By Kyle Smith
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
A cliché that is getting up off its diapered bottom,
flexing its fat little legs and taking its first wobbly trial steps is that
“our democracy is in crisis.” It is not. The Democratic party may be in crisis,
but that’s not the same thing.
The source of the alleged crisis is usually that some
Democrat has just re-discovered the existence of the Electoral College. Last
week the New York Times’ Nate Cohn published an intriguing piece that
suggested President Trump could do significantly worse in 2020 than he did in
2016 and still get reelected. Trump is doing pretty well in Wisconsin and might
well hold that state. Assuming he loses Pennsylvania and Michigan but holds all
other places he won in 2016, he would be reelected by the narrowest possible
margin, with exactly 270 electoral votes. He could conceivably lose the popular
vote by as much as four percent at the same time, Cohn writes. “This would be a
real legitimacy crisis,” Washington Post columnist Matt O’Brien wrote on
Twitter.
“This feels less and less like democracy,” President
Obama’s national-security mandarin Ben Rhodes wrote on Twitter, outlining what
will doubtless become a central talking point on the Left should the Cohn
scenario, or something like it, come to pass. The point will be: Our system has
failed. Democracy is in crisis. We must “do something,” meaning stop Democrats
from losing too many elections.
The prep work has been going on for a while. “American
Democracy Is In Crisis,” Hillary Clinton wrote in The Atlantic in 2018,
calling attention to Trump policies and behaviors she does not like and
notifying us, “You won’t be surprised to hear that I passionately believe it’s
time to abolish the Electoral College.” No, we’re not overly surprised to hear
that, but it’s a bit surprising to hear such a nakedly self-serving statement
from an obviously sore loser. It’s like hearing Bill Clinton say he wished
people weren’t so interested in other people’s sex lives.
“The United States’ crisis of democracy is taking center stage
in the 2020 presidential campaign,” wrote Katrina Vanden Heuvel in the Washington
Post, again focusing her ire on the Electoral College. When Mother Jones’s
David Corn was worried that Democrats might fail to take the House last
November, he wrote on Twitter, “We may be heading toward a democracy crisis — a
majority of Americans governed by the minority. House gerrymandering, the
Electoral College, and the disproportionate Senate: the triad of popular will
suppression.” Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times dispensed with using
“crisis” as a bogeyman and got right to the point: “The Electoral College Is
the Greatest Threat to Our Democracy.”
An Athenian-style
democracy in which a momentarily popular policy could easily be enacted in a
rush was not only not what the Framers wanted but what they elaborately warned
about and guarded against. “There are particular moments in public affairs,”
wrote James Madison in Federalist No. 56, “when the people, stimulated
by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful
misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they
themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.” That there
would be a red state-blue state cultural divide, and that the more populated
states might use their numbers to bring the less populated ones to heel, was
anticipated. To put it another way, the Framers valued diversity of opinion.
They didn’t want minorities to be silenced or ignored.
By democracy, the
pundits really mean majoritarianism, and our system has all sorts of
counter-majoritarian rules built in, the Electoral College and the Senate being
the most salient examples. For Ben Rhodes to say, in effect, “OMG you guys, the
Electoral College is NOT democratic” is like saying, “The Electoral College is
not a hot fudge sundae.” It wasn’t intended to be. The Electoral College, like
the Senate, was designed to stop the country from being ruled by a cabal of Washington
Post and New York Times columnists.
What’s bizarre about all the “crisis” talk is that it is
within the power of the Democratic party to change its course. There is a wall
up ahead marked, “How to lose the election” and the Dems are stomping on the
accelerator. Decriminalize illegal immigration! Destroy private health
insurance! Health care for illegal aliens! If, as the media and the Democrats
often tell us, Donald Trump represents a unique threat because of the nature of
his personality, then the Democrats should offer up a candidate who proposes no
major changes apart from not being Donald Trump. Instead, their supposed centrist
Joe Biden has already abandoned his primary credential of moderation, which was
that he opposed Medicare for All. Now even Biden is saying there should be a
“public option” for health insurance, which is simply a “glide path toward
Medicare for All” (Pete Buttigieg) because “over a couple years you’re gonna
transition into single payer” (Kirsten Gillibrand). Offering a public option
was considered so radical less than a decade ago that Democrats holding the
presidency, the House, and a supermajority in the Senate backed off, even while
in a frenzy to pass major health-care legislation with zero buy-in from
Republicans.
Those Democrats who have not completely lost their minds
see clearly what is happening. “Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just
nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and
creating more good jobs,” writes Tom Friedman in the New York Times,
adding, “Please, spare me the revolution!” If there is a “crisis” in America
it’s that the party of Barack Obama, who inspired a Time magazine cover
depicting him as FDR and a Newsweek cover saying “We Are All Socialists
Now,” has now moved breathtakingly far to the left of its standard bearer. We
should be worried sick about our Democrats, not our democracy.
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