'Our Democracy' Is Not in Danger
Article by Peter Van Buren in The American Conservative
'Our Democracy' Is Not in Danger
The articles followed a familiar path. Each started with some event—January 6 was the most popular choice—and then explained how it was the start of fascism, comparing it to one of the few historical examples cited by progressives, usually something to do with the Reichstag fire, and finishing with an image of, say, Trump standing over Lady Liberty.
Actually, our democracy is doing just fine. Things are working more or less how they are supposed to.
The runner up to January 6 for “the last gasp of democracy” in the progressive mind is the recent set of Supreme Court decisions. Central to this version is the overturning of Roe v. Wade, purportedly stripping women of their rights and showing the Court has no respect of precedent and could overturn anything. The potential repeal of same-sex marriage is used as another Democratic emote-o-point, and in some screeds the author goes as far as to suggest the Court will permit states to ban interracial marriages and contraception.
Slow down, kids. If you go too fast, you'll miss the scenery. Perhaps it is necessary to remind you that our "democracy" is sort of like sharing crayons in kindergarten: sometimes, you have to let the other kids use the red one.
Progressives, with a lock hold on the Supreme Court for many decades, never mind the media, advertising, entertainment, and academia, grew too used to getting their way, too used to defining democracy as "expansion of rights that I favor and shrinking of those you favor." So expanding the Bill of Rights, in their eyes, automatically meant ignoring the 2nd Amendment and reading abortions into the 14th. It is easy to see progress when you always get more of what you want.
But a real democracy shares. As national moods and voting patterns change (remember when Ohio used to be a well-contested purple state? Florida was always up for grabs? John King zoomed the CNN Magic Map practically into voters' backyards?), so does the makeup and decisions of the Court. Remember back in 1896 when the Court decided in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate rail cars for whites and blacks didn't violate the 14th Amendment, and states judging people by their race was constitutional? The upshot was constitutional sanction to laws known as Jim Crow.
Then in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, the Court set aside stare decisis and ended its recognition of separate but equal as a constitutional standard. Nobody is keeping score, but it was 59 years of separate-but-equal, and 49 of Roe. People said a lot of things in 1954 about the Brown decision, but it is hard to find a version of today’s "end of democracy" genre. Indeed, enforcing Brown—even to the point of deploying federal troops under the Insurrection Act—is often cited as a high point of democracy. When tested, the system worked.
January 6 should be a holiday every year as an example of democracy working exactly as intended. Let's look for the undemocratic element: 1) America holds an election and not everyone agrees on the winner—nothing new; where do you think all those complex presidential election rules came from? 2) Lawful protests take place at the Capitol. 3) When a minority of protestors start trespassing, law enforcement steps in and, after one terrible fatality, the crowd disassembles. 4) The vice president ignores any background noise and simply carries out his constitutional duty in the ceremonial certification of electors selected earlier.
With the arguable exception of a cop gunning down the unarmed Ashley Babbitt, everyone did their duty, and another peaceful transfer of power took place. There were no tanks on the White House lawn.
To create the same climate of fear progressives maintained during the four years of the Trump administration without blaming Joe Biden for some of the highest inflation and gas prices and lowest stock vitality in years takes some clever word play. Thankfully for progressives, it exists in abundance. According to some, Supreme Court judges became rightwing extremists, not jurists. Their decision on Dobbs was said to be based somehow on only rights that existed in 1868, and so forth. Taking away the EPA's unilateral power to make climate-change rules without full and open debate and returning that authority to Congress was somehow twisted into being both undemocratic and a sign of the apocalypse.
Even Sotomayor wrote of Dobbs that the majority decision “undermines the court’s legitimacy,” as if such a thing happening in a democracy—a majority carrying the day—was something extraordinary and gravely evil.
George Soros had to weigh in: "There is only one way to rein in the Supreme Court: throw the Republican Party out of office in a landslide. That would allow Congress to protect through legislation the rights that had been entrusted to the protection of the Supreme Court. It is now clear that doing so was a big mistake. Congress must act."
Let’s leave aside the part about Congress not acting on abortion, same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, contraception, the EPA, and a lot of other supposed threats to democracy for decades, including when Democrats held majority power in both houses, the Court, and the executive branch.
Soros still sees problems: "When it comes to organizing a landslide victory against the radicalized Republicans, opponents face almost insuperable obstacles. Republicans have not only stacked the Supreme Court and many lower courts with extremist judges. In states such as Florida, Georgia, and Texas, they have enacted a raft of laws that make voting very difficult."
This is absurd. Take Texas as an example. You can register to vote there online. You do have to present one of seven forms of ID to vote, which include a driver’s license, a handgun permit, and military ID. You can't have a decent night out on the town without one of those, and several of them are issued by the federal government, well away from the racist hands of Texas state lawmakers. In certain circumstances a utility bill or a cashed check can suffice. Over 17 million people in Texas are registered so far, which sounds like a whole lotta democracy to me. Meanwhile, showing the same photo ID and a vax card just to sit down for a burger did have some undemocratic overtones to it.
After Soros, no one clings to the "democracy is dying" meme like Max Boot. Covering the gloom beat for WaPo, Boot warns "we’re in danger of losing our democracy." He is stirred by Americans coming together to support Ukraine’s "fight for freedom" (better there then on the beaches of Santa Monica, eh Max?) "But it is dismaying," he writes, "to see that there is no similar consensus on defending democracy at home."
The solution is simple: vote for Democratic candidates only, even if you don't agree with them, because what could be more democratic than being told who to vote for and asked to not think about your choice? "Panic," Max writes, "…is sometimes warranted."
Boot, in another column, declares with the straight face of someone that "There is no justice in a political system that gives Republicans six of nine Supreme Court seats even though a Republican has won the popular vote for president only once in the past 30 years. So, too, there is something deeply amiss with a Senate that gives California (population 39.3 million) the same number of seats as Wyoming (population 581,348)."
"The Founders never envisioned such an imbalance between power and population," wrote Boot in a multi-Pulitzer-winning newspaper. But they actually did. It was the Founders who created that proportional representation system precisely to balance the power of big states and small ones.
There is a reason that progressives are trying to keep people in a state of fear. Fearful people are easy to manipulate. You need only scare them to the point where they demand relief, and then provide them your political program as a way out. It's a standard trick of the demagogue. "Democrats need to lean into the politics of fear," says the NYT.
It is a natural reaction of fear to extend the "Trump is Putin's waterboy" panic into support for a war against Putin. The solution to this panic, of course, is to stop and ask yourself if something is true, and respond from intellect and not emotion. If half of Germany would have thought through the Reichstag fire and not bought into fear mongering, progressives would need to come up with a brand-new go-to bad guy.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/more-progressive-panic/
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