I am not a racist. I just don’t like democracy.

Yes, but wouldn’t the electoral success of conservative politicians lend credence to conservatives’ contempt for democracy?

Is it telling or in need of explanation that the struggle for democracy is not a a symbolic (or strategic) foundation for oppositional politics in the US?

S’man @1. It is the lack of democracy which support conservative’s success (as the post on the Senate gets at). Red states in the US are largely both small in population and below average population density (i.e. more rural). Texas is the only large red state (and it is the one large population state that has low population density). A number of small states actually have radical histories, but many of these were politically colonized by the GOP. The electoral and Senate votes you get from small states are a bargain and being less urbanized are not nearly as conducive to counter-organizing. But this is only a superficial take on anti-democratic features of US politics, there is a long list.

“I always thought John C. Calhoun was right about secession and Lincoln wrong. But…” -Michael Ledeen

http://tinyurl.com/crvbtk5

How nice of you to concede, albeit in an unkind fashion, that approximately half of the U.S population may not be racists. It must be galling to discover that even those deluded fools who do not share your particular political conceits also have a right to declare that racism is A Very Bad Thing. They may even be sincere too, bless them!

Have you only just discovered America’s long tradition of anti-democratic thought? You seem morally shocked that there are people who don’t give a fig for the “will of the people”! Weird.

They actually consider themselves the choice of the people they consider real Americans, which is why they work so hard to prevent the wrong sort of people from voting.

carl, I don’t think anyone is going to concede that no conservatives are racists

I’m trying to parse Sandwichman’s snark. He could be saying that one of the defects of democracy is that conservatives are elected. It’s certainly discouraging to find conservative governments in power in the depths of worldwide recession, doing the best they can to make things worse, but it’s worth noting that the less conservative party got the most votes in the last election in the U.S., unfortunately without changing the balance of power appreciably.

Another reading is that conservative politicians are merely cynics exploiting the ignorant electorate, their very success feeding their contempt. I’m not sure that’s generally the case, because their behavior is not greatly different than that of the elite arbiters of opinion who a decade ago lined up in support of the invasion of Iraq. It’s a waste of time to try to figure out the thinking that leads to a conclusion when there’s substantial evidence that thinking could not have been involved.

I’m not suggesting that pundits and politicians are simply bullshitting, just that thinking analytically isn’t part of the job. Their tools are narratives and sentiments. Thinking is hard and originality is hazardous, particularly when your position depends on public approval.

Perhaps it’s too obvious to mention, but white supremacist Southerners were not democrats (small d.) because the majority of citizens in Southern states were African-Americans. They had a vested interest in keeping them from voting.

If you do NOT think that government should be doing much . . .

A plutocracy and a democracy cannot co-exist in the same country. You have to choose. You are for the plutocracy or you are against. The Republicans have chosen. Most non-partisans and most Democrats, too, refuse to even admit that plutocracy-or-democracy is a mutually exclusive choice being pressed upon them. They want to pretend that we can have a high-minded debate over the role of government, that we all want the good of the country, but simply differ ideologically over policy means, and can arrive at compromises that “move us forward”. And, if we are frustrated, we can blame the other side for being “racist”, as if financialization of economy by an elite of parasites has anything to do with race.

I’ve only heard “this is a republic, not a democracy” from a survivalist who also encouraged me to read Bastiat; is it mainstream GOP-speak these days?

As for what the distinction actually means (or meant), I’d pick up and sharpen pjm’s point @2. What people overlook is that ‘democracy’ wasn’t the unquestioned Good Thing in the late 18th century that it is now. At that time there were no governments based on universal suffrage, anywhere: the only positive model of democratic government was classical Athens. Well into the nineteenth century, when people used the term ‘democracy’ they were far more likely to be using it literally – ‘rule by the people’ – and with heavy negative overtones: if you asked Burke “what democracy looks like” he’d probably have pointed to the Gordon Riots. At the time of the Fed. Papers, “It’s a representative republic, but it’s not democratic” wasn’t (just) a rearguard action by the propertied oligarchy – it would have sounded like a good formula across almost all of the political spectrum.

Ironically, the new American system was rapidly seen to be very democratic – more so than anything we had in Europe at the time. Toqueville’s title Democracy in America originally had the overtones of a book called Zionism in Israel or Communism in Russia – “this weird radical philosophy they’ve implemented over there, how’s it working out for them?”

“The essence of democracy is not arithmetic, but government of the people, by the people and for the people”

I don’t want to distort, but this post could be interpreted as promoting conformity, as a virtue. The previous one is mostly about arithmetics.

