Senator Mike Lee (R-UT):
Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.
— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) October 8, 2020
A great-sounding excuse for keeping Trump, and indeed the entire Republican Party, as corrupt and immoral as it is, in power. In fact, David Harsanyi buys enthusiastically into it.
But it doesn’t work. From Democracy, built on a backbone of justice unswayed by popular passions, attended to by minds and hands reverent to its rational sanctity, trusted by those enabled by it, flows liberty, peace, and prosperity. Not in spite of it, nor unswayed by it, but because of it. That’s what makes Lee’s magical formula fail, utterly and completely.
Harsanyi’s piece, which appears to be little more than an excuse for cheap shots at people he despises, doesn’t address this central tenet of the system concocted and refined by the Founding Fathers.
And if you’re wondering about my phrase reverent to its rational sanctity, that means magical thinkers need not apply. The one thing democracy requires is a substantial, majority substantially devoted to rationality. A cacophony of magical thinkers, each disdainful of the next, and ready to condemn them for their ignorance, will merely cause democracy to fail.
