Populism's Road to Tyranny
If we can't agree to disagree to a certain extent, we can't have a republic
During a Facebook discussion about voter ID proposals with a former St. John's College classmate, I said that the left goes into hysterics about delusions of mass disenfranchisement every time they can't fathom that they lost an election, and the right is even worse by outright denying the reality of unwanted outcomes. The only serious solution to these complaints is for everyone to simply accept the reality that their side is, in fact, actually going to lose elections from time to time. My former classmate told me that my solution was obviously desirable but pie-in-the-sky; it is unrealistic of me to think people can just accept the fact that they have irreconcilable political differences.
But it's not unrealistic. That's what liberal democracy is; it's what constitutional republicanism is. If we can't accept that as individual citizens we inevitably will have a lot of irreconcilable political differences, if we can't accept that our preferred side is really going to legitimately miss out on wielding power sometimes, then, to echo Benjamin Franklin, we can't keep our republic — and no law or process can save us from our own deficiencies of character.
What then?
Deciding that we cannot coexist with people with whom we have incompatible ideas about using power will mean the end of the American experiment. We'll have to go back to the way things were before the rise of the United States, when few besides warlords, those with ancient lineages, or else psychotic megalomaniacs were both willing and able to pursue, obtain, and hold onto power. Someone like Trump is a new phenomenon for America, but public figures like Trump — almost transcendental in their self-regard and vain, empty ambition — are as old as humanity. The world has seen many Donald Trumps as emperors before and found them wanting.
The great liberal revolution was about mutually voluntary restraints on power: accepting that power, constrained by codified limits agreed to in advance, can and will be traded off over time between factions — so as to make it possible for everyone to live together. The need to scatter, rather than allow to concentrate, the deleterious consequences of unchecked power and loyalty to faction rather than the rule of law is the fundamental question of liberal republican politics dealt with by the Federalist Papers.
The illiberal essence of populism says: to hell with all that. The problem is a lack of fighting spirit, obsequious obedience to formalities and etiquette, not enough loyalty to personalities and principles and too much to process, not enough willingness to just get something done for the people, forget the damned rules. This is all antithetical to classical liberalism and constitutional republicanism. That’s the way politics tended to work prior to the Enlightenment and the American experiment. Humanity found it wanting.
That's why this election is the most important since the Civil War. We are beyond arguing about 'the issues' and are truly debating the fundamentals of civic life. Are we willing to accept that sometimes people we strongly support really do lose elections? Can we accept the fact that our neighbors might believe very differently than we do regarding religion, race, sex, taxes? Can we tolerate a mild amount of all-too-human corruption without exploiting its inevitable existence for the purpose of demagoguery? Can we agree on the basic facts of a situation, regardless of what our response to those facts is? Does it even matter if what we say is true if it happens to be useful?
If we can't agree on these things, we cannot have a constitutional republic. We take much of the miracle of contemporary life for granted, behaving as though all of the benefits of modern life under liberal democracy and constitutional republicanism are ‘just there.’ They are not. They are a remarkable exception in human history, and cannot exist unless we can agree to tolerate social and political differences. And we sure will miss what we have if we are suicidal enough to discard it for the sake of an individual personality or a temporal ideology, as people and factions usually did with their gains in politics in the world before the United States.
If we can’t agree to disagree to a certain extent, the American experiment is over.