Threats to Democracy to the Left, Right, and Below

Hey everyone,

I have a request. Before you respond to this “news”letter with a torrent of whatabouts—What about Trump? The GOP? January 6? Flynn? Powell? Cyber Ninjas?—please read my G-File from last Friday, or even my column today. That will give you a sense of what my answers to those queries are.

Now, come with me, if you will, aboard the Wayback Machine:

In 2009, the New York Times’ Tom Friedman began a column thus:

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. 

After surveying some of China’s enlightened policies, Friedman said of America: “Our one-party democracy is worse.”

This was a time in which the Democratic Party controlled the presidency, the House, and the Senate by wide margins. But that wasn’t the party Friedman had in mind. He was complaining about the Republicans.

In 2005, Friedman wrote:

Dear God in Heaven: Forgive me my sins, for I have been to China and I have had bad thoughts. Forgive me, Heavenly Father, for I have cast an envious eye on the authoritarian Chinese political system, where leaders can, and do, just order that problems be solved. … I cannot help but feel a tinge of jealousy at China’s ability to be serious about its problems and actually do things that are tough and require taking things away from people. Dear Lord, please accept my expression of remorse for harboring such feelings. Amen.

In his book, The World is Flat, there’s a whole chapter titled “China for a Day,” in which he explains how awesome it would be if America could have a Chinese-style dictatorship—but just for a day! That’s all the time that the enlightened despots—who agree with him, naturally—would need to impose their will on the country.

Why, it’s as if the Federalist Papers, with all that stuff about checks and balances, divided government, and the need for cool passions and diffuse power, were brilliant. The one mistake Madison, Hamilton, and Jay made was not specifying that all that stuff should bind the government for 364 days a year. On the 365th day—Tyranny Day!—policymakers should be able to do whatever they want.

Joe Biden has been making a watered-down but somewhat similar version of this argument lately, claiming that we need to ram through his agenda to prove to autocracies that democracies can “go big” too.

In 2016, Neil deGrasse Tyson floated an old idea for an ideal nation: “Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.”

Some of you may remember Lani Guinier, the Harvard professor who briefly achieved celebrity status for her failed bid to run the civil rights division of the Clinton Justice Department. Guinier argues in her book The Tyranny of the Majority and in various law review articles that the doctrine of “one man, one vote” needs to be jettisoned in favor of a more “authentic” form of democracy. She proposed an idea inspired by her then 4-year-old son, Nikolas: “Taking turns.” When Nikolas couldn’t get a consensus among his friends about what the kids should play, they decided they should take turns deciding. Similarly “authentic minorities”—she places enormous emphasis on the term “authentic”—should have a “turn” at representation even if their “authentic leaders” cannot win a majority of the vote.

These are just some recent, off-the-top-of-my-head examples of prominent intellectuals questioning the legitimacy or desirability of democracy, constitutionalism or democratic and constitutional norms. But let’s turn the Wayback dial even further.

Richard Ely was the founder of the American Economic Association—which, until last year, still had a major lecture series named after him—and the intellectual ringleader of the “Wisconsin school” of progressivism. He was also an avowed theocratic racist and eugenicist. The “human rubbish heap,” he wrote in 1922, was far larger than “a submerged tenth.” He believed that “the world consists of two classes—the educated and the ignorant—and it is essential for progress that the former should be allowed to dominate the latter.”

Woodrow Wilson believed democracy wasn’t an abstract system but a racial endowment of the Saxon people carried forward genetically through our germ plasm (the conduit of heredity according to German scientists in the late 19th century). The democracy of the American colonists wasn’t an expression of ideology or even political culture so much as the result of letting their “race habits and instincts have natural play.”

Wilson believed that democracy was an evolutionary adaptation of the evolutionarily advanced Teutonic race:

 When practiced, not by small communities, but by wide nations, democracy, far from being a crude form of government, is possible only amongst peoples of the highest and steadiest political habit. It is the heritage of races purged alike of hasty barbaric passions and of patient servility to rulers, and schooled in temperate common counsel. It is an institution of political noonday, not of the half light of political dawn. It can never be made to sit easily or safely on first generations, but strengthens through long heredity. It is poison to the infant, but tonic to the man. Monarchies may be made, but democracies must grow.

And, of course, Wilson was openly hostile to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. “No doubt,” he wrote, “a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle.” He railed against “Fourth of July sentiments” and believed that our constitutional system of checks and balances had “proven mischievous just to the extent to which they have succeeded in establishing themselves as realities.”

Wilson’s record of state-sponsored violence, censorship, and persecution of political dissenters and “hyphenated Americans,” I would argue, flows quite clearly from all of this.

I could go on for thousands of words—and have in the past—about other progressive intellectuals and politicians who shared such ideas. But let’s pick up the pace.

Over the weekend, Michael Flynn endorsed the idea of a military coup in the United States. It was abhorrent and grotesque and his denial that he meant what he said holds no water with me, and not just because I have eyes and ears and access to the video. He has a long record of advocating martial law on Trump’s behalf.

But I was reminded of another retired general: Hugh Johnson, the man who oversaw the draft in World War I and ran Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration during the New Deal. (He was Time’s Man of the Year in 1934.) Johnson was a fan of Mussolini. He hung his portrait on his office wall and, according to Francis Perkins, handed out Italian Fascist tracts to FDR’s Cabinet. In 1932, he printed up a weird “Proclamation” he wrote during the Democratic Convention. The fictional author was “Muscleinny, dictator pro-tem” and in it he proposed banning the democratically elected leadership of the country, as well as the Supreme Court “to a very pleasant archipelago” while America got its act together. This was the guy FDR made arguably the second most powerful person in the country. And under his NRA, Johnson endeavored to militarize not just the economy but the society.