The “republic not a democracy” meme has a long history. I first ran into it 30 years ago in some online discussions. Since I was raised to think that a republic (in the modern sense) was a representative democracy, I volunteered that republic and democracy were synonyms, that etymologically a republic is a thing of the people and a democracy is rule by the people. That went over like a lead balloon. But at the same time, no one clarified the difference between the two, either. I figured that nobody knew what they were talking about.

The US Constitution guarantees to the states a “Republican form of government”, without defining the term, either. Fine. That means that it was general knowledge at the time. My impression, having done a little reading, is that the guarantee was against rule by a king, emperor, or dictator. It seems ridiculous now, but at the time of the Constitutional convention, a military coup in, say, Massachusetts, was a definite possibility in the future.

In the early 19th century, IIUC, people in the US distinguished between democratic republics and aristocratic republics. It seems like the GOP of today wants to establish an aristocratic republic in the US, even if it keeps the form of a democratic republic.

Fortunately, this is a place where there are people who understand these matters, who do know what they are talking about. I look forward to learning more from these discussions.

The cry of Tyranny of the Majority and duped public when the majority disagrees with me. A call for Absolute Democracy when the majority agrees with me and it’s will is blocked.

I volunteered that republic and democracy were synonyms, that etymologically a republic is a thing of the people and a democracy is rule by the people. That went over like a lead balloon. But at the same time, no one clarified the difference between the two, either.

It’s simple. A Republic is like a Democracy, but with much higher levels of Corruption, and though it’s discovered Conscription it hasn’t discovered Recycling yet. Plus, in a Republic the Senate never objects when you want to wage aggressive wars against other countries.

But the accusation that you wish “to resist, ignore, or even overturn the will of the electoral majority”—that is, that you are resolutely opposed, if not downright hostile, to the basic norms of democracy—can be passed over as if it were a grocery store circular

That’s cheap nonsense. Successive British governments have opposed the will of the majority and refused to reinstate capital punishment, but I doubt that you would accuse them of hostility to the basic norms of democracy in doing so. The idea that democracy requires that, sometimes, the “will of the electoral majority” be refused is mainstream and just as present on the left as it is on the right – it is fundamental to the concept of human rights, international law and so on. The reason that the “tyranny of the majority” is a silly phrase is that most countries with majoritarian governments also place limits on what the government can do, even if it wins 99% of the vote. (Of course, these limits could be abolished, but I don’t see how abolishing constitutional safeguards is either exclusively a conservative, liberal or socialist position to take).

Now, you might argue that I’m being too charitable, and that the kind of majority-will-resistance conservatives do is fundamentally different from that which is done by the left, but I don’t see how that’s different from saying that the left and right have different political aims in general, and each side seeks to frustrate the democratic majority when it serves their interests to do so. The notion of false consciousness provides the left’s justification for (sometimes) ignoring the democratic majority on the assumption that it’s a “manufactured” majority born of ideology and expensive marketing, whilst the right has its own myths to explain why people sometimes vote in disagreeable ways (the 47%, or ACORN or whatever). I see how one is more likely to be correct than the other, but I don’t see how you can say that rejecting the apparent will of the majority is necessarily anti-democratic in situations where a constitution places specific limits on what democracies are allowed to decide.

I admit that this can be problematic, but very few understandings of democracy require public opinion be automatically and always to be translated into policy. If it did, there would be no democrats and no democracies.

All I know about Calhoun’s political theories I read in Richard Hofstadter’s essay, The Marx of the Master Class. My takeaway from that was, as I remember, that Calhoun found a way of carving out, inside democracy, a way in which the master class could rule within a democratic form. This was the attraction of “small government” and “state’s rights”. The larger the polity, the more mixed the populace, the more lively the upward social mobility, the more the master class was doomed to decline and disintegrate. Small government, which aims at decentralizing government, is not the equivalent of more democratic government – and here I am using democracy to mean not only the process of electing representatives, but the preservative framework that protects rights, without which democracy separates from the notion of greater existential freedom for all and becomes a tyranny whipped up by those who can afford to run the election game. Calhoun saw how an ethnically and culturally homogeneous group of electors within a small domain could be dominated by a caste of permanent rulers. It is important to remember that the Southern states were not hospitable to immigrants, not like the Northern states were (at least, by force majeure – there were plenty of Know Nothings in the North, but immigrants largely favored Northern states, and even more so in the post-war period when the South embraced apartheid ).
I think, then, the issue is not about being anti-democratic so much as it is about manipulating the democratic process to some end – in Calhoun’s case, to enshrine the power of the landed aristocracy, or in other cases, to advantage some technocratic, ‘meritocratic’ group. The other case is unfolding, in fact, in the EU, where unelected technocrats, such as Monti in Italy, are represented as the true representatives of democracy, whereas “populists”, who just happen to garner an enormously larger vote, are represented as “anti-democratic”.

bad jim @15: “Another reading is that conservative politicians are merely cynics exploiting the ignorant electorate, their very success feeding their contempt. I’m not sure that’s generally the case, because their behavior is not greatly different than that of the elite arbiters of opinion who a decade ago lined up in support of the invasion of Iraq. It’s a waste of time to try to figure out the thinking that leads to a conclusion when there’s substantial evidence that thinking could not have been involved.”

