Small-D Delusional

Why Can't We Just Say What's True?

Yesterday, centrist pundit Josh Barro put out a newsletter entitled “The Problem With 'Pro-Democracy' Rhetoric,” which was enthusiastically greeted by right-wing New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who tweeted out “Yes, yes, yes” about it like he was in an old Herbal Essences commercial. Also my good buddy Shadi Hamid liked it a lot too. Here is the central claim:

Six days before the midterm elections, Joe Biden will give yet another speech about “democracy.” I don’t care for this. First of all, as a political matter, Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini is right: This is a message of primary interest to the most core voters in the Democratic Party coalition. They are sure to vote for Democrats already — in fact, many of them have already voted. The idea that telling voters about January 6 one more time would help anything is just crazy.

But the other problem is that the message makes no sense on its face.

When Democrats talk about “democracy,” they’re talking about the importance of institutions that ensure the voters get a say among multiple choices and the one they most prefer gets to rule. But they are also saying voters do not get to do that in this election. The message is that there is only one party contesting this election that is committed to democracy — the Democrats — and therefore only one real choice available. If voters reject Democrats’ agenda or their record on issues including inflation, crime, and immigration (or abortion, for that matter), they have no recourse at the ballot box — they simply must vote for Democrats anyway, at least until such time as the Republican Party is run by the likes of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

This amounts to telling voters that they have already lost their democracy.

Well, you said it, not me, Josh. I agree it’s a problem that only one party has an actual commitment to democracy and that it fundamentally upsets the system, but the problem was not created by Democratic party rhetoric. More than half of Republican party candidates for office in this election continue to claim that the 2020 election was stolen. The republican gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin said, “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor.” And once again, for fuck’s sake, the former Republican president, still their party’s most popular politician and likely their 2024 candidate, attempted to overturn the previous election in a putsch. Am I the only one who gives a shit about the rules? Has the whole world gone crazy?

To Barro’s other point, I don’t know if it’s good politics on a messaging level, but it’s not a contradiction in terms that only one party is really small d-democratic, it’s the facts. Are we supposed to just pretend that’s all not happening for the sake of, what? He and Shadi Hamid seem to be of the opinion if you pretend nothing bad is happening, it won’t.

One other thing. Barro writes:

In countries where there is a real cross-ideological coalition to protect democracy, this is not how it works. In Israel and Hungary, coalitions of ideologically diverse parties have set aside their differences to run on very narrow governing agendas that are essentially about keeping the other side out. This approach has worked in some elections but not in others, but it hasn’t involved the Labor Party in Israel telling various right-wing anti-Netanyahu parties they must sign onto a full spectrum of left-of-center issue positions to share a coalition. This is how such coalitions engage in democratic accountability — if you’re going to tell people they must vote for your side to keep a dangerous authoritarian out, you also do what you can to make them feel ideologically comfortable within the coalition on issues besides elections themselves.

These are your positive examples of United Front politics? Hungary and Israel? Israel just had an election and the left had been reduced to a rump and Bibi Netanyahu has returned to power on the back of a Kahanist surge. In Hungary, the opposition was just trounced by Orbán’s Fidesz party—again. In fact, Orbán’s party just got their biggest vote share ever. So maybe moving to the left doesn’t work so well, but this strategy of broad ideological compromise doesn’t really seem to be the ticket either, now does, it? First, Barro is making the argument that a party can’t stand for democracy as such, devoid of all positive content, and then applauds of those that do and abjure an actual platform, without noting that they are, in fact, big losers.

The idea that one party, even if it has a clear-cut ideological or partisan agenda, can also embody the democracy as such has a lot of historical precedent. That was part of Roosevelt’s appeal. It’s also an old tradition in France, where the entire left would periodically identify itself with the republic and adopt a politics of “republican defense” against the right, usually when the right would engage in some coup-like behavior. The last great example of this, the Popular Front of the 1930s, was not a government of centrist compromise but quite radical in the social reforms it pushed through. The idea was that the surge of the far-right suggested a fundamental social problem that needed to be remedied through bold action. Did that approach work? Well, in some ways yes and in some ways no, but let’s leave that for another time.

Democracy is not simply the presence of a multi- or two-party system: That’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. There are some actual substantive commitments that come with it. One of the most important of these is a belief in popular sovereignty, which is the principle that virtually all Republican politics are designed to get around: either in the old fashioned form of Senatorial or Judicial anti-majoritarianism and gerrymandering or its more recent politics of menacing putschism and election denial. The former is bad, but conforms to the rule of law and one hopes can be remedied over time. The latter breaks the system. Fused together, as they are now, they form the basis of potential one-party rule.

Look, they even say it all the time—“We’re a republic, not a democracy,”—or some such similar bullshit. It’s just the simple truth: They don’t want the country to be a democracy anymore. They know it. We know it. But for some reason all these pundits say we shouldn’t say it. The centrist pundit, in either his cynical or naive form, loves to warn about the dangers of rhetoric, but this kind of equivocation about the parties sets the predicate for political cynicism and resignation: everyone shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Well, they are both bad, they Democrats have their authoritarian side, too, after all. I mean, look at all that manipulative ‘ saving democracy’ talk.” It also allows us to settle for the curtailing of democracy, but not an absolute destruction: some kind of hybrid regime: “Well, it’s not really an authoritarian dictatorship, there’s an opposition, after all, look, there’s still a Democratic mayor of…Ann Arbor.”

Are the Democrats incompetent, cynical, flailing, etc.? Of course. After all, this is the Democratic Party we are talking about. But, as always, they are still not the Republicans.