There was enormous intellectual support for FDR to become a dictator at the time, from the likes of Walter Lippmann and countless others who wanted to put flesh on William James’ call to organize domestic life as a “moral equivalent of war.”

FDR wasn’t a dictator, even though I think he abused his powers in myriad ways, starting with his decision to essentially become president-for-life in contravention of well-established democratic norms limiting the presidency to two terms.

The eternal struggle.

So what’s the point of this historical montage? For starters (and most importantly): Threats to democracy are as old as democracy—and they don’t just come from the side you hate.

Last Friday, I offered a fairly modest criticism of historian Joshua Tait’s essay on intellectual conservatism’s problems—real and alleged—with democracy. Again, I think he made some fine points, and there’s much that I agree with in whole or in part. But we have our disagreements.

In a Twitter thread responding to me, Tait says I’ve misread him. He writes, “I don’t so much argue conservative anti-democratic discourse is driving present GOP actions so much as it creates a permission structure to justify them. The driving force is deeper, and gets at my larger disagreement with Goldberg.” He continues, “Instead, GOP anti-democratic attitudes are driven by a disregard for the norms of forbearance and reciprocity central to a democracy, and this lack of forbearance is rooted in conservative intellectual elites.”

To which I say: Maybe!

We can argue all day long—and I’d love to have him on my podcast to do precisely that—about how much of the “stop the steal” nonsense was made possible by the permission structure laid down by Leo Strauss or William F. Buckley. I don’t see a lot of evidence for it. But if the Devil can quote scripture, I’m sure Rudy Giuliani can quote Strauss’ Natural Right and History.

But, if we’re going to invest this power to justify anti-democratic attitudes in intellectuals—as well as some of the most powerful politicians in American history—let’s not cherry-pick. Thomas Friedman had a lot more influence on elite thinking in the early 2000s than Strauss, Buckley, or Wilmoore Kendall do today. The New Deal remains a central organizing principle for Democrats, from the Green New Deal to Joe Biden’s spending spree. And I see an enormous amount of “disregard for the norms of forbearance and reciprocity” from the left on a daily basis.

I understand that today’s self-described progressives don’t know a lot about the early 20th century political movement they borrow their label from. So I’m not willing to argue that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is as contemptuous of democracy as Richard Ely and his peers were.

But ignorance of history is often just as dangerous as selectively mining it for “permission structures.” Neal deGrasse Tyson may be a fool—or at least foolish—for his Rationalia nonsense. But that doesn’t mean he wants to replay the carnage of the French Revolution. It does, however, mean he doesn’t understand how that sort of talk, if taken seriously, gives such carnage a permission structure.

Tait and I agree that the Trumpian effort to subvert democracy is the most pressing and most appalling threat to democracy in the present moment. But every moment contains within it threats to democracy. They don’t always come from elites on the right or left. Sometimes—often—they come from below, i.e. from the people themselves. The American Founders and the republicans of Rome alike understood this. That’s why I place the blame for this moment on populism, not the writings of a handful of conservative intellectuals whom the people applauding Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell have never heard of.

Also, it’s worth noting that arguably the most important and successful institution created by the old conservatism—the conservative legal movement, manifested in the Federalist Society—has stood against the effort to pilfer the election. The Trump campaign brought its bogus claims to numerous conservative judges and Supreme Court justices, including Trump appointees. They were all thrown out. If conservatism was shot through with anti-democratic permission structures, you’d think one of them might have indulged this scheme a little, or even a lot. None did. 

But yes, there are right-wing intellectuals testing democracy right now, and I think they are profoundly wrong. The most famous—and older—ones, I would argue, aren’t doing so because they’ve scanned the yellowing pages of old copies of National Review. They’re doing it because they’ve been captured by their populism-soaked audiences. But tellingly, the younger and less famous ones mischievously playing with fire aren’t “clinging” to the old conservatism as Tait accuses me of doing. They are openly declaring that the old conservatives—the ones Tait claims had anti-democratic tendencies—are no longer relevant.

This doesn’t wholly disprove Tait’s thesis, but it does complicate it significantly. The radicals of the later phases of the French Revolution were ideologically baptized by the good liberals of the Tennis Court Oath and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. So, too, you could argue—I wouldn’t—that these folks were indoctrinated by the old fusionists and are now turning on them. That’s an old story. But that’s not the argument Tait is making, as far as I can tell. The new, sincere radicals reject the very writers Tait says have inspired or encouraged them.

I’m not one of the old fusionists. When I first met Bill Buckley, he was an old man and I was a twentysomething (Leo Strauss died when I was 4 years old). But I am proudly a member of that remnant (even though I think many of the founders of conservatism were wrong about some things). Conservatism, rightly understood, seeks to preserve the constitutional order as amended and improved over time. Conservatives have fallen short of that in the past and many are doing so now. But at least their failures and hypocrisies pay tribute to that ideal. I’m not sure you can say the same of the inheritors of the progressive tradition.

Which brings me back to my point: Threats to democracy, like broader threats to liberty, are always with us, because human nature is always with us. If you are only vigilant to the threats that fit your worldview, you’re likely to miss a few. As Ronald Reagan said (in direct refutation of Woodrow Wilson and his Teutonic germ-plasm nonsense), “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”