I would phrase it as ‘I *am* sure that that is generally the case, because their behavior is not greatly different………’

IIRC, the majority of Americans didn’t support the war until a few months before the invasion, after (a) a terrorist attack, (b) massive lies and propaganda deliberately using that to support a war with Iraq, and (c) the fact that by a few months before the war it was clear that the administration was going to do whatever it wanted, full stop.

mdc @36: “whereas on the right “racism” has become the epitome of all evils, the worst political sin conceivable. ”

In a sense you are right, given the right interpretations of the quotes around ‘racism’. On the right, calling somebody ‘racist’ is Ultimate Evul, particularly if it’s an accurate comment. Of course, calling the left ‘racist’ (or ‘fascist’, or ‘feminazi’) is just good clean fun, because…………

My takeaway from that was, as I remember, that Calhoun found a way of carving out, inside democracy, a way in which the master class could rule within a democratic form.

Presumably someone has looked at Calhoun’s thought vis-a-vis the first Reform Act in 1832 over in the U.K., which one has to suppose was a closely-followed debate on the American side of the water. Even that left only 650K voters (saith Wikipedia) out of 14 million people, 1 in 6 males having the vote.

So in the U.K. he had a “master class” enjoying democracy amongst themselves, while denying it to the great majority of the population. It would be strange if Calhoun didn’t find a lot to imitate there. Consider also the background of antebellum Anglophilia in the South.

Re: The idea that 100 people coercing 99 is the triumph of justice, while 99 coercing 100 is an unspeakable tragedy seems highly immature. Democracy is a principle, one of many. Most of them, unfortunately, in conflict with each other, most of the time.

I agree, and I’ve always seen the love of democracy for its own sake as misplaced at best. Democracy is a tool, like other forms of government are tools, that can be used for good ends or for bad. As I said on the Venezuela thread, it’s a means, not an end, and when it fails to achieve good ends it should be looked at much more critically.

Barry @ 40

As polemic, accusing the Republicans of being in favor of “Big Government” might be effective; I certainly don’t disagree about the pigs-in-the-trough aspect, or the use of arbitrary power aspect either, speaking from my own point of view.

In my previous comments, though, I was trying to get at how they see themselves, at the rough consistency internal to their own point of view.

From their own point-of-view, the essential point is that they favor weak beyond the point of incompetent, government, a government that fails to govern, a government, which never gets in the way of corporate business cheating or oppressing the mass of ordinary people, who are to have no legal recourse, no countervailing public power to appeal to.

They are perfectly happy to see the largess of the vestiges of “Big Government” spread around, in the form of bloated Defense contracts, or unrestrained health care spending or Federally-guaranteed mortgages or the private-prison industrial complex.

And, the pro-plutocracy forces are also perfectly happy to see the Government run roughshod over local communities, where democracy might rear its head — to prevent municipalities from creating an internet service provider, for example, or from regulating shale gas fracking.

The essential desiderata though is to let corporate business do as they will, and the people suffer what they must. And, that politics is rationalized with the laissez faire rhetoric of classical liberalism and Ayn Rand’s sociopathic, John Galt individualism.

KH @ 26

Not to be picky, but Britain’s castles were never instruments of national defense. Their function was to allow a small, parasitic elite to garrison the country after conquest.

I’m still, even with the update, unclear on the practical difference between:

If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow down to the demands of the numerical majority.

And:

But the accusation that you wish “to resist, ignore, or even overturn the will of the electoral majority”—that is, that you are resolutely opposed, if not downright hostile, to the basic norms of democracy….

the left’s qualms are actually rooted in fundamental democratic principles

If I’m understanding the argument, “democratic” is being overloaded the second statement. It’s meaning both “in favor of deciding by majority vote” AND “based on a theoretical underpinning of equality”.

If I’m right, then it’s not the anti-democracy-as-voting that’s at issue. It’s the classic, familiar quarrel between “maximizing liberty” (classic liberalism) and “maximizing equality” (classic socialism)–with both thinking that majority votes should be ignored if they go against those ends.

