Noncommittal

The Week's Damon Linker asks: "Are Republicans the only ones abandoning democracy?" He then references a Ross Douthat column in the New York Times that points fingers at everyone.

I have trouble understanding how this is news.

There is a degree to which one can understand that in a Democracy, the populace determines what they will do, or not do, by a majority vote. But one can take that a step further and say that the populace determines what, for them, is right or wrong, ethical or unethical, by that same vote. I can think of very few people, regardless of their political leanings, with whom this sits well.

And to the degree that any given person believes that some outcomes are simply off-limits, no matter how many people vote for them, they are skeptical of mass democracy. The primary factor that drives the current debate about the topic now is that Democrats believe, with some justification, that in a nation that lacked the tools of gerrymandering and restrictive rules concerning voting, they'd be better placed within the halls of power than they currently are. Former President Trump's protestations that the 2020 election was rightfully his come across as somewhere between sour grapes and the scheming of a thwarted thief.

But I generally find that it isn't particularly difficult, for any given person, to find some electoral outcome that they believe is both plausible and unacceptable. Mr. Douthat's observation, as related by Mr. Linker, that liberal and progressive America believes that some areas of governance should be handed over to experts and the public kept out of it likely occurred years ago to anyone who has been paying the least bit of attention.

In practice, I suspect that fewer people are committed to democracy than they are convinced that, left to it's own devices, the public will generally agree with them on those things they understand to be important. And so they will never be forced to choose between following the expression popular will and their living their convictions in daily life.

What threatens democracy in the modern United States, more than anything else perhaps, are the monstrous caricatures that partisans draw of one another. The more that political opponents view each other as willfully perverse to the point of deliberate evil, the less likely they are going to see the prospect of an electoral victory by them as something with low enough stakes to be allowed to stand. And democracy demands that the losers in any election see that defeat as having less-than-existential stakes for them. When a commitment to democracy is seen as anywhere between a vow of continuing poverty and signing one's own death warrant, defections are going to become more commonplace. I would have thought it was understood that there's nothing particularly partisan about that outlook.