Donald Trump, Democrat?

by Ralph Benko, Contributing Author:  My headline employs “democrat” in its generic, rather than proper noun (partisan), definition. President Trump shifted his party registration back and forth (five times, according to the Washington Times’s report of a report by The Smoking Gun). Trump, Politico reports, also was a substantial donor to Senator Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and many other Democrats.

This history does not make Donald Trump a Democrat. But I submit that Donald Trump is democracy's smoking gun.

Trump won the presidency as the nominee of the Republican Party. Despite his occasional public flirtations with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi he works with the Congressional majority, Republicans, largely eschewing the Democrats' progressive policy agenda.

That said, I submit that the election of Donald Trump as president is largely an outcome of “creeping democracy.” Democracy is routinely extolled by the left. It, along with “equality,” is frequently used by leftists as a vague synonym for anything good.

The left, however, is wrong about this. Democracy is a bad thing. Bad for the left too.

This remains unclear to the left. This is understandable. The word "democracy" sounds vaguely good. It has proved useful in advancing the progressive agenda. Thus, celebrations of democracy persist but the outcomes, even from their point of view, just are not looking so hot.

O Democracy!

The Washington Post earlier this year adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”  According to the Post’s own credible backstory, this was not aimed at President Trump but was derived from a line in a speech by its owner Jeff Bezos, adopted from Bob Woodward (who had used it for many years), itself appropriated from a coinage by appellate Judge Damon J. Keith.

Currently, the poster child book on this topic is How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (whose names are curiously omitted from the cover of the book jacket). The New York Times’s David Leonhardt extols it in his recent column The Meaning of Bannon vs. Trump:Democracy. Later this month, an alarmingly titled book, “How Democracies Die,” written by two political scientists, will be published. It is, as the book’s promotional material states, “a bracing, revelatory look at the demise of liberal democracies around the world — and a road map for rescuing our own.”Let’s help the left out. America was unequivocally designed as a republic, not a democracy. There are reasons for this.

My friend Jonathan Rauch, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings Institution, has wryly painted how wrongheaded have been the progressives in undermining the republican order. His assessment may be found, among other places, in a cover story at The Atlantic archly headlined The Case For Corruption. Progressives have, over more than a century, conscientiously eroded America’s republican structure, including the very political norms -- the guardrails -- they take Trump to task for violating.

Let them consider whether Trump's presidency is the effect, not the cause, of their own century-long project of undermining republican safeguards.

Progressives? Meet the Law of Unintended Consequences.

A more democratic America has delivered unto you President Trump.

Happy?

Let's take a deeper dive into democracy vs. republicanism to help understand where the left went so Wrong.
I have many dear progressive friends. I heart them for their commitment to justice among other things. I myself am neither a progressive nor a democrat. As Alcuin famously wrote to Charlemagne in 798 AD, “Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.”And do not listen to those who keep saying, 'The voice of the people is the voice of God.' because the tumult of the crowd is always close to madness.Trump certainly plays to the tumult of the crowd.  As I have pointed out here the remnants of the republican system – the electoral college (which progressives are now targeting for demolition) -- worked as designed. The electorate -- which is subtly but materially different from the "crowd" -- chose the presidential aspirant who best, relative to the other 19 significant contenders in 2016, articulated its yearning for peace and prosperity.

The left would do better to seek to extract the log in its own eye than to condemn the mote in the eye of the right. “'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,— mon frère!'"

Notwithstanding their ongoing confrontation with the Law of Unintended Consequences the left continues to extol democracy. That’s a system of government America’s founders deplored. The Founders' deploring it, one supposes, would have made them a basket of deplorables to the Hillary Clintons of their day.  Such figures, then, were blessedly few.

Let’s go to the record.

The founders of America detested democracy, putting many guardrails against it into the Constitution. They made no bones about it.
Here are some representative quotes by some of the premier architects of our charter document:At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787: A lady [one Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia] asked Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy[?] — A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it[.]James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 10:From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union.Edmund Randolph, in the Constitutional Convention, said in speaking on the constitution of a Senate:If he was to give an opinion as to the number of the [U.S. Senate], he should say that it ought to be much smaller than that of the first; so small as to be exempt from the passionate proceedings to which numerous assemblies are liable. He observed that the general object was to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy; that some check, therefore, was to be sought for against this tendency of our governments, and that a good Senate seemed most likely to answer the purpose.As John Adams wrote to John Taylor in 1814:You Say “Mr. Adams calls our Attention to hundreds of wise and virtuous Patricians, mangled and bleeding Victims of popular Fury.” and gravely counts up several Victims of democratic Rage as proofs that Democracy is more pernicious than Monarchy or Aristocracy.” Is this fair, sir? Do you deny any one of my Facts? I do not say that Democracy has been more pernicious, on the whole, and in the long run, than Monarchy or Aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as Aristocracy or Monarchy. But while it lasts it is more bloody than either.

... Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty.America was very much designed to avoid democracy, The Constitution itself, at Article 4, Section 4 states:The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…."A Republican Form of Government." Nowhere in the Constitution does the word democracy occur. This is not an oversight.

Fraud, Violence and Cruelty? John Adams, a member of the Committee that wrote the Declaration of Independence and our second president, thereby demonstrated prophetic qualities. The left, hoist with its own petard, would do well to take heed.

Comes now How Democracies Die. Its lead jacket blurb is from E.J. Dionne, Jr., who I respect greatly as one of the leading classical liberal public intellectuals working today notwithstanding that he bats (cleanup) for the Other Team.

How Democracies Die turns out to be an interesting work by two scholars who have deep knowledge of how authoritarians have taken power. They give special attention to the role of the establishment parties in facilitating that process, by connivance or negligence, thus paving the way for monsters such as Hitler, Mussolini, or Hugo Chavez to take power. They offer many interesting cautionary vignettes from world, and American, history.

They offer a soft, almost exculpatory, critique of some of FDR’s violations of political norms – prominently, threatening to pack the Supreme Court and violating the precedent of limiting himself to two terms.  They gently chide, while exonerating, some of Barack Obama's violations.

At base however, the authors blame the Republicans. They attribute the key erosion in what they call the political "guardrails” to the hardball tactics of Speaker Newt Gingrich and Majority Leader Tom Delay. There is some merit to this claim. However, they weirdly present a case that good Republicans are domesticated to the progressive agenda and protest, if at all, impotently. They seem oddly insensitive to the manifold examples of the violations by prominent Democrats such as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi among many others. The sins of progressives are venial while comparable sins by conservatives are presented as mortal.

The left has a propensity to extol hardball tactics when used by Democrats and excoriate them when used by Republicans. Chris Matthews’s finest and most delightful book, Hardball: How Politics Is played, Told by One Who Knows the Game, for which his MSNBC show is named, provides a very nice Bill of Particulars.

In the eyes of progressives “democracy” is a great thing ... so long as Democrats get elected and move the policies of America leftward. When the political system works to elect Republicans who move policy rightward it is ipso facto deemed demagoguery.

How Democracies Die displays many of the internal contradictions inherent within the left’s narrative. For example, the authors critique state defiance of President Obama’s (questionable) regulatory order limiting greenhouse gas emissions. They term it “a stunning undermining of federal authority." Then the authors attack Trump for signing an executive order authorizing federal agencies to withhold funding from “sanctuary cities” that refused to cooperate with the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

State resistance to federal authority is inherently either legitimate or illegitimate. They can't have it both ways. The plenitude of these kinds of opportunistic arguments is one of the book's greatest flaws. While I -- on conservative philosophical grounds -- oppose the withholding of federal aid to self-designated sanctuary cities one cannot logically reconcile how state resistance to the federal government is "a stunning undermining" while municipal resistance is legitimate.

The authors, blind to their own contradictions, paint themselves into many such logical corners. There are arguments to be made for their preferred policies here. This argument, however, is self-contradictory and thus contributes to the polarization which the authors, purportedly, deplore.

Senator Warren is right. The game is rigged.

Just, not necessarily in the way she propounds.

The Founders were not alone in their condemnation of democracy. H.L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, a somewhat libertarian curmudgeon beloved by progressives for his ridicule of William Jennings Bryan for his attack on the teaching of evolution, was an intense and consistent critic of democracy.

Mencken devoted his Last Words to a rather definitive deconstruction of the pretense of democracy (and, let it be noted, of the Democrats of his day):Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a common-place of every day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to rule the rest of us—but it must be rigorously policed itself. There is a government, not of men, but of laws - but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function of the citizen is to serve the state - but the first assumption that meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then the farce only grows the more glorious.

I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself - that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating.The many political and policy maladies and madnesses of which the left complains derive from democracy itself, not its death. For the sake of making tactical gains the left has (and continues) to kill the goose that lays the golden egg: republicanism. To fall doubly afoul of the metaphor: the chickens are coming home to roost. Down with democracy!
-----------------
Ralph Benko is an advisor to nonprofit and advocacy organizations, is a member of the Conservative Action Project, a contributor to the contributor to the ARRA News Service. Founder of The Prosperity Caucus, he was a member of the Jack Kemp supply-side team, served in an unrelated area as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House. The article which first appeared in Forbes.

---

Tags: Ralph Benko, Donald Trump, Democrat? To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!