Are Conservatives Anti-Democratic? Not Peculiarly So

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, May 31, 2024

 

Joshua Tait has unleashed another of his stem-winders about the American conservative movement that is long on citations but short on perspective or common sense. Or perhaps, it’s misdirection.

 

The subject this time is conservatism’s supposed hostility to “democracy.” The piece is begging to be pulled into the slipstream of liberal-centrist readers who believe “democracy” is in unique peril in this moment.

 

“A comprehensive history of the attitudes of American conservatives toward democracy would excavate source material at least as far back as the Founding and the American response to the French Revolution. But for present purposes, focusing on just the twentieth century and after, it is clear that there is a strong undercurrent of anti-democratic thought in American conservatism,” he writes.

 

To the alarmist reader, this is alarming. To just about any other politically literate reader, this is so banal as to be barely worth mentioning.

 

He continues, citing some of William F. Buckley’s formative influences:

 

Each of the writers who joined Buckley at the foundational conservative magazine National Review—men like Russell Kirk, James Jackson Kilpatrick, James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall—were in their own ways skeptical of democracy.

 

Indeed, although at this time, Buckley’s skepticism of democracy is tied up with his attitude that “populism . . . is anti-conservatism.” It’s a point many alarmed liberals have been trying to make themselves in the current panic about “our democracy.” To say that thinkers as supple and differentiated as Russell Kirk, James Burnham, and Willmoore Kendall “were in their own ways skeptical of democracy” is to utterly flatten and falsify their views. Burnham’s political realism was concerned primarily with how elites possess power over the masses. Kendall, a staunch supporter of McCarthy, could also be accurately described as wildly more sympathetic to democracy than not just his peers at NR but most liberals who saw in it the dangers of mass prejudice.

 

From there we get another recitation of Buckley’s defense of segregation, which was likely the political position he abandoned fastest in his career and repudiated shortly thereafter.

 

Next, a summary:

 

The conservative arsenal of anti-democracy is well stocked, and often effective. It challenges democracy from multiple angles, from critiquing democracy as empty proceduralism to attacking its effect on the polity and individual. There can be merit, of course, in a critical analysis of democracy; such philosophical critiques go back at least to Socrates. Even in the American context, it is possible to critique democracy—both the theory and the practice—in constructive ways.

 

The admission that it’s possible to critique democracy in constructive ways is obvious. Our Founders did so, and many since then. Not just conservatives, but liberals — who, again, saw that democracy needed to be restrained by doctrines of inalienable rights or other republican structures as a bulwark against passing or popular prejudices and bigotries.

 

Finally, Tait turns to the obvious point that conservatives sometimes put themselves forward as champions of democracy, tribunes of the people against elites or the managerial class, etc.:

 

Can these two seemingly contradictory conservative strains—Buckley’s “phonebook” populism and the longstanding skepticism of democracy—be reconciled? It is best not to even try, nor indeed to grant much coherence to the practice of right-wing politics. Ultimately, the American right shifts between populist and anti-democratic arguments depending on which is appropriate to achieve its political goals. [Emphasis added]

 

On the surface this is an attempt to indict or charge the Right uniquely with incoherence, hypocrisy, or stupidity. But in fact, this is the inevitable condition of all thinking political actors whose politics have been formed by and must be expressed in a mixed regime like that which exists in the United States. It just so happens that, living under our Constitution, the shortest path for protecting the First Amendment protections of speech and religion is not democracy. Yet we hardly get long-winded diatribes against the ACLU for pursuing privately funded legal strategies rather than popular apologetics and campaigns.

 

Anyone claiming, as conservatives do, to operate with some fidelity to the American Constitution and the Founders will not be entirely democratic or anti-democratic. They will find some decisions of democracy harmful to other values that are protected by the Bill of Rights, or by republican institutions. Just as everyone else does.

 

Tait’s only substantive critique is that conservatives have too often resorted to anti-democratic means for racist ends. True. But America’s racist past doesn’t cut in only one direction. The same charge could be hurled at progressives who went about sterilizing those they deemed unfit, disproportionately non-whites, into the second half of the 20th century. Similar charges of anti-Catholic bigotry could be hurled at the same and their predecessors in the Liberal Leagues and supporters of Blaine Amendments in the 19th century. Like conservatives, American progressives are Americans. That is, they are both formed by our legacy of a mixed regime, loyal to it, and not 100 percent democrats or anti-democrats. And sometimes, they share American prejudices, too.