Are Republicans really anti-democratic? It’s complicated.
Are Republicans really anti-democratic? It’s complicated.
A re we not democrats? John Ganz alleges that “it’s very difficult to seriously maintain that the modern GOP and Conservative movement, either in ideology or in practice, is substantially committed to majority rule” and that “the entire ideological edifice of Conservatism at this point is just a sustained attack on the principle of majority rule, either through open rejection of its legitimacy or a more subtle redefinition of democracy into something unrecognizable.”
Ganz’s short essay is probably among the strongest restatements of a case that is becoming the most common indictment of Republicans among the most voracious consumers of political media who are aligned with the Democratic Party. With a slightly different spin, a version of this case has also become something like the moral crusade among those conservatives hoping for a purge of populist sentiments and ideological positions in the Republican Party. And you can see its influence breaking into the fray among elected politicians.
“Democracy isn’t the objective”?
This from a sitting member of the democratically elected US Senate https://t.co/7CEG1eX8OX
— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) October 8, 2020
So it’s important to summarize his case fairly. Ganz argues that the places in which Republicans are achieving and exercising power are the judiciary and the U.S. Senate, which are not majoritarian institutions. Republicans have also won three presidential elections in 20 years without winning the popular vote. And that there was on January 6, 2021, “a fairly violent attempt by the [losing] GOP candidate’s supporters to invade the halls of Congress to interrupt the certification of his Democratic opponent’s win.” Further, a variety of right-leaning intellectuals and polemicists have, from the beginning of the post-war conservative movement, in their various ways, expressed hostility to democracy. He concludes that conservatives and Republicans therefore have “no principled commitment to democratic rule.”
Ganz does offer caveats. “Are all Conservatives and Republicans such rabid anti-democrats? Of course not. But I think pretty much all of them tolerate or encourage anti-democratic discourses or practices from time to time.” Then Ganz almost immediately does the same himself, noting that checks and balances on majority power are guarantees of liberalism. But he asserts that the “actions and thought of the Conservative movement and the GOP go quite a bit further than checks and balances: they speak to systematic efforts to frustrate and delegitimate popular rule, not to efforts to moderate its extent.”
Taken together this case blends — or really, conflates without directly linking — a critique of Republican actions with a majoritarian critique of America’s republican institutions, and some observations about conservative intellectuals. Doing so allows the case to be overstated.
It’s tempting to dismiss the case outright. Republicans run in democratic elections, and when they win, they take office and exercise the powers of those offices. When they lose, they don’t. And they begin positioning for the next election. Separately, we grant that conservatives are not “in principle” committed to unqualified majority rule. Conservative intellectuals tend not to write all that much about “democracy” at all, often treating it as merely one tool or expedience in building a flourishing society, rather than as the prime measure of one. Ganz doesn’t distinguish between different types of conservative resistance to democracy, or distinguish them from the anti-democratic commitments of other liberal democrats and progressives.
But let’s go further. Not everything can be covered in one column, but we can begin to untangle a few knots here.
The popular vote–Electoral College vote split obviously agitates Democrats who have been on the difficult side of it three times recently. But these were not popular-vote elections. The parties do not campaign in them as popular-vote elections, and if they were, not just the campaigns themselves but the entire structure and the ideological commitments of both parties would likely be transformed. The voters themselves would respond quite differently. Democrats are as free as Republicans to campaign where America’s federalist system grants the most advantage. Although it is easy to fall into the prejudice that conservatism belongs to rural life, and progressivism to the cities, there are plenty of examples where something like the reverse obtained. Trump’s 2016 victory was a case of majority rule: The majority within each state ruled the distribution of that state’s Electoral College votes. Ganz’s case here is really against distributed sovereignty.
