The-Ave.US

This article is commentary from a middle perspective, i.e., neither radical right nor radical left.

It’s time we have a serious talk about democracy, because Republicans don’t believe in it, and this week a prominent GOP senator, Mike Lee of Utah, came right out and said it.

This is what Lee said in a pair of tweets, quoted here exactly, down to his typos: “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

Webster’s definition of “rank,” the adjective Lee used to describe democracy:

Now that you know what Mike Lee thinks of democracy, Vox reminds us (read it here) that,

“On the American right, there is a long tradition of arguing that the United States is a ‘republic, not a democracy,’ a distinction its proponents trace back to the founders. It centers not on whether a nation holds competitive elections but the extent to which it puts constraints on majorities from restricting the rights of minorities. Democracies, on this definition, allow for untrammeled majority rule; republics put in place rules that prevent legislators from using their power in tyrannical ways (think the Bill of Rights).”

There’s no question the Constitution established a republic, not a pure democracy. That’s an acceptable, arguably superior, form of government, when interpreted (in my own words) this way: Our governing system is based on the principle of majority rule, with protections for the rights of the minority. It does not give the minority a right to rule the majority.

But that’s where the Republican Party is going, which is why we need to have this conversation. Vox continues:

“The problem is [their] underlying reading of early American documents is quite wrong. When the founders inveighed against ‘democracy,’ they were warning against something very different — direct democracy rather than the election of representatives — that isn’t really on the table in modern America. The spin offered by Lee and others on the right, historically speaking, originated as arguments for curbing democracy in the ordinary sense of the word — the ability of majorities to enact popular policies (that conservatives disapproved of). Warning against ‘the tyranny of the majority’ serves as a justification for minority rule.”

(For a glimpse of what legal experts say about Mike Lee’s intrepretation of “republic,” click on a Raw Story article here.)

Minority rule, under which the majority of voters cannot remove a minority faction from power, is actual (as opposed to imagined) tyranny, according to the normal definition of the term. It’s what we will be facing if Biden wins the election, but is thwarted from taking office, and Trump is maintained in power, by gerrymandered legislatures that don’t represent the people of their states or intervention by a partisan Supreme Court loyal to a party or faction rather than democratic process, or a combination of both. Combine that with a president who blows past  constitutional and legal constraints, and that, my friends, is a dictatorship and the end of our freedom.

Vox continues:

“It can also serve as justification for something worse. At a time when President Trump is calling for the prosecution of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, while both he and Vice President Mike Pence refuse to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, this kind of talk isn’t just a harmless dispute over political theory.”

Yes, it puts the adjective “fascist” in front of the noun “dictator.” And dictators, of course, make opposition illegal and imprison (or, in worst case, murder) their political opponents. Trump talks about prosecuting his opponents. His most rabid followers talk about killing them.

“In short, what we call “representative democracy” today — a system of government where people elect leaders to make policy — is what the founders called a “republic.”

When someone starts talking about overriding the people’s right to elect their leaders, they’re no longer talking about a republic. If Republicans want to blather about America being a “republic,” they must stay within the bounds of not violating the voters’ right to decide elections. The moment they begin thinking, talking, or doing otherwise, they are no longer advocating a “republic,” but something tyrannical in nature.

Vox continues,

“Lee’s definition of ‘democracy’ is out of step with both the way the founders used the term and the way most political observers use it today. It is an idiosyncratic definition found almost exclusively among American conservatives — in a way that reveals some deeper problems in the modern conservative project.

The John Birch Society, a radical faction in the postwar conservative movement, helped popularize the ‘republic versus democracy’ distinction in the 1950s and ’60s. According to Nicole Hemmer, a historian of the conservative movement at Columbia University, the idea really took off on the right during the conservative fight against civil rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings expanding the franchise. ‘It goes back to the ‘republic, not a democracy’ chants from the 1964 [Republican] convention,’ she tells me. ‘Conservatives rejected the one-person-one-vote standard of the Warren Court, a set of arguments deeply entangled with their opposition to the Black civil rights movement.'”

You knew this eventually would snake back to racism, didn’t you? We can discuss arcane history all we want to, and thread our way through ideological minutia, but the “White Lives Matter” and militia types, the Karens, and racist cops don’t know about any of this, nor do they care. This isn’t about historical racism. It’s about today’s racism, which is deeply embedded in the Republican Party, and lies at the heart of Trump’s appeal to his most ardent supporters. Set aside the conservative b.s. masquerading as intellectualism; this is what it’s pandering to (along with assorted other prejudices).

Vox continues,

“This is the key move, the moment in which a seemingly innocuous terminological dispute actually takes on real stakes. It reveals how modern conservatism has long had a built-in intellectual justification for ruling without popular support …[;] the tradition Lee is operating out of … casts doubt on the most basic democratic principle: that the people who win the public’s support should rightly govern. It takes such an extreme position on what should be out of bounds that it can be used to argue that Democrats being able to implement their policy agenda is itself a form of tyranny.

