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Rise of the Un-Intelligentsia
It’s not fear of Donald Trump’s becoming president that causes me despair. There are plenty of safeguards and limitations — not only of the office, but of public attention-span — that makes the scariest of his statements (not coincidentally, this category overlaps with those most-desired by his constituency) extremely unlikely to come to pass. For me, it’s having to face two facts that I am always aware of, but can usually safely ignore. First, that we share this country with a super-majority of people who have a multitude of incorrect worldviews and opinions. Second, that when a republic becomes democratic enough, those people may make their voices heard. Seeing Trump supporters’ views being validated is what causes me despair.
In the rush to stamp down the rise of Trump, many people alluded unthinkingly and superficially to the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Pinochet. A much more apt comparison is that of the modern European Right. Not so much the most reprehensible versions like Greece’s Golden Dawn or Hungary’s Jobbik, nor the more respectable ones like Britain’s UKIP, but probably something more like France’s National Front, with it’s combination of protectionism, immigration-skepticism, and (small letter) national socialism. As things currently stand, we run the risk that the two major political parties become the Democrats and an American-European Right. With no natural home for classical liberals, I fear we may become more like Europe than Obama and the Democrat’s wildest dreams.
Some seem to think that Trump is devastating the politically-correct culture; that is, if nothing else, political correctness will be forced to retreat. But it seems more likely to me that Trump’s ability to get away with saying things will not trickle down to greater freedom of expression for Joe Everyman. The media is happy to cover Trump’s daily outrages because they’re good for ratings; the rest of us will just be bigots. If Trump doesn’t complete the American transition into a European-style social republic, he’ll be an aberration that will evaporate as soon as he’s gone.
One of the best aspects of republican democracy is its stability, but Trump the politician is destabilization. This is inherently risky, in much the same way a second constitutional convention would be, because it’s unlikely to turn out how proponents imagine it would. Unfortunately, you can’t blame other people if you succeed in destabilization but fail to get want you want.
I gave this post its title not because Trump supports are unintelligent or because intelligence is synonymous with correctness; to anyone on Ricochet, this is obvious. I use it because the noble sort of pro-Trump thought leaders are heavily relying on a base who are understandably angry, unambiguously wrong, and proud of it, and these leaders should have known better. Democracy doesn’t care how wrong you are if your numbers are legion, and we’re all about to feel the consequences.
Published in General
Also, don’t even assume that Trump is a reflection of public wishes, when it is just as likely that he is not.
Remember. The first primary state got to choose among 17 candidates. Then a few dropped out. After a few primaries, more dropped out, and by the time Indiana rolls around, it’s Trump/Cruz/Kasich. What if Indiana wanted to vote for Walker or Perry?
I live in Washington State, and we haven’t had our primary vote, yet. So what on earth would make a Trump supporter claim that I live in fear of democracy? As was pointed out on a recent podcast: “Democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.” The wolves in Iowa decided that I don’t get to choose Walker.
Our country is built around the concept that democracy is not the same thing as liberty. That so many Trump supporters conflate the two is not a failure of conservatism, it is a failure of conservatives, who believe that artificially growing their numbers is a good substitute for effectively spreading their message.
I’ve had it pointed out to me that the government does not commit theft, the government extorts your money by threat of prison/violence. So from now on, I’m not going to call taxation “theft,” it’s extortion.
Ok, so what would you replace democracy with?
As Dan Hanson said (#20), a constitutional republic. It’s constitution would prohibit wolves from dining on lambs (i.e., it would private protect property rights and individual liberties).
Barack Obama and Harry Reid?
Frankly, I have yet to hear how “noble pro-Trump thought leaders” have the ability to “save the country” by “destroying” a political party that has survived the Great Depression, WW2, the Civil Rights era, and Watergate. The hubris of that sort of thought makes Donald Trump look…very conservative.
But what happens when later generations of citizens, tired of waiting for the slow grind of the republican process, destroy the protections? That is what has happened here.
Absolute rulers are more efficient, even if more capricious or malevolent, at “getting things done”.
I guess you start over.
As long as the wolves outnumber the lambs, nothing will protect the lambs, certainly not a piece of paper. If you really believe that most people are essentially wolves, then your only hope is to somehow transform them into lambs. This is not easy, but it has been done before. See Martin Luther King Jr.
Monarchy
With the dumbing down of the youth in schools, the generation that will save us has yet to be born. We can’t survive moral rot – no country has, at least with freedom and prosperity. Striking is the number of comments criticizing Cruz because he is religious. Will you sacrifice your values because of the future judicial nominations? History has shown that even Republican presidents have chosen foolishly. What in Trump gives you an inclination he will make better choices than the other moderate Republicans have made? The only lesson left is the laboratory one …. people must live their “utopia” before they believe their ideas are wrong. Prosperity isn’t a right but a reward that must be earned. That conservatism isn’t winning doesn’t make it wrong. It merely means a majority are not deserving of the prosperity and freedom it brings.
Abolish the primary system and have regional primaries select delegates to send to a national convention.
King Gilmore I?
And the answer is Trump’s touchback amnesty? We anti-Trumpers never denied the frustration but never did, and still don’t, understand the appeal.
Bingo.
