from these anti-democratic forces and restore the public’s trust in our government.” Similarly, Democracy Forward promises that they “go to court for people and democracy.” “The fight for democracy is the fight for people. Democracy Forward uses the law to build collective power and advance a bold, vibrant, democracy for all people.” They claim to have “met the first 100 days of the Trump-Vance administration with 100 days of courage,” to have “won court orders for hundreds of millions of people, that they will “keep going,” and that “this is not the moment we chose, but it’s the moment we are made for.” Further, most Democrat politicians are happy to position themselves the same way. For example, Congressman Robert Garcia has an issue tab on his website dedicated to his efforts towards “Defending Democracy.” “Congressman Garcia believes that one of the biggest threats facing the United States today comes from efforts to undermine our democratic process by restricting access to the ballot and attacking the legitimacy of the electoral process. Congressman Garcia knows that we need leaders who will work to defend our civil rights, and this starts with making voting accessible to every American regardless of their background.” In line with this view, some have even claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris lost last year because she focused too much on saving democracy rather than so-called kitchen table issues like inflation. According to The New York Times, “Harris Asked Voters to Protect Democracy. Here’s Why It Didn’t Land. In more than 200 interviews, voters worried not about an endangered country, but about paying rent.” “Her campaign pitch was moving, even high-minded. If Vice President Kamala Harris were elected to the White House, she would safeguard the ideals of a good nation. Voters had a choice, she said: democracy, constitutional rights and bedrock freedoms — or Donald J. Trump’s ‘chaos and division.’ On Tuesday, the nation replied. The answer from more than half of voters seemed to dismiss warnings that Mr. Trump was a threat to principles on which the country had been founded. Abstract truths mattered less, voters said, than tangible issues, like the ability to pay rent or concerns over border crossings. In a time of widespread distrust in institutions, Ms. Harris’s call to protect the nation’s norms rang hollow for many Americans.”
Of course, many, including me, have long believed this was more posturing than political reality. After all, the tactics of Democrat politicians haven’t always been, shall we say, democratic. In addition to more recent tactical positions on redistricting and whether or not a single unelected judge can thwart the will of a duly elected president, this is the party that embraced the most authoritarian measures imaginable during the pandemic and that continues to idolize former President Barack Obama who declared that he can no longer wait on his fellow elected members of Congress to follow the regular democratic process and armed with a pen and a phone, he would use his own executive authority to advance his agenda. At the time, CNN’s Dean Obeidallah only half jokingly claimed that “liberals want Obama to be a king, not a president.” Regardless, one might forgive politicians for using hard nosed tactics to achieve their goals, only to decry those same tactics when the other party takes advantage of them. Anyone who has followed the great game for long is well aware that this applies in ways both big and small just like the party out of power always criticizes the vacation and leisure habits of the President in power, for example. This, as they say, is simply the way it goes and yet there’s a point where everything in the known universe simply can’t go any further. Progressives might well have reached it last week when any pretension to be protecting democracy was fatally undermined by a call to rewrite the entire Constitution and related musings on why the military leaderships hasn’t done more to undermine the Commander in Chief. Ironically The New York Times was the source for both stories. First, on August 13, they published a “guest essay” by two former generals who claimed without irony, “We Used to Think the Military Would Stand Up to Trump. We Were Wrong.” According to them, they were prompted to write this piece after President Trump invoked emergency powers to nationalize the DC Metropolitan Police force to restore law, order, and quality of life in the federal district. “By ordering 800 National Guard troops to Washington, on the pretext of an illusory crime wave, President Trump has further dragged the U.S. military into domestic law enforcement, in a move credibly perceived as an ominous ‘test case.’ This continues what the administration started in California in June as part of its deportation efforts. Unfortunately, though we (and others) had hoped that the military would only respond to calls to action in American cities and states kicking and screaming, we no longer expect resistance from that institution. Once, perhaps, traditionalist officers might have leaned on protocol and refused to heed a lawless order, taking inspiration from the generals — Mark Milley and James Mattis — who resisted the uprooting of established military standards in the first Trump term. But today, general officers no longer seem to see themselves as guardians of the constitutional order. It now seems clear to us that the military will not rescue Americans from Mr. Trump’s misuse of the nation’s military capabilities.” Of course, it doesn’t take a Constitutional scholar or an expert on democracy to know that this is a complete inversion of the traditional view of civilian control of the military under the duly elected Commander in Chief, who is the head of all armed forces. If an officer strongly disagrees with an order on moral or other grounds, their recourse is to resign and make their concerns public. If Congress disagrees with a president’s use of the military or military strategy in general, they can exercise their oversight powers. In either case, the answer is not to ignore and resist, much less encourage others to do so and be disappointed when they don’t. In other words, it’s not democracy at all these generals and by association, The New York Times is advocating for. It’s totalitarianism and authoritarianism through a military dictatorship, both of which are thankfully protected against via the structure of our government under the Constitution.