“’As early as the late 1980s/early 1990s, Pat Buchanan is spearheading a sharper suspicion of democracy that would become increasingly influential on the right,’ Hemmer says. ‘It comes and goes — obviously, the neocons liked the rhetoric of democracy — but it’s pretty clear that the GOP has come to embrace minoritarian and anti-democratic politics.’”

See? It’s not just me who says Republicans oppose democracy. So don’t try to cast me as an alarmist or a hand-wringer. This phenomenon is real and being observed by others, too.

“In the context of the 2020 election, the anti-democratic strain embodied by Lee’s rhetoric takes on particularly serious significance. President Trump has been clear that he believes any Biden win will be fraudulent; he has refused to commit to accepting the results of the election or even agreeing to a peaceful transition of power. The Republican Party as a whole has largely aided and abetted this approach, most notably by insisting on the fiction of massive voter fraud and enacting policies at the state level that make it harder for Democratic-leaning constituencies to vote.

“The idea that majority rule is intrinsically oppressive is necessarily an embrace of anti-democracy: an argument that an enlightened few, meaning Republican supporters, should be able to make decisions for the rest of us. If the election is close, and Trump makes a serious play to steal it, Lee’s ‘we’re not a democracy’ argument provides a ready-made justification for tactics that amount to a kind of legal coup.”

If you click on that last link you’ll see those “tactics” are the same ones I’ve been writing about: “lawsuits even more brazenly political than Bush v. Gore; convincing Republican state legislators in battleground states to override the vote count and send Trump supporters to the Electoral College.”

Now let’s talk about Mike Lee again. Who is he? Besides a Republican U.S. Senator from Utah, the deepest-red state of them all? And, of course, a Mormon. I mention that because Lee’s Mormon background surely influences his thinking — Mormons were a persecuted minority in our early history, who fled to Utah to establish a homeland where they could feel safe. They are people who fear mobs.

But beyond that, first and foremost, Mike Lee is a child of privilege. Being an average American is completely outside his experience. His father was president of Brigham Young University and founder of its law school, and Reagan’s U.S. Solicitor General in his first presidential term (the solicitor general is the government lawyer who represents the United States in the Supreme Court).

Needless to say, skids were greased for Mike Lee. He was student body president at BYU, and admission to BYU’s law school was a foregone thing. (For students without his connections, getting into law school is highly competitive.) After graduating, he was inserted into plum judicial clerkships, a fast track for future judicial appointment, clerking first for a federal district judge, then Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. A judicial clerk does legal research and helps a judge do his work. He then was eased into a Washington D.C.-based law firm doing legal work for corporate clients.

He got to the Senate by running as a Tea Party Republican and “primarying” (i.e., defeating in a Republican primary) a long-serving incumbent, Bob Bennett. That was in 2010. Today, the New York Times ranks Mike Lee as “the most conservative member of the Senate,” which isn’t surprising, considering he comes from the most conservative state.

One Senator is not the U.S. Senate or a political party. This year, 13 QAnon supporters are running for Congress or Senate, and barring an incredible series of upsets, it’s likely some will be elected. But there are 100 senators and 435 House members, and a few outliers won’t prevent responsible legislating; the system is resilient enough to tolerate some extremists and wackos in our representative bodies.

So the trenchant question is this: Is Sen. Mike Lee — a man who is incapable of having any concept of what it’s like to be you — an outlier whose anti-democratic views can be brushed off as irrelevant prattle, or is he speaking for a movement that aims to replace our democracy with fascism and might be able to do it?

To begin with, Mike Lee isn’t the most extremist Republican in that regard — the President of the United States is. The question then becomes whether Trump is an outlier? Clearly not. At first, he co-opted the Republican Party, but now he is the Republican Party, and every GOP House member, and every GOP senator except Romney, has been a toadying sycophant. Apart from Romney, no influential Republican has done anything to restrain Trump’s constitutional excesses or abuses of power; they won’t even criticize him.

Trump, of course, is Trump; and by that I mean he’s a unique personality, even in the Republican Party. There isn’t another like him, even in the Republican Party, but that’s beside the point; he’s still in power, and there’s an active question of whether he can be dislodged from power, even if the American people wish to dislodge him. (In an interview here, a retired Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, a Republican, voices her concerns, and makes a specific reference to Hitler.)

In the larger scheme of things, there’s simply no evidence that Mike Lee is an isolated individual with freakish views within a democratically-minded party; the rest of the Republican Party, from Trump on down to the GOP grassroots, is fully on board with anti-democracy ideology, and the Republican Party establishment and apparatus are fully engaged in trying to sabotage our elections, and openly talking about overthrowing the presidential election. In their rhetoric, they say a Democratic administration is not acceptable for our country.

I’ve written before that Trump isn’t a Hitler (here), because he doesn’t have the guts to do what Hitler did, but I believe Trump is a genuine fascist, and is pulling his party after him. There’s a dearth of Republicans in positions of power willing to oppose the direction Trump is taking their party.

Consequently, preserving America’s democratic principles is now entirely up to the Democratic Party and its voters. Sen. Mike Lee is not the main opponent of democracy in the GOP, but he is an opponent of democracy.

Photo: This man — Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — is coming for your freedom.

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