Opinion | Who Believes in Democracy? – The New York Times

And that idea and self-image have remained a potent aspect of the right-wing imagination even as the old Nixon and Reagan majorities have diminished and disappeared: With every new age of grass-roots activism, from the Tea Party to the local-education revolts of today, the right reliably casts itself as small-d democrats, standing boldly athwart liberal technocracy singing Yankee Doodle.

Against this complicated backdrop, Trumps stolen-election narratives should be understood as a way to reconcile the two competing tendencies within conservatism, the intellectual rights skepticism of mass democracy and comfort with countermajoritarian institutions with the populist rights small-d democratic self-image. In Trumps toxic dreampolitik theres actually no tension there: The right-wing coalition is justified in governing from a minoritarian position because it deserves to be a true electoral majority, and would be if only the liberal enemy werent so good at cheating.

So seen from within the right, the challenge of getting out from under Trumps deceptions isnt just a simple matter of reviving a conservative commitment to democracy. Trump has succeeded precisely because he has exploited the rights more democratic impulses, speaking to them and co-opting them and claiming them for himself. Which means a conservative rival cant defeat or replace him by simply accusing him of being anti-democratic. Instead the only plausible pitch would argue that his populism is self-limiting and that a post-Trump G.O.P. could win a more sweeping majority than the one his supporters want to believe he won already one that would hold up, no matter what the liberal enemy gets up to.

But if that argument is challenging to make amid the smog of Trumpenkampf, so is the anti-Trump argument that casts American liberalism as the force to which anyone who believes in American democracy must rally. Because however much the rights populists get wrong about their claim to represent a true American majority, they get this much right: Contemporary liberalism is fundamentally miscast as a defender of popular self-rule.

To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.

But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.

This vision what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called undemocratic liberalism is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to Who votes? is different from its answer to Who decides? In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process.

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Opinion | Who Believes in Democracy? - The New York Times