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.He also concedes that Republican support for democracy is ... um, fitful.
First, there’s 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 different right-wing schools of thought, showing up among traditionalist defenders of aristocracy and libertarians alike.Right, racism is bad, but you never know when we might wake up in 1960 again. They say LBJ died in the mid-'70s, but I wouldn't put reanimation past those sneaky Democrats.
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.
Yet even though Douthat acknowledges that Republicans express qualms about allowing every legitimate voter to vote and Democrats don't, he insists that Republicans are the real believers in democracy.
It's not just because, as Douthat puts it, "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." (I'd argue that sending operatives to break into the headquarters of the opposition party suggests that Nixon wasn't the biggest fan of representative democracy, but what do I know?) Here's Douthat's reasoning:
... 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....(Emphasis added.)
Who should lead pandemic decision making? Obviously Anthony Fauci and the relevant public-health bureaucracies; we can’t 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 don’t want parents demanding some sort of veto power over syllabuses.
... the recent wave of right-wing populism, even when it doesn’t 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.
So even if majorities choose to vote for the party that listens to experts, it's somehow more democratic to go with the preferences of a minority of the electorate if that minority rejects expertise. Sure, that makes sense, Ross.
Of course, in a sense, Republican voters don't reject expertise -- they simply prefer to turn policy over to their unelected experts, or pseudo-experts. They want pandemic policy to be decided by Robert Kennedy Jr., Alex Berenson, and Dr. Sheri Tenpenny, who says COVID vaccines magnetize recipients and "interface" with 5G towers. On election administration, they trust the sage wisdom of Mike Lindell, Mike Flynn, and Jovan Pulitzer, who claims he can identify fraudulent ballots by finding "kinematic markers," whatever the hell those are. They trust Christopher Rufo on critical race theory, and Tucker Carlson on everything. And above all they trust Donald Trump on anything other than vaccines.
And to the extent that they take charge of policy themselves, they do so by being the loudest faction, not the largest. That's mobocracy, not democracy.
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