Ganz mentions that some anti-democratic rhetoric on the right is merely opportunistic. He could explore whether the arguments for decreasing checks on the majority are the same for liberals and progressives. Liberals and progressives in other nations have recently found themselves in the opposite position. After losing a referendum on Brexit, liberal and progressive Remainers launched a boldly anti-democratic campaign against it via institutions they still controlled, even executing a temporary legal coup on the British constitution via the Supreme Court. Conservative populists who won free and fair elections in Poland and Hungary have been chastised as “undemocratic” and “threats to democracy,” often when their reforms expand democratic control over more areas of the government or other institutions. Poland moved toward democratic checks on its judicial guild, bringing it closer to norms in the United States. Liberals in Poland and across the world balked at it. Hungary’s government has similarly used its democratic mandate to go after institutions run by a small number of elites.
In the United States, liberals and progressives hate when elected Republican legislatures micromanage state colleges. And perhaps in efforts like this they glimpse something of the warnings of J. L. Talmon or Samuel Huntington, that increases of democratic participation can be a vehicle for tyrannical excess or cause a corresponding erosion of democratic satisfaction and trust in governing institutions. If the Supreme Court substantially alters the American settlement on abortion, it will dramatically increase democratic input into the question of abortion. Does dreading this possibility make progressives anti-democratic? It’s easy to grant the moments that conservatives are ill at ease with majority rule if we can at least acknowledge the times when liberals and progressives are, too. Would Ganz prefer the official recognition of same-sex marriage to be returned to state legislatures? Probably not. Neither would I, a conservative, wish to have Catholic institutions’ actions regarding birth control subject to the same. We each believe fundamental rights are at stake.
The January 6 riot was a disgrace. But it’s hardly fair to imply that “the GOP candidate’s supporters” were all for it. A small rabble of Donald Trump’s supporters did it, at Trump’s instigation. Most Republicans have shrugged at the arrests of those participating in the riot. Wherever material help was solicited in overturning the result of the election for Trump, elected Republicans balked. Some of the conservative tub-thumping against populism and democracy in recent months that Ganz adds to his case was aimed squarely at the January 6 rioters. Ganz picks up on my colleague Kevin Williamson, whose problem with “the people” ruling is precisely their resemblance to the Q Shaman of the Capitol riot.
Ganz seems to date the conservative suspicions about democracy to the post-war movement. But the founders of National Review cannot be blamed for the existence of the Electoral College or the Senate. Suspicion of unconstrained democracy is, frankly, common among almost all serious political thinkers, even among progressives. Far-left intellectuals also have a similar tendency to redefine democracy into something unrecognizable as such. We’ll return to this point in a moment.
Conservative intellectuals today are more likely to turn to the Framers of the Constitution for their suspicions of democracy than to the post-war intellectuals. “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths,” wrote Madison in Federalist No. 10.
Some of the thinkers Ganz cites have very idiosyncratic views. James Burnham, and Samuel Francis after him, weren’t “against democracy” in the way that James Madison was or other classical thinkers were. Burnham had turned away from Marxism to the modern Italian political realism of his “Machiavellians.” They believed all ruling ideologies to be frauds of a ruling minority on the public, including democracy.
To close the argument, I would like to suggest that the conservative movement might be too democratic for its own good. That is, the relish with which conservatives engage in electoral politics — and their special anxiety over electoral results — is partly a consequence of their exile from, or refusal to participate in, other institutions in our society that exercise considerable power but are not entirely democratic: our universities, entertainment industry, media and the arts, and the much larger nonprofit sector of nongovernmental organizations and charities, to name just a few.
These institutions are not democratic — they are sometimes nearly medieval, or even institutions of patrimonial capitalism — and they are largely ceded to liberals and progressives. They produce the knowledge, give shape and direction to rising passions and moral impulses emerging in society, and while they certainly enhance and magnify the power of elected liberals and progressives, they have the ability to in some ways soften and redistribute the felt impact of that ruling. The domination of these institutions by liberal democrats and progressives pushes conservatism more toward populism, toward looking for the first 200 names in the Boston telephone book instead of Harvard’s faculty.
Conservative governance often feels “harsher” because it is in a constant state of friction with these non-democratic institutions, and the people formed by them — the most influential in our society.