Democracy dies in … giving voters a choice?
Timothy P. Carney
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I owe the Democrats an apology.
Last week, I posited that Democrats’ constant support of MAGA Republicans in GOP primaries demonstrated that they didn’t really believe that these MAGA types were a threat to democracy. My reasoning was sloppy, as libertarian scholar Michael Cannon pointed out.
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Indeed, recent actions suggest that Democrats are not dishonest in backing anti-democracy candidates — they are not even inconsistent. It turns out the Democratic Party might just not care much for democracy, and the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision evicting former President Donald Trump from that state’s ballot is the latest evidence.
You could come up with all sorts of arguments for the Colorado court’s unprecedented, novel interpretation of the 14th Amendment, but it is obviously anti-democratic to disqualify a front-runner from the presidential ballot for a crime of which nobody — not a jury, not a judge, not the U.S. Senate — has convicted him.
Yet the argument against Trump, and all Republicans in the Trump era, has always been that today’s GOP is not merely a political enemy of the Democrats but an existential threat to democracy. This argument was not merely an effort to reach out to centrist voters uninterested in Democrats’ policy priorities, but it was also a permission structure for the news media (which fashions themselves as neutral) to take sides openly.
Also, calling the Republican Party not merely wrong but beyond the bounds of acceptability made it easier for Democrats to hoodwink corporate America into taking its side — see, for instance, President Joe Biden and Georgia Democrats convincing Major League Baseball to beclown itself regarding Georgia’s perfectly sensible voting reform.
The thing is, Trump really is extraordinarily bad. Even compared to politicians, he’s shockingly dishonest. He’s a narcissist who instigated the Jan. 6 riots and egged them on even when he knew his supporters were armed and coming for Mike Pence.
So, there are lots of reasons to want Trump gone. And again, there are also arguments to be made that Trump did disqualify himself legally from serving another term. I’m not convinced by those arguments, but they’re plausible. What the disqualifiers are not, though, are defenders of democracy.
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Kicking Trump off the ballot is not only anti-democratic, it additionally undermines democracy by infuriating his supporters and giving them valid grounds for saying the election is rigged.
You can be a defender of democracy or a defender of the Colorado Supreme Court. You can’t be both.