After quitting blogging in a huff, Andrew Sullivan returns (as he was always going to) with a long tedious New York Mag piece about tyranny. By which he means the threat of Trump. It invokes Plato and James Madison before sinking back into the contradictory incoherence that makes it so appealing to the chattering classes on both sides that are passing it around.
As usual with Sullivan, it's not so much that he's wrong, as that he spices up cliches with histrionics. The whole thing only works for someone incapable of following a logical argument.
Is too much democracy the danger?
Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power. Voting rights were tightly circumscribed. The president and vice-president were not to be popularly elected but selected by an Electoral College, whose representatives were selected by the various states, often through state legislatures. The Senate’s structure (with two members from every state) was designed to temper the power of the more populous states, and its term of office (six years, compared with two for the House) was designed to cool and restrain temporary populist passions. The Supreme Court, picked by the president and confirmed by the Senate, was the final bulwark against any democratic furies that might percolate up from the House and threaten the Constitution. This separation of powers was designed precisely to create sturdy firewalls against democratic wildfires.
That's all well and good, but he objects to exactly that outcome when it came to Bush.
The barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our president, are now almost nonexistent. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote and won the election thanks to Electoral College math and, more egregiously, to a partisan Supreme Court vote.
I'll skip over fact checking this nonsense. The larger point is that there's no logical argument here. Sullivan contradicts himself in two sentences. His argument goes left the moment it encounters Bush.
The entire piece is full of grave nonsense that anyone with a basic knowledge of history can dismantle in 30 seconds.
Direct democracy didn’t just elect Congress and the president anymore; it expanded the notion of who might be qualified for public office. Once, candidates built a career through experience in elected or Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly imploded. In 1940, Wendell Willkie, a businessman with no previous political office, won the Republican nomination for president, pledging to keep America out of war and boasting that his personal wealth inoculated him against corruption: “I will be under obligation to nobody except the people.” He lost badly to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but nonetheless, since then, nonpolitical candidates have proliferated, from Ross Perot and Jesse Jackson, to Steve Forbes and Herman Cain, to this year’s crop of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and, of course, Donald J. Trump.
Sullivan sticks military commanders in there because otherwise his argument completely falls apart. This awkward argument insists that a general is qualified, but that a businessman isn't. Of course Andrew Sullivan has to overlook Herbert Hoover. Or we could discuss how much public office experience Woodrow Wilson had. Or we could go back to the Founding Fathers.
But it doesn't really matter. The bias here is evident with a list of candidate who, except for Jesse Jackson, are centrist or right. There's no mention of Obama's lack of qualifications for the job.
Trump, we now know, had been considering running for president for decades.
We knew it in 1999 when his plans to run for president were widely covered. It's not something we discovered last week. Andrew Sullivan, like Obama, constantly discovers things last week.
There's a section that few would argue with about the impact of the internet and the coarsening of public discourse, but it's only a problem when his side doesn't win. The same factors that he bemoans when it comes to Republicans are great when it comes to Democrats.
The way in which outsider candidates, from Obama to Trump and Sanders, have brought millions of new people into the electoral process is an unmitigated advance. The inclusion of previously excluded voices helps, rather than impedes, our public deliberation...
...Politically, we lucked out at first. Obama would never have been nominated for the presidency, let alone elected, if he hadn’t harnessed the power of the web and the charisma of his media celebrity.
The climate Obama thrived in, however, was also ripe for far less restrained opportunists. In 2008, Sarah Palin emerged as proof that an ardent Republican, branded as an outsider, tailor-made for reality TV, proud of her own ignorance about the world, and reaching an audience directly through online media, could also triumph in this new era.
So the internet's democratization is good as long as Andrew Sullivan approves of the results. They're bad if he doesn't. Unqualified candidates are good if they're Obama, but bad if they're Republicans.
Andrew Sullivan's democracy is really that of one man. Not Plato or Madison. Just him.
While Andrew Sullivan bemoans tyranny, he is actually the aspiring tyrant. In attempting to describe others, he is actually describing himself.
For, like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape. Once again, Plato had his temperament down: A tyrant is a man “not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule others”; a man flooded with fear and love and passion, while having little or no ability to restrain or moderate them; a “real slave to the greatest fawning,” a man who “throughout his entire life ... is full of fear, overflowing with convulsions and pains.” Sound familiar?
It should. It's a great description of Andrew Sullivan.