Maybe you don't actually like democracy as much as you thought?
Plus: modernity's self-destruction, train up a village, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.
A take I haven’t written elsewhere
Maybe you don't actually like democracy as much as you thought?
By now, many Democrats’ why we lost narratives of the 2024 election are fairly measured. Particularly compared to this time in 2016, and especially at The New York Times, I’m seeing much less how could this happen? or look what those white women did! and more yeah, we had this coming and have for years. I’m guessing
’s book, We Have Never Been Woke, (see the review at CT if you haven’t yet) is selling well.This could become a real inflection point—the Democratic Party is a big machine, but those taking a serious look at their own side’s failures are at least important cogs. And yet, even if Democrats learn the lesson of this uneven reckoning, it still strikes me that they find themselves in a bit of a pickle. After all, how do you be the party of the people when you think so many of the people are dumb and/or wrong?
The problem is most obvious in the less measured and introspective election reactions. Here’s one of many car monologues in which a woman rages against the stupid bigots she perceives around her. Or here’s a list of comments from prominent journalists expressing their bafflement and disgust with a public that would vote this way: “Who are we as a country?” “It was an indictment of America.” “Since this nation’s inception large swaths of white Americans—including white women—have claimed a belief in democracy while actually enforcing a white ethnocracy.”
The overall effect is along the lines of this very funny tweet from
:
But even in the more nuanced and reflective crowd, it’s impossible to miss the disconnect between what they want the people (most of all, the working class) to want and what the people actually want.
Maybe the starkest example is the question of gender. This is not what most voters report decided their votes, but it’s not a coincidence that the Trump campaign spent so much—and had so much success—with the “Kamala Harris is for they/them” ad.
Though there have been a few defectors from the party’s consensus on trans issues since the election, the Democratic Party still disagrees with a growing majority of Americans on these matters. Most Americans understand that you cannot change your sex and that sex should determine where athletes compete. The Democratic platform, by contrast, touts the Biden administration’s support for “medically necessary gender-affirming care” and generally operates under the assumption that gender can be changed. One of President Biden’s first executive orders said gender identity should determine where athletes play.
So what are Democrats to do here? With time, perhaps, they will persuade the majority or vice versa. But right now? It’s one thing to recognize, as many sharper left-leaning writers and pundits have now done, that the Democratic Party differs from much of its desired constituency on major issues, including, as with gender, issues not merely of prudence but of morality and justice. It’s quite another thing to resolve or somehow get around those differences.
Popularism can only do so much, and election strategies like that don’t resolve the underlying tension that comes with claiming the role of defender of democracy while rejecting how the demos want to rule—while having such a narrow and, in some cases, spiteful vision of what I’ve called the “legitimate public.”
Democrats aren’t the only ones in this pickle, of course. As I wrote in that previous post, we see a cruder version of this dynamic in Republican birtherism and talk of “real Americans.” For all its newfound populism, the Republican Party is just as capable of dissatisfaction with the demos.
So neither party, it seems to me, likes democracy nearly so much as it imagines. They like the idea of democracy. But the real thing? When it doesn’t work out as hoped? When you believe a majority of the voting polity has bad and stupid ideas?
The good news for both parties is that there’s an alternative to retreating into service of a narrowly conceived legitimate public (and vilification or neglect of the rest): recognizing that democracy alone was never enough. In the American system, it was always meant to be accompanied by liberalism and little-r republicanism.
This kind of republicanism, as constitutional scholar
argues in American Covenant (great book; highly recommend), is an “essential element of the political framework of American constitutionalism, but one that has become less familiar to us over time.” Here’s how Levin introduces it:Republicanism is sometimes identified with its procedural implications and, especially, with representative as opposed to direct democracy. Indeed, James Madison, at times, defined it this way, referring to a republic as “a government in which the scheme of representation takes place.” But republicanism, in both its classical and modern forms, runs far deeper than that. It is a civic ethic, not a system of government.
At its heart is an idea of the human being and citizen that emphasizes our responsibilities to one another and to the common good. It counterbalances the democratic ethos because it values not just what we each want but what is good for all of us. It counterbalances the liberal ethos because it values not just rights but obligations.
It’s not democracy but republicanism in concert with liberalism that produces the American constitutional system’s interest in restraining the whims of the majority, bringing temperance to public passions, slowing reckless decisions we may come to regret, demanding deliberation and debate, and protecting the rights of even offensive minorities. It’s these that get us something like the Loftus tweet, except in a good and serious way, without the underlying convenience, myopia, and pride he skewered.
Democracy alone doesn’t get you all that that. It makes for some nice, alliterative slogans,1 but it’s mostly a means of determining the will of the majority. Though not without norms and values of its own, it’s primarily procedural. It can tell us what most people want; it is so not well suited to telling what they should and should not want. We need republicanism and liberalism, respectively, to take those further strides.
