Toward a Non-Usable Past

"The New York Times" as the World's Most Exhausting Professor

Back on this question of the history of democracy in America: The New York Times has just run a major piece, by David Leonhardt, exploring the current threat to democracy posed by Trumpism and American rightism in general. The article should go into a time capsule or be otherwise enshrined for ideally encapsulating the long-prevailing, totally failed liberal view of U.S. history and civics that many of us grew up with, and which now seems to me so astonishingly vacuous that I can’t help thinking its constant reiteration has played a role, at least, in causing the real trouble that American political liberalism and American democracy are now are in.

Not trying to get the right-wing sleazebags off the hook—but if this is all we’ve got, we might be in even worse shape than we think.

In the hands of the greats, like Lincoln and King, the familiar story may have been crucially instrumental to democracy’s progress. Those people had big things to get done. But at this late date, the familiar story—presented with all the display of baseless authority that seems to come naturally to this kind of writing—gets nothing done. And that might be the worst thing of all.

To jump around in the article in no real order, here’s Yascha Mounck, a political science professor, on the current crisis: “There is the possibility, for the first time in American history, that a legitimately elected president will not be able to take office.” I guess placement of modifiers might be the problem here, but if Mounck is saying that the possibility hasn’t existed before, as early as 1800, the possibility was loud and clear. Had Burr been legitimately elected by the House over Jefferson that year, it’s not just possible but highly probable that certain elements would have bent every effort, anyway, to overturn that outcome by force.

And it’s by no means clear that the 1960 presidential election outcome didn’t defeat the legitimate process.

Then there’s 2000. A very strong case can be made that possibility went beyond probability and became actuality.

Of course I know that Mounck’s correct if he’s saying nothing more than that it’ll be a new thing if, absent any grudging concession, backroom deal, or overbearing Supreme Court ruling, the legitimate winner can’t take office—new and also horrible. But that’s blindingly obvious, so what’s the point of quoting him? This liberal insistence, at once weirdly alarmist and weirdly complacent, on seeing the current antidemocracy crisis as anomalous, and not the worst flare-up of a systemic disease, has to be a key factor in the weakness of the fightback.

The article does try to offer a longer-range perspective. And that’s where it really falls apart, in the end to a pretty unforgivable degree, not just getting the history “wrong” or whatever but wiping out the real fight—especially important to keep in mind today—by which some degree of democracy really did arise in the U.S.

According to the boring, doddering history prof that the Times now seems to want to be:

The founders did not design the United States to be [harumph] a pure democracy. They [harumph] distrusted the classical notion of direct democracy, in which a community came together to vote on each important issue, and believed it would be impractical for a large country. . . . Instead of a direct democracy, the founders created a [one-minute coughing fit] republic, with elected representatives to make decisions, and a multilayered government, in which different branches checked each other.

Before we get to the really bad part, that’s just way, way off. The founders never seriously considered “direct democracy.” Their entire focus was on representative procedures—that’s mostly what they and their ancestors knew—and in their explicit attempt to obstruct democracy by forming a national government, they strictly limited representation. Yes, via the Senate. But also via the size of the House, the Electoral College, and the independence of the judiciary, as well as by acquiescence, at the very least, in the states’ sharp exclusions of most citizens from voting.

Anyway, pro-democracy people then and now haven’t generally been calling for establishing the “classical notion” called pure democracy. Thomas Paine, e.g., wanted a huge, unchecked representation. That’s what the framers set out to prevent.

Leonhardt goes on to defend the idea that the U.S. republican system was originally pretty democratic anyway. “Even with the existence of the Senate, the Electoral College and the Supreme Court,” he says, “political power has reflected the views of people who had the right to vote.”

Well, yeah. That’s a good defense of the virtues of republics. But the idea that that kind of majority rule equates in some originalist way with democracy, when the people who instituted the system did so explicitly in order to push back against representative advances made by ordinary people in the 1780’s, sums up the liberal delusion that has gotten us in such deep trouble. The idea is that those founding men, though “flawed” by sexism, racism,  and classism, nevertheless created a system naturally and originally amenable to the grand progress of democracy. As Leonhardt puts it:

Over the sweep of history, the American government has tended to become more democratic, through women’s suffrage, civil rights laws, the direct election of senators and more. The exceptions, like the post-Reconstruction period, when Black Southerners lost rights, have been rare. The current period is so striking partly because it is one of those exceptions.

Oh. My God. The flat-out wrongness, while rife here, again isn’t the only problem, though I’ll note that rights actually were lost when the states broadened suffrage for white men in the 19th century—yes, the states, not the national government, which originally didn’t contemplate a constitutionally protected right to vote for anyone. Both women and free black men lost rights, in a process not just unexceptional but tied to the rise of some kinds of democracy. The real history here is bumpy as hell.

But it’s the first sentence above that really kills me.

Evidently, according to the Times, there’s a thing called the sweep of history, which I guess, like, sweeps us along, into the future, unimpeded by the beating-back waves Fitzgerald talked about except during periods defined axiomatically as exceptional. And during the sweep, a certain progress for democracy has tended to occur.

Are there really no editors? I know, I know, that’s what liberal civics has taught us. . . and people do tend to cling, metaphorically, to their guns and religion . . . But do I really have to note that the advances in equality that Leonhardt mentions didn’t “tend” to happen? That they were fought to the death, in some cases literally, against every prevailing tendency? Including in many cases the tendencies of The New York Times?

Delusions about our national origins may once have been critical to energizing progressive movements, but all I get from this major Times piece—and many other sententious explainers of its kind—is a defensive combination of urgency and mental exhaustion, leading to inertia, a past supposedly usable and actually useless. Maybe it remains key to “energizing the base” to go on not knowing that democracy, far from being written into our national DNA, has always been a hard-fought exception to the original idea of the national government. But I don’t know what energizes the base. What am I, a tactician? These days, energy’s not what I’m sensing.