...or so ends the subtitle to the latest article from Andrew Sullivan, "Democracies end when they are too democratic." The article, as you might imagine, centers around Donald Trump and the populism he embodies.

 

Democracies end when they are too democratic: And right now, America is a breeding ground for tyranny.

 

There's quite a lot to chew on here and it contains at least something every group will find disagreeable (Sullivan has an innate political contrarianism). There are echoes of arguments I've made in various threads here about the structural conditions that have led to the rise of anti-democratic movements elsewhere, though Sullivan distills them into a more historic and straightforward argument.

 

His central thesis revolves around the tension between elites and the masses in a democracy and how the collapse of elite power in the face of populism has led to a figure like Trump, someone he considers an "extinction-level event" in terms of our democracy.

 

It begins with a summary of how our constitution was meant to ward off what we are faced with today.

 

Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power. Voting rights were tightly circumscribed. The president and vice-president were not to be popularly elected but selected by an Electoral College, whose representatives were selected by the various states, often through state legislatures. The Senate’s structure (with two members from every state) was designed to temper the power of the more populous states, and its term of office (six years, compared with two for the House) was designed to cool and restrain temporary populist passions. The Supreme Court, picked by the president and confirmed by the Senate, was the final bulwark against any democratic furies that might percolate up from the House and threaten the Constitution. This separation of powers was designed precisely to create sturdy firewalls against democratic wildfires.

 

He chastises the evolution of the media landscape and the uprooting of the "gatekeeping" role of media elites.

 

The web was also uniquely capable of absorbing other forms of media, conflating genres and categories in ways never seen before. The distinction between politics and entertainment became fuzzier; election coverage became even more modeled on sportscasting; your Pornhub jostled right next to your mother’s Facebook page. The web’s algorithms all but removed any editorial judgment, and the effect soon had cable news abandoning even the pretense of asking “Is this relevant?” or “Do we really need to cover this live?” in the rush toward ratings bonanzas. In the end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic, measured far more accurately than any other medium had ever done before.

 

And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness. Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin. Godwin’s Law — it’s only a matter of time before a comments section brings up Hitler — is a reflection of the collapse of the reasoned deliberation the Founders saw as indispensable to a functioning republic.

 

And finally concluding with a paean to the necessity of the "elites":

 

But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself. The political Establishment may be battered and demoralized, deferential to the algorithms of the web and to the monosyllables of a gifted demagogue, but this is not the time to give up on America’s near-unique and stabilizing blend of democracy and elite responsibility. The country has endured far harsher times than the present without succumbing to rank demagoguery; it avoided the fascism that destroyed Europe; it has channeled extraordinary outpourings of democratic energy into constitutional order. It seems shocking to argue that we need elites in this democratic age — especially with vast inequalities of wealth and elite failures all around us. But we need them precisely to protect this precious democracy from its own destabilizing excesses.

 

Of course, his points and conclusions center around the rise of Trump as a symptom of an ill democracy. Obviously, this will likely be controversial here for those who choose to read it, but I hope a reasoned discussion will follow.

That's a lot to chew on during Derby week! But I'll give it a go and report back.

What RM said. I'm jumping in tomorrow morning.

I feel like I would need to attend a lecture series just to wrap my head around all of that.

 

However, generally speaking I do agree with the conclusion of the rise of Trump as a symptom of an ill democracy.

Pretty much summarizes the elite left's thought process.

While I believe this lengthy piece is an overreaction to Trump, I thought it was a very interesting read.

 

The author's overall premise is best summarized, in my opinion, by the following two sentences:

 

But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself.

 

The problem for me, though, lies in the paragraph just prior to that:

 

An American elite that has presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional democracy...The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.

 

I see the author's viewpoint as a dog chasing its tail. Elites have failed, which has led to the rise of Trump, so let's put everything we have behind the elites (Hillary Clinton, GOP establishment trying to thwart Trump).

 

Of course, I am of the opinion that Trump has little-to-no chance of winning. Hillary has beaten an economic populist in the primary & she'll beat a cultural populist in the general.

While I believe this lengthy piece is an overreaction to Trump, I thought it was a very interesting read.

 

The author's overall premise is best summarized, in my opinion, by the following two sentences:

 

But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself.

 

The problem for me, though, lies in the paragraph just prior to that:

 

An American elite that has presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional democracy...The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.

 

I see the author's viewpoint as a dog chasing its tail. Elites have failed, which has led to the rise of Trump, so let's put everything we have behind the elites (Hillary Clinton, GOP establishment trying to thwart Trump).

