Sham Democracy
First it was the Capitol riot on January 6th; then the passage of Republican voting laws were the “most dangerous threat to our democracy since the Civil War”. Tomorrow there will surely be something else to take the title.
It shouldn’t have to be said that to claim any recent event as the equivalent of the Civil War is utterly ridiculous. January 6th pales in comparison to any of last summer’s mostly peaceful protests, while Republican election endeavors, if anything, represent attempts to fortify a democratic system that appears shakier with each passing day (albeit, clumsy efforts that don't go nearly far enough).
Looking past the histrionics, the comparison makes even less sense. The Civil War marked a grave threat to democratic government, surely. But in which way? The war’s catalyst, the Election of 1860, was perhaps the least “democratic” event in American history. Abraham Lincoln was elevated to the White House with less than forty percent of the vote; and his plurality victory was not the result of split opposition: Bell, Breckenridge, and Douglas may as well have been one man, and the outcome would have remained unchanged. Lincoln won an absolute majority in 15 of the 18 states he took, totaling more than enough electoral votes to carry the day. The Electoral College, working as intended, rewarded the ability to build a coalition at the expense of a democratic majority concentrated largely within one region.
And what was the Civil War but a successful crusade to subvert the will of a significant portion of the nation’s localities? Union leaders found it necessary to suppress internal opposition and engage in brutal tactics against others they still deemed to be countrymen. Certainly it couldn’t have been wrong to wage a war the end result of which was the abolition of slavery, but these facts puts moral righteousness at odds with the democratic desires of the day. The shallow minds of the modern left are thus faced with two conflicting principles, neither of which they can abandon.
Liberals attempt to reconcile the apparent dissonance by claiming that the South and its states were no democracies at all. By depriving slaves of their liberty, southern institutions were illegitimate, their governments illusory— that is to say, sham democracies. Likewise, they apply this apologia to justify later actions that greatly expanded governmental reach during the era of Jim Crow; however, these stipulations would disqualify the vast majority of historical democracies from being considered as such, making the existence of “real” democracies so rare as to hardly be worth considering.
Rather than admit that there may be appropriate times to spurn democracy, the left insists that legitimate democratic governments may exist only under specific terms. In order for a democratic system to operate it must have a free citizenry; but freedom to a leftist means the ability to shape one’s own destiny without any sort of boundaries, natural or experiential: It is a vision of the unconstrained. Since institutions mold the people who live under them, those which impart attitudes or biases liberals deem irrational are incompatible with a functioning democracy, and its people unsuited to participation. Consequently, the left can, say, meddle in elections and disenfranchise certain segments of the population and still claim to be acting in service of the people— at least the people who may count as full and proper citizens.
Of course this way of thinking is full of paradoxes. These systems are no different in form than the others liberals deride as sham democracies; merely, the left decides which predispositions are legitimate and who may be full participants. Progressives themselves cannot escape the institutions that shaped them from birth even if they claim freedom as the product of the enlightened and unconstrained mind; nor do they spurn the support of low information voters onto whom they impart their personal biases.
And yet, maybe this is all democracy really is at its core— neither a safeguard of liberty, nor the instrument of popular sovereignty, but a shadowy veil behind which a secular, self-appointed priesthood cows the masses into a tacit acceptance of its will. In other words, a total and complete sham.