This Dispatch piece by Jonah Goldberg is extremely useful in illustrating the centrality of anti-majoritarianism on the right. Jonah has been a consistent critic of Trump and the GOP’s loony, violent, authoritarian turn. However, even the most reasonable, principled, philosophical conservatives tend to be wary of majoritarian democracy, as Jonah illustrates in his case against what he calls “democratic supremacy.” He doesn’t exactly define it, but the idea comes across clearly enough: political legitimacy and liberal justice require that the preferences of the majority generally prevail. Jonah rejects this because he’s of the opinion that “a liberal society can be just with remarkably little democracy.”
In my opinion, this claim is both false and dangerous. Moreover, I suspect that neither the Trump presidency nor the GOP’s authoritarian, illiberal, anti-democratic turn would have come to pass if not for the fact that most conservatives were already convinced that democracy is at best an incidental, instrumental aspect of a free society. Jonah’s articulation of the standard, traditional conservative view is worth digging into precisely because he’s a normie, pre-Trump fusionist throwback.
Now, Jonah’s plainly right that “large swaths of the center-left these days are somewhere between mildly and extremely obsessed with what might be called ‘democratic supremacy.’” And he’s right to see this commitment to “democratic supremacy” behind left-leaning criticisms of the Electoral College, the small-state bias of the Senate, the filibuster, other procedural hurdles to decision-making through simple majority votes, and the partisan bias of the Supreme Court. However, his criticism of proposed reforms in each of these domains are weak and fail to engage standard liberal arguments for the role of democracy in securing freedom and authorizing power.
Jonah begins with a response to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s argument that there’s something wrong with a system that allows nine judges (five, really) to overturn popular legislation that managed to survive the demanding gauntlet of the American legislative process. He notes that “the left’s most prized political baubles,” such as Roe v. Wade, were “imposed” by Supreme Court majorities, suggesting that Democrats are fine with judges legislating from the bench except when Republicans do it.
Now, it’s interesting that AOC focuses on the court overturning democratic legislation, but Jonah focuses on the court assuming the power of a legislature and imposing policy. In my opinion, they’re both right because I believe that legislative supremacy is good and judicial supremacy — which is enabled by America’s queer, arbitrary, over-powered version of judicial review — is bad. My guess is that AOC also believes something along these lines. But Jonah clearly doesn’t. He is what I call an “ideological constitutionalist” of the right.
The ideological constitutionalist treats his contested ideological conception of justice or the best regime as a condition for the legitimacy of government and argues that, therefore, it must be constitutionally codified and sheltered from democratic revision.
As I recently argued in a post reconsidering my former Rawls/Hayek fusionism:
I think most Americans are ideological constitutionalists of one stripe or another, which is a big problem. It generally turns democratic politics into a contest to control the judiciary in an effort to remove your political rivals’ policy preferences from the scope of democratic discretion through the anti-democratic channel of judicial legislation. Eventually, one or another ideologically constitutionalist faction will get a leg up on the others, gain outsize power over the courts and proceed to undermine democracy in even more fundamental ways to lock down the partisan constitution its partisan judges have been successfully authoring.
I suspect that Jonah’s resistance to majoritarian reform is a symptom of his conservative ideological constitutionalism, which also accounts for his approval of the Republican lock on the Supreme Court and his indifference to the fact that it is an artifact of the anti-majoritarian nature of the Senate and Electoral College.
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