In a more charitable mood, I wrote (2015):
Let’s not point fingers, but for all their hands-over-their-hearts, pocket-Constitution-carrying, misty-eyed Americanity, there are certain of our neighbors who are just not comfortable with democracy. With one-person, one-vote. With freedom of speech and religion that is not theirs. With facts that do not support their preferred view of the world. With not being in control. Galileo Galilei knew a few. As Jesus said about the poor, they will be with us always.
The word democracy does not itself appear in the U.S. Constitution and Amendments. The words vote, elect, election, majority and their variants, however, appear dozens of times. Majority alone appears 14 times. Democracy — people vote; the majority wins, others lose — was baked into how this country of, by, and for the people governs itself from its founding. Colonists soundly renounced rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. English landed gentry, anyway.
So in case you missed this (I did), days ago Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican, had this to say to the New York Times about that founding principle:
“The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for,” Mr. Paul said. “The Jim Crow laws came out of democracy. That’s what you get when a majority ignores the rights of others.”
Actually, that’s why the Constitution and Amendments exist: to safeguard people’s right to self-govern via their right to vote. Jim Crow laws appeared in Southern states where a corrupt faction managed to strip or intimidate a large swath of eligible fellow citizens of their ability to participate in American democracy for one hundred years. Prohibition lasted far less time.
“One of the edifying side effects of the Trump era has been that, by making democracy the explicit subject of political debate, it has revealed the stark fact many influential conservatives do not believe in it,” writes Jonathan Chait. “Mike Lee blurted out last fall that he opposes ‘rank democracy.'” Paul denies democracy is a foundational American concept. As does former President Donald Trump and his MAGA cult. That cult has expanded to assimilate the Republican party almost in its entirety.
Chait writes:
The belief system Paul is endorsing contains a few related claims. First, the Founders explicitly and properly rejected majoritarianism. (Their favorite shorthand is “We’re a republic, not a democracy.”) Second, to the extent the current system has shortcomings, they reveal the ignorance of the majority and hence underscore the necessity of limiting democracy. Third, slavery and Jim Crow are the best historical examples of democracy run amok.
National Review has consistently advocated this worldview since its founding years, when it used these ideas to oppose civil-rights laws, and has persisted in using these ideas to argue for restrictions on the franchise. “Was ‘democracy’ good when it empowered slave owners and Jim Crow racists?,” asked NR’s David Harsanyi. Majority rule “sounds like a wonderful thing … if you haven’t met the average American voter,” argued NR’s Kevin Williamson, rebutting the horrifying ideal of majority rule with the knock-down argument: “If we’d had a fair and open national plebiscite about slavery on December 6, 1865, slavery would have won in a landslide.”
It is important to understand that these conservatives have taken Trump’s election, and escalating threats to democracy, not as a challenge to their worldview but as confirmation of it. If Trump is threatening democracy, this merely proves that the people who elected him are ignorant and therefore unfit to rule. The attempted coup of January 6, another NR column sermonized, ought to “remind us of the wisdom that the Founders held dear centuries ago: We are a republic, not a direct democracy, and we’d best act like it.”
These people are royalists, not Americans, and we’d best treat them as the enemies of democracy they are.