Wonks Anon @48 : See wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_minority
Weirdly, “hispanics” (a euphemism for “Mestizo”?) are considered “non-white”, though I believe in Texas they were not, traditionally.

In any case, Blacks were certainly a majority in South Carolina at time of Calhoun and probably in much of the Deep South during reconstruction.

As I recall, white antebellum Southerners justified lived in a state of constant paranoid terror of Haitian-style black insurrection/revenge and this was their main rationalization for continued white supremacy and later Jim Crow. New Orleans, however, had a black majority without any ill effects, disproving their fears at the time. See Jerah Johnson’s fascinating “New Orleans’ Congo Square: An Urban Setting for Early Afro-American Culture Formation” (Louisiana Historical Assoc., 1991), among others.

I’d like to second SamChevre’s question @51. I’m sympathetic to the idea that left anti-majoritarianism is “democracy enhancing” in a way that right anti-majoritarianism isn’t, but I do think it requires a more thorough explanation.

“Two reasons come to mind. Handing out political favors, and sabotage.”

3. Self-loathing.

“If their parents kicked them out into the Real World at age 18, and the had to actually make their own living for a couple of years, they’d be more humble.”

I don’t know. There’s nothing less humble than the self made man (in love with his maker, as the saying goes)

Yes, but I would hazard that a lot more would realize that ‘self-made’ is both hard-made and luckily-made.

Wow, we’re really doing some all-or-nothing thinking here.

As I said in a previous thread, almost no one seriously believes that “democracy” literally amounts to the majority being able to do whatever it wants to the minority. Not only would that be incredibly stupid, but it would also obviously fly in the face of lots of other left/liberal goals. Yeah, there are limits on democratic action; why are people acting like that’s not an established part of political theory? The fact remains that a system in which people don’t get to, at minimum, elect their government, is a system lacking a key aspect of legitimacy.

On the utilitarian side of things, we don’t need to show that every decision made by a democracy is uniformly better than every decision made by, say, an aristocracy or a monarchy. Owing to the nature of complex systems, we only need to show that democracies are more likely to make better decisions overall, while minimizing rights violations, all relative to other forms of government.

The aggregate (why magically?) will of millions of individuals cannot justify everything. But it can justify a lot of things.

Harold, wikipedia gives the 1930s as the latest period in which a southern state had a black majority. So it would seem to be well before Buckley’s time. Louisiana had a majority previously, but of course segregation was still in effect at that time.

Modesto Kid, the 13th amendment prohibited slavery and the 14th made them citizens.

Re: If their parents kicked them out into the Real World at age 18, and the had to actually make their own living for a couple of years, they’d be more humble.

Being poor and struggling doesn’t necessarily make you humble, it can do quite the opposite. (If it did, the phenomenon of left-wing vanguardist ideology wouldn’t exist). It can make you resent your powerlessness and fantasize about how your going to put the smackdown on rich people when the revolution happens.

Re: The fact remains that a system in which people don’t get to, at minimum, elect their government, is a system lacking a key aspect of legitimacy.

Depending on what you consider legitimacy. People have certainly defined legitimacy in other ways (ideological correctness, heredity, historical inevitability, religious/moral purity, etc.) that had nothing to do with popular consent.

Re: Ultimately, the left feels exactly the same way about enacting “the will of the people” as the right does!

Well, sort of. At a global level, yes. There are left-wing authoritarians in other countries. I don’t think there are many in America, though, except maybe me. Things like communism, Trotskyism, violent Black nationalism, etc. were never more than trivial fringe phenomena in America. Right-wing authoritarian movements, by contrast, were a much bigger deal.

Take Romney’s complaints about losing because voters wanted “free stuff”. That kind of complaint–which I guess goes back to Road to Serfdom–isn’t just that the current population of voters has bad preferences, it’s that democracy as a form of government actually changes voters and makes their preferences worse by creating a culture of dependency (“takers” or whatever). It is not merely that democracy empowers a corrupt majority, it’s that democracy is the actual source of the corruption.

There are plenty of times when when people on the left disagree with the outcome of a democracy and ask for courts to overrule it. But does the left have any Road to Serfdom moments in which democracy itself, rather than the existing prejudices of current voters, is the problem?