Reviving republicanism and maintaining liberalism are far easier said than done. Republicanism has fallen into obscurity and liberalism into some disfavor in both major parties, and the American public has fallen into an incautious, antagonistic, populist mood. But we need to remember we are—or are supposed to be—doing something more than democracy here. Democracy by itself is pretty weak stuff, frankly, and we’ve placed on one pillar a load meant to be borne by three.
Intake
“The therapist in the machine,’” by Jess McAllen for The Baffler
“Schools vs. screens,” by Luc Rinaldi for Macleans
Adam [a teacher], though, says that his administrators are kowtowing to helicopter parents, tolerating illicit device use and depriving teachers of enforcement power. The higher-ups have decided that insulating themselves from risk—a broken iPhone, an irate parent—is more important than students’ education. […]
In math class, their phones double as calculators. But it’s a devil’s bargain. “If I drop my pencil and it causes a four-second break in my lesson, I look up and I’ve lost them,” [another teacher] says. “I kid you not, some of my students will not graduate high school because of their phones.”
“The new type of relationship everyone’s doing, but no one wants,” by
for Slate“Modernity’s self-destruct button,” by
for First Things
The nature of geometric progressions means that a population drop can be very sudden if the fertility rate does not recover to replacement level. When fewer children are born, fewer future parents are available to raise the next generation, and so on. In South Korea—the country with the world’s lowest TFR, at 0.7—the number of babies born in 2100 is on track to be 93 to 98 percent lower than the number of babies born this year. No disease or invading army has ever managed to destroy a country so thoroughly, and the word that springs to my mind, when contemplating such an event, is “biblical.”
Some napkin math, if this forecast is correct—and I’m not wholly sold that it can be gamed out so precisely (but also, 0.7!): South Korea’s population is 51 million, with about 230,000 births in 2023. Per this prediction, less than a century from now, it’ll have between 16,000 (that’s the 93 percent drop) and 4,600 (98 percent) births per year. Of course, the population won’t be 51 million then, but still: 4,600 babies nationwide. For comparison, as a friend noted, my county alone reported more than 12,000 births in 2020, with a population of about 1.2 million.
“The consolation of providence,” by Brad East for Christianity Today
“Trump has put an end to an era. The future is up for grabs,” by
for The New York Times“Meet Trump’s incredibly confusing new national security cabinet,” by Matthew Petti for Reason
Many of Trump's nominees are conventional war hawks. His secretary of state nominee, Marco Rubio, is open to regime change wars in Latin America. Brian Hook, running the State Department transition, is obsessed with regime change in the Middle East. Elise Stefanik, nominated as ambassador to the United Nations, and John Ratcliffe, nominated to run the CIA, also want more intervention there. Waltz, perhaps the most radical of them all, is on record supporting U.S. boots on the ground in Ukraine and a reinvasion of Afghanistan.
Output
New work:
Personnel is policy | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
Train up a village | Christianity Today (unlocked link)
Newly relevant work:
Sometimes what I’m doing in this section is simply listing old articles with something to say about present news. Sometimes I’m trying to interrogate my past work, especially when I happen to reread something and realize I got it wrong. But this week, I want to re-up a take from November of 2018 that I still find entirely apt: It’d be better if President-elect Donald Trump could be head of state without being head of government. Or, as The Week’s headline more provocatively put it, Trump for king.
The head of state is a largely symbolic office which represents, in the words of former French President Charles de Gaulle, l’esprit de la nation—“the spirit of the country.” A head of state gives speeches and hosts fancy dinners, presents medals to noteworthy people and visits the troops. A head of state decorates a big mansion for Christmas, pardons turkeys, and throws an Easter Egg hunt for kids. This is a job for a personality, someone who by birth or election comes to represent the nation at a cultural level. The core of the job is generating feelings among the populace.
That last bit’s his exact skill set, no? I think we’d all be happier with this arrangement.
I realize the irony of putting this at the end of a post in which I praise American Covenant, which extols our congressional system over a parliamentary approach, which more often has a split executive. But this is one point on which I envy the English, at least sometimes. It can be very useful to have a king.
“defend”! “dies”! “darkness”! “danger”! “death”! So many options!
Never thought I’d be agreeing with DJT for king, but here we are.
Your voice here, and generally out in the all the places where you are published, is a non-anxious presence for me, a go-to when everyone else seems to be freaking out. I also appreciated that about Untrustworthy. And I sometimes find myself quoting things/ideas/facts you write about on your substack-- no pressure (haha). Now, I'm going to go try to find the time to read more about republicanism! and liberalism!