His charm is lost on me, but apparently he makes some part of his supporters’ bodies tingle.
I’m pretty solidly anti-Trump, but I’m not sure that promoting a “democracy doesn’t work”-type screed containing the buzzwords “anti-intelligentsia” and “national socialism” to the Main Feed was the best way to set an amicable tone on Ricochet going forward.
Here’s my basic beef with our current form of democracy: it creates false expectations among voters.
Democracy has always been equated with the “will of the people”, and correspondingly, people expect their will to be carried out when they vote. And since we have greatly expanded the number of offices which are directly elected in the US, this expectation has also grown commensurately.
But logic dictates that in a pluralistic society, most people will not be pleased by public policy most of the time. But as a society and as individuals, we seem to be incapable of accepting this glarlingly obvious truth.
Good luck with that :)
I did. On Trump’s support for transgendered bathroom rights:
Perhaps he’s on those Schedule C appointments as we speak. As for Trump’s comments on the Bathroom Issue, they said:
Reasonable enough, but the last time I saw that quantity of projection onto a blank object, my ticket said IMAX.
This is my other beef with our democracy, as currently practiced:
In American democracy, the buck stops with the people, not the parties. But too many people have convinced themselves it is the other way around.
The only way for the major parties to become major was by gathering the votes of millions of individuals.
But elections are not spectator sports. The parties will only cater to those who actually vote regularly and take their vote seriously.
That means that if the parties have been ignoring a major bloc of voters for years, it’s because that bloc wasn’t participating seriously enough.
Padulalocracy!
With exactly what we have, which we’ve been trying to undermine for quite some time now.
The idea of the senate was to have individuals who represented state governments and state interests; we switched that to more closely resemble a democratically elected body. I’d switch back.
The idea of separation of powers and checks and balances was that nothing could be done without compromise. It forced people to work together, but the federal government was to be far more limited in its role than it currently is. I’d re-castrate it.
A political party should have some better control over who gets nominated. Yes, we have to curb the influences of the “donor class,” but having open primaries is not the answer. The caucus system, for example, is much better, in that it requires quite a lot of effort, so that it is far less likely that whim-votes will swing things in any direction. The fact is, mobs are prone to doing crazy things that individuals would not likely do. Democracy actually caters to mobs. Our system, as initially envisioned, tends to empower individuals over mobs, while simultaneously requiring much of those individuals. Motivated and interested individuals are more likely to educate themselves and put a great deal of thought into their decisions. They will also hold elected officials accountable on the local level.
I think “ease of voting” is a bad thing as well. Allowing for online votes or mail-in ballots, lack of voter-ID, etc… seems to do more harm than good.
I believe there is also some wisdom in property-class voting; when you have great masses of people on welfare, or in unions, all voting their own self-interest, coupled with mob-mentality and ease-of-voting, I think you’ve got problems. Of course, our problems are not so easily solved – if you required property or income for voting, you’d have to be pretty serious about thwarting cronyism.
All that to say, the ways in which we’ve chipped away at our constitution, to bring us closer to direct-democracy and to eliminate limitations-of-power, have brought us circumstances that are proof of why those measures were put in place to begin with.
That’s because leftist vitriol and political rhetoric has been internalized by a number of people in the Republican Party, especially the victim ideology. They see others competing and winning (by rules agreed upon by everyone at the time they were set) and pushing their agenda as the “establishment” subverting democratic will rather than winning by the rules.
Thus they see themselves as helpless victims in need of a savior. Enter trump (who Milo Yinnopolous calls “Daddy”).
Also… I wouldn’t be “replacing” democracy. The United States was not established as a democracy. In fact, I’m pretty sure that – in the wake of the French Revolution – many of our founders intentionally took great pains to avoid some of the more obvious problems with Democracy.
As RyanM says, the founders carefully avoided creating a pure democracy. And build upon British constitutional tradition in having the republic presided over by a figure with many of the characteristics of a monarch.
Since the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, Britain had been, in effect, a republic with an hereditary president. The war of independence removed a “President” that had been found unacceptable (and the 2nd amendment reminds us that this option remains available), but then created a complex system of checks and balances that improved upon the existing checks, balances, precedents, and accumulated culture that make up the evolving, unwritten British Constitution. That wasn’t transferable, so they did the exceptional thing: they invented a state that would have tradition designed in.
It would be a pity to see that thrown away, rather than rescued and treasured. The rest of us need an example. We also need the world’s largest market to be healthy.
I would say a more up to date version is two pigs and a farmer voting on whose job it is to fill the trough.
Or because that bloc was insufficiently large or wealthy enough in either party to get its way.
And the wealth issue cannot be discounted. Our system has, since FDR, been very much a spoils system. It’s very difficult to get to any kind of national office without gobs of money, and that money is all too often tied to the spoils. The pro-trump folks have never had that kind of money to back enough people to get their way.
You have to be pretty serious about thwarting cronyism now; the whole reason Trump won and everybody else lost is because he convinced people that he was pretty serious about thwarting cronyism. No one else seemed to care. To say that Trump is lying is not a good enough answer: the point is, most republicans don’t seem to care at all. If they even attempted to give the impression that they cared, they might have stood a chance against Trump.
As for going back to a system where only those who own property can vote, good luck with that. :)