Last week, Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) made headlines by posting a few home truths about democracy on Twitter. “Democracy isn’t the objective” of our system of government, he wrote. “Liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”
Reactions to this statement among the chattering classes ranged from nonplussed agreement on the right, where Lee’s remarks were received as if he had written “1+1=2,” to indignant alarm on the left, where the tweet was taken to be the canary in the coal mine of an impending fascist dictatorship. In truth, there is scarcely a single statement that could better reveal the divisions between right and left on process questions than Lee’s did.
Comments