A witty-looking man on a helicopter in a well-known New Yorker film that was published shortly before the first Trump election says,” These arrogant pilots have lost touch with ordinary passengers like us. Who believes I may take the airplane?” Drawing the clear comparison between the aircraft and the nation, the cartoon is in fact plainly anti-democratic: Voters if, on the view of the cartoon, not be able to choose who they want over the experts who know what they’re doing. This view, framed as antagonism to a “populism” that itself is just politics by another title, runs through center-left ideology about education, media, the courts, the experts, through suspicion of free speech to credentialism about almost everything.  ,
In contrast to the rhetoric about defending politics, the notion that credentialed experts will do better than the masses and are therefore entitled to move things becomes incomprehensible. And, sadly, liberal elites have claimed to be doing just that in the Trump time. In February 2017, a month into the first Trump presidency, the Washington Post changed its tagline to a corny, cape-y slogan that captured the” Resistance” mood of the time:” Democracy Dies in Darkness”. Donald Trump threatened British politics in a way that was philosophical. Our brave editors were the only people who could manage it. In 2024, as Kamala Harris searched in vain for an actual message for her plan, merely as Hillary Clinton had in 2016, this sort of speech returned. Across journalism, job titles such as “democracy editor” and newsroom projects with titles like” Protecting Democracy” proliferated, all framed in language aligned with then-candidate Harris’s statement that, in the coming election, “democracy]was ] on the ballot”.
It appears then that despite a lot of talk invoking politics in our political discourse, there is a ton of uncertainty about what democracy is. Take the author Zack Beauchamp’s book The Conservative Spirit, which was released this summer and exemplifies the issue with combining the pro- and anti-democratic sentiments we find in prominent center-left figures. Trump, or” Trumpism,” is argued by Beauchamp as the pillar of democracy’s protection, as well as a controversial figure within the country’s political system as a special issue to its success.  ,
Unfortunately for Beauchamp, the book was released five weeks before Joe Biden resigned from the competition. Needless to say, his case did not benefit from the serious political events of the summer and the fall. The Democrat party’s commander in chief and strategy turned out to have been financed by a conceited media that was unwilling to comment on his physical and mental state. His vice president, who had started the campaign earlier in 2024, discredited special counsel Robert Hur for saying that Biden’s recollection was “poor” and had a “high level of integrity” under the leadership of his presidency, rose to the position of presidential nominee and sprang to prominence with a slew of favorable reviews. The idea that the middle departed is for, while the New Right is against, the process of social decision-making by an educated populace was completely undermined by all of this.
But even if there had not been for attempt to mislead voters about their political options in 2024, Beauchamp’s thesis was always in poor condition, both generally and theoretically. Politics doesn’t indicate what Beauchamp believes it does, and the center-left has never been that way. However, a big arc of current British politics is perfectly encroachment, by centrist and left-wing judges, bureaucrats, and “experts”, on the political democratic process. More frequently than not, this encroachment is what the formerly dominant center-left intellectual and journalistic apparatus refers to as “democracy.”
Beauchamp’s method is to characterize democracy mostly by reference to “associated ideas, like political equality and human rights” and by the changes these ideas “helped fuel”, such as “decolonization and LGBT movements”. Beauchamp’s treatment ultimately becomes less about analysis and more about vibes. The problem with this is that the term “democracy” has been transformed into a terminological black hole, squished from high-level concepts like freedom, equality, and justice to specific aspects of the American political system, such as constitutional guarantees of rights that cannot be overruled by the democratic procedure of vote by a simple majority. This comes across in Beauchamp’s treatment of the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt. Beauchamp, who is charged with the possibility that democracy might not actually be equivalent to liberalism or equality, merely rehashes the “terrible genius” of that charge as though he is diagnosing an underhanded stratagem:” He has provided a scheme for something called “democrat politics” that replaces universal equality, the foundational idea of democracy as we understand it, with hierarchy.” However, universal equality is not the fundamental principle of democracy as we currently understand it. And it’s clear that progressive elitists don’t share their beliefs either.
The “reactionary spirit” of his title is, for Beauchamp,” the idea that if democracy threatens existing social hierarchies, it is right and maybe even righteous to overthrow democracy rather than permit social change”. For Beauchamp’s definition of political “reaction”, he offers, citing scholar Corey Robin’s book The Reactionary Mind, the idea” that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others”. It contrasts with Beauchamp’s definition of democracy. As Beauchamp writes,” Democracy’s core principle is that no person is inherently better than any other, for that reason, we all deserve an equal say in how we’re governed”. Beauchamp writes that “democracy, by its nature, encourages the upending of social hierarchies”. It appears that the philosophy of democracy is the source of this problem.  ,
This is a bad way of mapping the terrain. First, democracy doesn’t require denying that some people are capable of governing others. Instead, especially in representative democracy, we might think of it as a procedure for figuring out who is fit to rule others. But more importantly, even a direct democracy is not a system in which nobody rules others. A system in which everyone has control over others is a direct democracy. We might assume that the universal franchise is rooted in the notion that everyone is prepared to instruct others.
The center-left consensus under which Beauchamp operates appears hostile to democracy as well as even considering most political concepts. For instance, Beauchamp protests a Florida law that “restricts LGBT education in public schools.” Of course, these laws are just what happens when public education is susceptible to the democratic political process. Center-leftists tend to think public education ought, somehow, to be immune to democracy. Similar to Beauchamp, Beauchamp mentions that the Democratic Party’s victory in the 2022 midterm elections was largely attributable to the tensions between democracy and abortion ( live in part because of the riots on January 6 intended to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election ). But this linkage was never coherent. By removing abortion as a fundamental right and putting it on the ballot, Dr. Dobbs increased the democratic sensitivity of abortion, not decreasing it.
Beauchamp mentions his concerns about one of Trump’s “gravest threats” in his first term, which is” an executive order stripping job protections for tens of thousands of civil servants and allowing Trump to replace them with his cronies,” in an aptly telling way. In the event that it is implemented, it would only increase the civil service’s ability to support democratic processes and give elected officials more authority over unelected bureaucrats. Indeed, judicial review is frequently used as a shield against the “tyranny of the majority,” a notion Beauchamp raises but doesn’t give enough thought to. The failure to address these issues results in a book with no solid theory regarding democracy and its value.  ,
The Reactionary Spirit is both an analysis of a particular kind of right-wing opposition to democracy and a suggestion that it is a little too cute to make the case. Despite the rhetoric, it is the Democrats, not the Republicans, who have undermined themselves electorally through their opposition to democracy itself. I’m happy that they have taken their lesson.  ,
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At the University of Tulsa Honors College, Oliver Traldi teaches philosophy.