<iYou can make an argument that by encouraging rich people and poor people to both fight for their self-interest in the open political arena, you are going to aggravate people’s sense of self-interest and greed, and favour those who are best equipped to pursue their self interest and to compete in the arena (i.e. the rich). And that only by subordinating everyone from every class to an authoritarian state, can you suppress greed and self interest and get people to think about the common good. This isn’t really a *Marxist* argument as such, it’s probably more what he would have called a sort of left-wing Bonapartist argument

This is actually a corporatist argument that’s historically been very popular among the European right. It was made by nineteenth century Catholics (Adam Müller, Franz von Baader, Frédéric Le Play, Albert de Mun, René de La Tour de Pin), neo-feudalists (Carlyle, Ruskin), as well as by various Romantic nationalists and their interwar Fascist progeny. Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz

Oh yea, right, it has right-wing versions. Famously, the interwar Catholic church (maybe the Orthodox too) made similar arguments. You can make the same argument in a left-wing vein too, was my point.

Wonks Anonymous: “Harold, wikipedia gives the 1930s as the latest period in which a southern state had a black majority. So it would seem to be well before Buckley’s time. Louisiana had a majority previously, but of course segregation was still in effect at that time.”

Louisiana had the “one drop rule”, which meant that to have any Black ancestor classified you as Black. Given the creole history of Louisiana, that made virtually every native born Louisianan a Black.

Interesting discussion.

With respect to the Tanenhaus piece, the reaction at National Review is indeed telling. The dirty little secret of today’s GOP is that its post-1964 ascendency was built squarely on racial politics. LBJ predicted the realignment of Southern whites when he signed the Civil Rights Act, and he was right about both the event and its cause.

The anti-majoritarian strain in white Southern politics cannot be cleanly disentangled from its racial obsessions, precisely because it derives from the white South’s self-image as an enclave of ethnic purity under constant threat from the mongrel hordes that surround it. It’s true that this self-image includes potent cultural and religious elements as well, but these are themselves often understood in racial terms. Southern oligarchs, as Michael Lind points out in a brilliant piece published in Salon last year, look upon poor whites with almost as much contempt as they feel for black Americans, but their characteristic admonishment to the former is expressed in racial language: they should “act like white men” and not allow themselves to sink to the level of African-Americans.

This siege mentality among white Southerners shapes the entire political and cultural vision of the region. Like any believer in herrenvolk democracy, the white South defines its polity as much by whom it excludes as by whom it welcomes. The sense of constant threat gives rise to the paranoia and extremism so common in the region’s political rhetoric, and to the inclination to regard compromise as treachery. These traits, in turn, make it difficult to regard one’s opposition as simply another group of rational actors pursuing its goals in the political, economic, and cultural system. One doesn’t see them as just mistaken or confused: one sees them as ILLEGITIMATE.

These are, of course, precisely the features that distinguish today’s GOP, particularly its incarnation in the House of Representatives. Welcome to the Southernization of conservative politics.

I would say that racism is not even an important or essential part of Calhoun’s worldview. It’s elitism based on cultural superiority, not too dissimilar from Nietzsche’s — race enters the picture only incidentally. As Hofstadter’s wonderful essay “John C. Calhoun: Marx of the Master Class” argues, Calhoun’s underlying analysis was not far from Marx’s, but he opted to go radical in a much different way: http://www.mc.cc.md.us/Departments/hpolscrv/jccalhoun.html

As reactionaries go, Calhoun was extraordinarily honest (much more honest than Burke, much more honest than the propagators of all that “divine right” bullshit, much more honest than Thomas Jefferson…). So was Fitzhugh (also not racist). So was Carlyle, who is closely related (racist, but also with plenty of contempt for poor white people!). It is this fact that accounts for modern conservatives discomfort with them.

In fairness, I think Will’s construction of Hofstadter’s remarks has more to do with the former than the latter. In “The Marx of the Master Class,” Hofstadter is clearly struck by Calhoun as the mirror image of Marx: someone who saw class antagonism as a constant in history but approved rather than condemned it. (‘There must always be a mudsill class.”) But Hofstadter realized that Calhoun used this belief as part of a defense of black slavery specifically, and was himself a thorough-going racist. He quotes a chilling letter Calhoun wrote to an overseer on his estate, instructing that a slave receive “lashes well laid on” as punishment for some offense or another.

The distinction is certainly well-taken, and opens a nice interpretive window onto the essay. I’m just speculating here, of course, but it seems to me Hofstadter might have been willing to accept both dimensions— the racial and the economic— as constitutive for Calhoun’s view of slavery. But it any case, only the economic dimension was constitutive for Hofstadter’s interest in Calhoun. He was clearly driven to distraction by the power of a relatively crude Lockeanism (as he saw it) over the American mind, and seemed fascinated by Calhoun as an example of that logic carried to its remorseless, merciless end.