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Democracy in America: What is it?
Whatever it is, we know that it is under siege.
Barely a moment goes by without tocsins sounding about various threats to “our democracy.”
It used to be that the biggest, baddest threat to “our democracy” was Donald Trump.
Then a curious thing happened. When it comes to “threats to our democracy,” Trump seems to have been overshadowed somewhat by a new threat: the Constitution.
Today, if you are truly up-to-date, you know that the Constitution, while venerable, is basically at odds with democracy.
The Constitution allowed Donald Trump to become president. Ergo the Constitution is “dysfunctional.” QED.
Originally, “democracy” meant rule by “the demos,” the people.
But most political theorists from Plato and Aristotle on down have been suspicious of “pure,” direct, unchaperoned democracy.
James Madison, in Federalist 10, warned that throughout history most democracies have been as “short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
It was part of the founders’ genius to have forged a species of popular rule that carefully modulated the passions of the masses in such a way that protected individual liberty in the face of the imperatives of democracy.
Hence the Electoral College, which is a primary mechanism for preserving federalism.
Hence, too, two senators to every state: Why should Wyoming, say, be swamped by the ethos of California?
When Benjamin Franklin, emerging from the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was asked what sort of government he and his colleagues had forged, he famously said “A republic, if you can keep it.”
A republic, nota bene, not a democracy. The difference is critical.
There is a sense, then, in which the Constitution’s detractors are right about its being “antidemocratic.” It is antidemocratic in the sense that it is pro-republic.
The limits on federal power set forth in the Constitution make it a bulwark against many sorts of abuse, including that most constant temptation of democracies, the tyranny of the majority.
Yet Americans now find their lives directed by a jumble of agencies far removed from the legislature and staffed by bureaucrats who make and enforce a vast network of rules that govern nearly every aspect of our lives.
Woodrow Wilson, a standard-bearer for an earlier incarnation of the progressive juggernaut, welcomed such an arrangement.
“The bulk of mankind,” he noted sadly, “is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes.”
What to do? The solution was to shift real power out of elected bodies and into the hands of the right sort of people, enlightened people, progressive people — people, that is to say, like Woodrow Wilson.
Many commentators have noted the profoundly undemocratic maneuver by which Joe Biden was erased and Kamala Harris installed as the Democratic presidential nominee.
After all, nearly 15 million people voted for Joe Biden in the Democratic primary.
He won, hands down, because certain high-level Democrats made sure that other candidates — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — were shunted to one side.
They had done the same thing to Bernie Sanders years before.
All, of course, in the name of “democracy.”
Which brings me to the distinction between “democracy” and what Democrats like to call “our democracy.” The latter poaches on the authority and prestige of the former.
But honestly parsed, the phrase “our democracy” really means “rule by Democrats.”
It used to be that the left accorded a certain latitude to opposing views.
That’s all over now.
Every issue is an existential emergency for which the left’s shock troops are willing to go to the wall.
Every loss demands that people scream at the sky. We win or we threaten to burn everything down.
At least since Trump’s victory in 2016, the dominant attitude has been that only the left is allowed to win.
Any conservative victory is by definition illegitimate, a blow to “our democracy.”
To reverse these developments, one major goal of conservatives must be to downgrade the place of Washington, the city as well as the spirit it entails, in the metabolism of American political life.
Notwithstanding its overwhelmingly Democratic coloration, the capital has effectively developed into a political party itself.
Its triumph stands behind the real threat to the republic bequeathed to us by the founders.
That threat is not the Constitution, but subservience to the faceless managerial elite that exercises the real power in our society.
Legitimacy is draining out of our governing institutions at an alarming rate.
Stanching that debilitating flow requires that we redirect our attention away from the greedy puppet show in Washington to the true source of legitimacy, which is with the people.
Roger Kimball is president and publisher of Encounter Books and editor and publisher of the New Criterion, from whose October issue this article is adapted.