 

Of course, I am of the opinion that Trump has little-to-no chance of winning. Hillary has beaten an economic populist in the primary & she'll beat a cultural populist in the general.

 

Great points. That's definitely the hole in the argument's armor.

 

I think it was a provocative argument in the sense that he's harkening back to, perhaps, the intended design of this government and its various constraints on democracy because of Madison's distrust of "mob rule," which is usually an argument reviled by the left who believe democracy is a human right and there ought to be a movement toward more of it. Yet, he turns the tables on it by arguing such unfettered democracy inevitably leads to populists like Trump (and Sanders).

 

Almost all of it comports with my understanding of this election and our system of government, but I don't know what to make of his conclusion regarding democracy. I have no reverence for the "elites" and generally believe people should have self-determination (as did Jefferson, since we are going back that far), but what happens when the people's passion threatens to unmoor the system itself?

but what happens when the people's passion threatens to unmoor the system itself?

 

Million dollar question. I'm just not convinced we're there yet.

 

On a side note, I was reading an article yesterday or Monday that spent a few paragraphs comparing Trump to Andrew Jackson. What jumped out at me, and the reason I think Trump eventually fails, is the following paragraph:

 

Old Hickory understood that for a very unsettled electorate to propel him into the White House, its anger had to be grounded in civic virtue, restoration of personal and states’ rights, and noble public service, rather than simple demagoguery.

Donald Trump's Choice | RealClearPolitics

Million dollar question. I'm just not convinced we're there yet.

 

I'm not sure either. But despite the doom and gloom predicted by either party every four years, Trump is a completely different beast than anything we've seen before and I don't think anyone can say with any certainty how a Trump presidency will play out. Will he outsource governing to the Republican leadership and more or less become a traditional politician? Will he become America's Berlusconi, a mostly corrupt showman? Or will he ignore the constraints of his office and simply take action on whatever he sees fit? And what if that proves popular, especially against an inept and gridlocked Congress and a Court split at 4-4?

 

I'm mostly thinking out loud but a Trump presidency could be merely mundane or it could trigger a constitutional event.

 

On a side note, I was reading an article yesterday or Monday that spent a few paragraphs comparing Trump to Andrew Jackson. What jumped out at me, and the reason I think Trump eventually fails, is the following paragraph:

 

Old Hickory understood that for a very unsettled electorate to propel him into the White House, its anger had to be grounded in civic virtue, restoration of personal and states’ rights, and noble public service, rather than simple demagoguery.

Donald Trump's Choice | RealClearPolitics

 

That's interesting. As another aside I was listening to a podcast yesterday and they were talking about how an alleged 20,000 uninvited common people showed up to Jackson's inauguration at the White House. He had to climb out of a window and leave for a hotel and the staff had to move the alcohol to the lawn to get them out of the house. :lol2:

Trump is a completely different beast than anything we've seen before and I don't think anyone can say with any certainty how a Trump presidency will play out.

 

No question about that. :thumb:

 

As another aside I was listening to a podcast yesterday and they were talking about how an alleged 20,000 uninvited common people showed up to Jackson's inauguration at the White House. He had to climb out of a window and leave for a hotel and the staff had to move the alcohol to the lawn to get them out of the house. :lol2:

 

Wow! :lol2::lol2:

Still just beginning to digest this. What it really makes me want to do is go back and re-read "The Republic" for the first time since an undergraduate philosophy course to really get a handle on what he's talking about and whether it makes any sense. In truth, I was always more of an Aristotelian than a Platonist, but that's neither here nor there.

 

But truth be told, I think the author might have been served better by Aristotle's discussion of the demagogue rather than by Plato's tyrant. They are fairly similar but Aristotle speaks with more clarity about how a the demagogue arises not merely from a system which pits the poor against the rich (which is how Plato saw democracy) but one in which the rule of law is no longer universal, as could best be demonstrated by the response of the United States government to the massive fraud at the root of the financial crisis.

 

I think Plato might help explain Marius or Trump in the last days of the Roman Republic, but Aristotle might be a better explanation of how Trump and Sanders came to be major forces in our two major parties.

 

* That said there's probably a paper somewhere in parallels between Trump's plan to deport all illegal immigrants, limit the overall immigration flow, and his vision of economic protectionism and Marius' decree in 95 BC that expelled all non-citizens from the city of Rome.

