I regret to inform you that Jonathan Chait is at it again. His latest column warns darkly that “Ron DeSantis Would Kill Democracy Slowly and Methodically.” Both the motive and the rhetorical trick at work here are fairly transparent. The motive is the same one that led Chait, back in 2016, to argue that liberals should prefer Donald Trump to Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. It is the same one that leads panicked progressives such as Charles Pierce of Esquire to rise up in alarm against a DeSantis presidential campaign: “Dear America, Do Not Walk Away From Ron DeSantis—Run.” Chait, Pierce, and others on this beat recognize that Trump would be more likely to lose in 2024 than DeSantis, and that DeSantis (if elected) would be more effective in advancing conservative policy. So, they prefer another Trump nomination, and if pressed, they prefer Trump in power again to DeSantis in power. That’s what this is all about.
The rhetorical trick is to convince readers that the loudest alarms about Trump — that he’s a threat to democracy who won’t abide by the results of elections, as evidenced by his “stop the steal” campaign and January 6 — can be seamlessly transferred to DeSantis. There is, however, a problem in making that leap, and we can illustrate it with what never appears in any of Chait’s many columns on this same topic: the Democrats. Is it bad and dangerous to peddle stolen-election conspiracy theories, attack the legitimacy of election results, try to get them thrown out in court, object to certifying electors in Congress, and generally treat the winners of elections as if they have no right to exercise the powers of office? If that is your standard, there are a lot of Democrats who are threats to democracy, including Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Stacey Abrams, John Lewis, former DNC chairs Terry McAuliffe, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Howard Dean, January 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson, and — of course — Jonathan Chait himself. I have documented this in depth here, here, here, here, here, and here, as well as several other places linked in those items. Heck, the current president, Joe Biden, has preemptively attempted to delegitimize the upcoming midterm elections, while the current Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, described American elections as a “rigged game.” Chait appears to have no problem with any of this, having participated in some of it himself. Chait complains of a “belief that Democratic election victories are inherently illegitimate” but freely participates in a movement to treat Republican election victories as inherently illegitimate.
Ah, but Chait and others of his ilk would argue: What Trump did after the 2020 election is different and uniquely dangerous. Nobody else has gone where he went as the sitting president in pressing challenges to an election result beyond all legitimate legal bounds, pressuring various points in the system to throw the election his way, and summoning an angry mob in an effort to intimidate Congress and the vice president. As it happens, I agree. And I do not point to the prior and ongoing misconduct of Democrats and their intellectual and pundit class as a justification for the behavior of Trump or the behavior of anyone in the GOP or on the right. But here’s the thing: You can’t have it both ways. You can’t summon up the “danger to democracy” rhetoric on the basis of Trump’s unique behavior, defend and distinguish the behavior of your own side by pointing to that uniqueness, and then just routinely transfer the Trump rhetoric to people who have done nothing like what Trump did. Chait does not even bother to lay out a case on that basis; he just hand-waves at some fairly routine political grievances (some of them dishonestly framed, such as claiming that it is a “poll tax” to require felons to pay back fines to complete their sentences) and declares them “Orbanist.”
The other oddity of Chait’s complaint is something he has repeated so often it’s like a tic: “The conservative movement never accepted the democratic legitimacy of the welfare state. Conservatives considered the ability of majorities to vote for economic redistribution a threat to liberty and placed the preservation of liberty (as they defined it) above democracy.” This is a weird grievance to group with Trump, who broke with conservative orthodoxy in his defenses of the entitlement state. There are also three things going on here.
First, he confuses democracy and liberty. Of course, a liberal democrat (small l, small d) will be alarmed when democracy tramples liberty, and there are very long-standing and worthy debates over how to resolve those conflicts. The conservative view is that the people should, by supermajority, enshrine constitutional protections for those liberties that are above the daily business of democracy; the progressive view is that the judiciary should do so (see, e.g., Roe v. Wade or Obergefell v. Hodges). I submit that ours is the more democratic stance. So far as I can tell, Chait believes that liberty should override democracy, so long as it is sexual liberty or some forms of political liberty, and not a disfavored liberty such as free exercise of religion, the right to bear arms, or economic liberty. But once you begin drawing such distinctions, you have strayed far from debates about respecting the outcomes of elections.
Second, there is also a long-standing conservative fear, which the Founders shared, that profligate welfare spending by the voters on the voters will cause the self-destruction of democracy. Worrying about such things does not make one anti-democratic, just prudent — and, in the long run, protective of our system. It is not pro-democracy, for example, to have Weimar Germany’s economy.
Third, the specific conservative complaint about the legitimacy of the welfare state and how it is democratically illegitimate is not that the government spends money on welfare programs, but that it does so without requiring the affirmative and ongoing consent of the people’s representatives. The Constitution was designed so that the most representative body — the House — would not spend a penny unless a majority approved and it had the assent of the president and the Senate. Of course, logrolling deals could be cut, but a bare majority of the House could always just say “no,” and unless they were given something of value in return to make a deal, that was the end of things until the next election. A program such as Obamacare would have been dead years ago if we were still governed that way. Instead, the modern welfare/entitlement state spends money on autopilot without asking the people for their continuing consent; you need a majority of the House plus 60 Senators plus the president in order to not continue an ongoing act of the federal government. That absolutely is a problem of democratic legitimacy, but it thwarts the results of elections in ways that Jonathan Chait approves of.