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Times gave a forum to a professor, Osita Nwanevu, who claimed that we need an entirely new Constitution the very next day under the headline, “Abolish the Senate. End the Electoral College. Pack the Court. Why the left can’t win without a new Constitution.” According to the host of the “Interesting Times” interview, Ross Douthat, “We’re going to talk about how radical ideas and radical critiques from the left might end up being very influential in Democratic Party politics going forward,” meaning it is their belief that these ideas could become mainstream. After Mr. Nwanevu repeated the canard that Vice President Harris lost because she focused on abstract issues, “I think the people thought that they were being asked to judge, on one hand, a set of abstract ideals that their civics teacher might have told them was important in high school or grade school; on the other, the price of groceries and the cost of living. I think a lot of Americans looked at that choice and they said: well, hell, I’m going to go with my own economic well-being — the hope, which I think was a misguided hope, that Donald Trump’s going to improve conditions within the economy. And so the abstractions that Democrats ran on, the conception of democracy that they put forward, wasn’t compelling for a lot of different reasons,” he proceeded to call for a complete upheaval of the very democracy they claim to be defending. Rather than revitalize the Constitution and our democratic institutions, Mr. Nwanevu chose to reframe democracy as a whole, “A democracy is a system in which the governed govern. You can read a lot of political theory, you can read the classics — I don’t think you get a definition that is more succinct than that. Another formulation is Lincoln’s government ‘of, by, and for the people.’ And so, in a democracy, the people themselves are the people who govern. It’s not entrusted as a responsibility to some alien authority, some external power, some other hierarchy. People take on the responsibility and burden and promise of governing themselves. That’s the core idea.” From there, he defined three characteristics of democracy, political equality, that is “people are equal in standing when they come to make a collective choice,” responsiveness, that is “real authority among the public — when they come together to make a collective choice, things happen,” and “majority rule.” Perhaps needless to say, he promptly found America lacking in all of these areas, but to do so he must ignore the nature of our Founding and the origins of our system of government. First, he assailed the Senate as essentially undemocratic because states get two votes each regardless of their population or physical size, though it was designed to represent the states themselves because of their importance to the Republic. This point he blithely dismissed as “You hear in school that this is balanced out by the House. It’s not really, in a substantive way. The Senate shapes the judiciary, it shapes the executive branch, and obviously, it’s a veto point for the passage of even ordinary legislation. Right away — and I think the Senate is the crux of a lot of this — we have a fundamental piece of our system that flouts basic democratic principles and basic democratic intuitions.” Even aside from the supposedly undemocratic Senate, he continued to claim that our system is inherently oligarchical rather than democratic in the first place and that too was intentionally so. “We spend about a third of our time at work. The decisions that are made at the top of corporations we work for often affect us more directly, intimately, and immediately than decisions made in Washington, D.C., or in our statehouses or in city hall. And yet we feel that we’re not democratically entitled to any kind of voice in those spaces, except for maybe hoping that we can act through government to regulate the economy. When we try to do that, we find that Washington, D.C., and political institutions are often dominated by wealthy people — our bosses. When it comes to solving the concrete problems of inequality, worker power — the absence of worker power, the absence of worker voice — is one of the things that’s contributed to our current economic situation. That is a democratic problem, and I think it suggests democratic solutions as well.” Reading between the lines as they say, one might believe he was advocating for public ownership of private companies. Whatever the case, he ultimately agreed with Mr. Douthat when he described one of his key “arguments” being “America was not actually intended to be a democracy” in the first place, that “we should understand our founding almost in terms of a kind of oligarchic coup.”
Even if we choose to give Mr. Nwanevu and other progressives who feel this way the benefit of the doubt, they are implicitly insisting that America as it has been conceived since the Founding isn’t actually a democracy, or not a democracy the way they would have it. Thus, at a minimum we can conclude that when they claim to be defending democracy, they are not defending what most people would agree is democracy. Instead, they are defending some other hypothetical system, one where they and they alone have more power. This certainly seems to be the case, when the purported fixes – the usual panoply of statehood for Puerto Rico and DC, a Senate apportioned based on population, and a packed Supreme Court – would only add to their power, at least in their view. At a maximum, especially in light of the “guest essay” just the day before, their real goal isn’t democracy at all, but rather authoritarian rule by the credentialled expert class. Ultimately, there’s an old expression that one occurrence might be coincidence, but twice is enemy action that comes to mind.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 