Re-reading the article again, he comes right out of the gate with something I find troubling, quoting Plato's declaration that "tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy", which I find pretty well refuted in subsequent works by Aristotle. What is a mad king with a sense of entitlement that cares only for his own wealth, power, and pleasure and not at all for his people's but a tyrant? Tyranny can grow out of any form of government.

 

But again, that's not really what we're interested in here.

 

The best parts of the article are in his discussion of "The True Believer", the book by Eric Hoffer. In fact, this sentence sums up the collective anger of a segment of the American population better than anything I've read so far:

 

For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome.

 

The thing that is perhaps disturbing is where he discusses how to then unify this collective frustration and turn it into a movement. According to Hoffer, what you then need most is hatred, and an object for that hatred.

 

Now this book was written in 1951 and there can be no doubt that the rise of the brownshirts and National Socialism are precisely what the author has in the back of his mind here. That alone makes for troubling times ahead in the article, but he makes an interesting point. Trump is the one who captured that seething frustration folks had with a modern America that felt like it wasn't for them any more and then focused it on Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, and then ultimately, the Republican Establishment. It makes for an interesting study in capturing that tendency for mass movements to need to say "these people here, they're not for us and they're working against us." It's not a long leap to suggest that getting rid of them will make your own life better.

 

I'm still working all this out and I'm extremely loathe to make Sullivan's leap from seeing a popular movement born of frustration and labeling it as the rise of an authoritarian demagogue, but he raises a lot of interesting points and captures the fears many folks have of what a Trump presidency might look like.

I'm not sure either. But despite the doom and gloom predicted by either party every four years, Trump is a completely different beast than anything we've seen before and I don't think anyone can say with any certainty how a Trump presidency will play out. Will he outsource governing to the Republican leadership and more or less become a traditional politician? Will he become America's Berlusconi, a mostly corrupt showman? Or will he ignore the constraints of his office and simply take action on whatever he sees fit? And what if that proves popular, especially against an inept and gridlocked Congress and a Court split at 4-4?

 

I'm mostly thinking out loud but a Trump presidency could be merely mundane or it could trigger a constitutional event.

 

This is a fascinating idea and the real meat of the article. Are the disaster that calls itself the U.S. Congress and a court currently ill-equipped to stand up for precedent and the rule of law ripe to be overshadowed by a political strongman? There's been a lot of anger on the right about Obama's executive actions and the growing power of the executive office, but if Trump can't get an agenda through Congress, I've seen nothing in the last 12 months to suggest he'll do anything other than just do it himself.

"Were Trump to win the White House, the defenses against him would be weak. He would likely bring a GOP majority in the House, and Republicans in the Senate would be subjected to almighty popular fury if they stood in his way."

 

Was this guy asleep during 2009 and 2010?

 

AHCA passed with no Repub vote. Democrats held a filibuster-proof super-majority in the Senate and owned the House. There was nothing they could not get passed.

 

And then AHCA has been changed in a blatant tyrannical manner. Changes were done that went directly against the passed law and never voted on, approved or had any sort of review by the people's representatives. They were just 'done'. It does not get any more tyrannical than that.

 

This is lunatic fear mongering that ignores recent history in its example.

 

And at the end...

 

"For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. "

 

Just yesterday, Rafael Cruz said that Trump was the same as Clinton - a liberal. So is he 'far right' or a RINO liberal?

 

 

What is correct is that with the weakening of the system of checks and balances, the growth of a massive centralized government that is controlled mainly, if not almost exclusively from the Executive branch. Thus, yes - the President - regardless of their party, leaning, etc. has power not meant by the Founders or Our (with a capital O) Constitution.

I'm still working all this out and I'm extremely loathe to make Sullivan's leap from seeing a popular movement born of frustration and labeling it as the rise of an authoritarian demagogue, but he raises a lot of interesting points and captures the fears many folks have of what a Trump presidency might look like.

 

It's putting the cart before the horse in some ways, because we have no idea how Trump would govern. But populism and populists are weighted with negative connotations, going back to Plato and Aristotle (which I assume is why he starts with the Greeks) not only because the passions of the populace are usually reactionary and emotional but because a demagogue can inflame and harness these passions.

 

I think he's right in that populism is a danger in a democracy, and perhaps he's right that the quasi-Madisonian model of balancing democracy with elite stability is the best of both worlds, but it does undermine the notion of the human dignity at the heart of democracy and I wonder if it's an argument that only has merit when a Trump is knocking on the door. It's certainly easier to yearn for the days of the Establishment when you turn on the TV and can do nothing but shake your head at what's being said, but these Establishment people have earned their comeuppance as well. Strange times.