Whether you believe democracy is in peril in the United States,

Whether you believe democracy is in peril in the United States, or whether you believe a sentiment like this dramatically inflates our current level of vulnerability, it’s fair to say that, under any sober analysis, American democracy has recently undergone some stress tests.

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When this happens, when a foundational ideal like representative government is shaken from its slumber as a background condition for society, as an assumption taken for granted, and comes up for discussion as a pressing issue in its own right, it provides plenty of opportunities to reveal what exactly we think about it.
This happens more or less organically. Donald Trump didn’t set out to jumpstart a conversation on democracy, but his actions have facilitated one nonetheless. In the ensuing discussion, as various political episodes get framed as strengthening or weakening democracy, as drawing us closer to the democratic ideal or moving us away from it, the discourse inevitably gets flooded with appraisals of this political value. Utah Senator Mike Lee, for example, recently had occasion to announce his view that “democracy isn’t the objective.”
The Senator Who Doesn’t Like Democracy
As America considers reforms that would make us more democratic, Mike Lee would take us in the opposite direction
arcdigital.media
Statements like this don’t just appear in a vacuum — we have to be engaged in a kind of ongoing negotiation of democracy’s place in society to elicit takes like Lee’s. And, actually, the discussions that follow can end up being quite helpful to us.
The dominant concepts in our political architecture should never go too long without incurring some scrutiny. Even when we’re fully convinced of their importance, even when we fully expect society to reaffirm its support for them, we should still happily submit them for fresh examination. What place does a quality like democracy occupy in our hierarchy of political values? These discussions help us determine that.
This is the context in which I recently came across two perspectives on democracy that I found importantly wrong. I want to respond to them here, because I think they misunderstand democracy in key ways, and the misunderstandings themselves provide a useful opportunity to see why this concept is so important.
Misunderstanding Democracy, Part 1
We just held a presidential election. In it, Joe Biden blessedly triumphed over Donald Trump. But as anyone familiar with our system knows, the contest isn’t settled by simply tallying up the votes. We use a strange device called the Electoral College to determine the winner.
Under established electoral protocol, a state’s electors are basically asked to ratify the choice for president that the state’s voting population has already made. For the 2020 election, this phase already happened on December 14, though the final step of the process will take place on January 6.
Prior to mid-December, one of the techniques some Trump supporters looked into to wrest the election away from Biden was to have certain electorally crucial states cast their votes for Trump — that is, to have the states’ electors vote for Trump — despite their voters going for Biden. Hard right provocateur Mark Levin, to pick one ignominious example of many, exhorted state legislators to “do your constitutional duty,” i.e., to override the will of their own voters.
This is obviously, plainly, unquestionably anti-democratic.
But on Twitter, that discourse wonderland where all manner of thoughtful takes sprout like dandelions in the summer sun, I spotted an argument suggesting that a state’s electors deviating from their voters would actually be emblematic of democracy rather than a repudiation of it.
Behold:
Is it really undemocratic for state representatives, chosen in elections where each voter is one of a few thousand, to decide to seat electors themselves after an unprecedented fiasco in which each vote is one of 150 million? I’m sorry, but I don’t think the libs get to own this word.
It may be unwise, a mistake, a bait-and-switch from expectations for Republicans to do. But I don’t concede that it’s undemocratic. If democracy means one big pool where your vote is practically meaningless and you barely get a real choice, democracy wouldn’t be worth valuing.
The way this is written is somewhat unclear, so I want to unpack what the argument is supposed to be.
The suggestion is that, to select our next president, we ought to disregard the election that just took place — the, um, presidential election — and instead grant rogue presidency-picking powers to state officials, who attained their roles in their state legislatures by winning elections of their own.
We should do this, according to this argument, because the elections that put these officials in their state government offices had more democratic resonance, for these voters, than the actual presidential election.
How so?
The votes that determine the outcomes of state-level elections just count for more, from the perspective of the individual voter, than the votes that determine the outcome of a presidential election. In other words, each voter’s voice has more relative weight in state races than it does in nation-wide elections, when the voting pool dramatically expands to include voters from all 50 states.
MAGA, a Marriage of Idiocy and Influence