The 56-year-old woman from Michigan was not screaming. She wasn’t shouting. There were no bulging forehead veins. Her explanation at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was matter of fact: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
We are living in the “upside-down.”
Calls from Within
We are not the first to debate the raiments of our government.
“A republic if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin was to have said. James Madison, a key architect of the Constitution, used the terms "republic" and "democracy" interchangeably over his lifetime. In Federalist No. 14, he distinguished between a "pure democracy" of direct rule by the people and a "republic" of representative government, but considered both to be forms of popular rule. Constitutional democracy, liberal democracy, radical democracy.
These terms rankle. Scholars are not in agreement. Founder John Adams took aim at Thomas Paine’s too “democratical” ideas in Common Sense calling it a “crapulous mass.” The word “crapulous” doesn’t mean what it sounds like despite the collapse of contemporary standards of discourse. Adams was referring to Paine’s crapulous work as drunken and fueled by alcohol. Adams was indignant. How could Paine promote allowing white men who did not own property the right to vote and hold public office. The very idea!
We’ve come a long way. Or have we? Yes, if we acknowledge the ascendence of minority rights in a series of Constitutional amendments. No, as we witness attempts to chip away at those rights. The tensions between majority and minority rule are playing out in our courts and our legislatures and our executive branches of government with no resolution expected anytime soon.
When William F. Buckley Jr. published God and Man at Yale in 1951, he was arguing against the bipartisan liberal consensus that the federal government should protect civil rights, provide a basic social safety net and build infrastructure. His alternative was to promote Christianity and free enterprise.
That thinking is gaining momentum again in American life. In fact, rebellion against liberal traditions has never been extinguished. There has always been an anti-liberal vein running through our society despite the belief fostered by Martin Luther King that “the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.”
As we look toward that justice, which was certainly not evident in the original Constitution, we embrace a radical set of principles that all human beings are created equal - an equality that guarantees certain inalienable rights that do not derive from religious belief but are “self-evident.” They were not granted by God, by the crown or even by the Constitution. Until the American Revolution no government had ever been founded on these liberal principles. Imagine an 18th century emperor ceding the principle of universal and enforceable equal rights.
Our cherished liberal democracy could all change. Soon.
Across the 2024 landscape, governments-in-waiting are ready to deploy anti-liberal objectives into a future administration sympathetic to anti-liberal objectives.
- We know of Project 2025’s designs on women, bodily autonomy, vulnerable minorities, and more.
- Scholars at the Claremont Institute are opposed to the founding fathers' ideal of division between church and state.
- Seven Mountain Dominionism proposes to take over every aspect of organized American life including family, education, entertainment, and media.
- Christian Nationalism spouts a political ideology posing as religion.
- The Center for Renewing America is dedicated to disempowering the so-called administrative state largely through dismantling the expertise of career civil servants./America First Policy Institute is a research haven of right-wing populists.
- America First Policy Institute is a research haven of right-wing populists and America First Legal argues cases before the court attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion in all its forms including so-called “woke corporation” human resource practices.
The list of antidemocratic organizations is long, extensive, well-funded, and coherent. They define the United States as a White Christian country. They repudiate the division between church and state. They view the United States as under siege from secular forces. Their “grievance” is that they are deprived of the “freedom” to impose their religious and racial views on society. “Freedom of conscience” gives these true believers the right to replace a country which bestows individual rights with a Christian commonwealth - a culture that preserves order, promotes public morality, and aspires to the beauty that awaits us in another Kingdom. After the graveyard.
Glenn Ellmers, a Claremont scholar writes, the “only road forward is overturning the existing post-American order.”
And there we have it again. In the upside-down we hear that mantra over and over. To overturn. To overthrow the government, just like the woman from Michigan said on January 6, 2021.
Howls from Beyond
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” - George Santayana
Totalitarian tyranny is coddled by both forgetting and allowing. In his new book, “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power,” Timothy Ryback chronicles a single year, 1932, during which Hitler didn’t grab power. He was given power.
Germans were voting for stability and safety - not for the depredations and nightmares to come—just for some nice programs they thought would benefit them and protect them from the people they feared.
And whom did they fear? They feared what Hitler told them to fear. Hitler knew precisely how to reassure Völkisch nationalists that he would protect their pure culture, pure race, pure language, and a common moral order from “the evil other.”
It worked.
Years later, these same tactics are being deployed in Russia by Vladimir Putin and in Hungary by Victor Orbán and other authoritarian regimes. Putin and Orbán present simplistic portrayals of the West as the place where family, church, nation and traditional notions of marriage and gender go to die. They subjugate the news media. They demonize migrants. They energize the narrative of victimhood as they look backwards with yearning toward a mythical halcyon past.
Pulitzer Prize winning historian Anne Applebaum says it is not enough for a tyrant to control the masses through surveillance, observation, and repression. It is just as important for the tyrant to poison and destroy the liberal ideas that the masses may find seductive. Things like a dynamic constitutional democracy forever expanding the equal rights and liberties of individuals is a threat to autocracy.
“That is why autocratic regimes have slowly turned their repressive mechanisms outward, into the democratic world. If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned.” - Anne Applebaum
Autocracy depends on the steady drumbeat of discrediting democracy as divided, degenerative, dangerous & weak. The autocratic narrative is about stability and safety. About nice programs and protection from “the evil other.”
According to Applebaum, the “Chinese Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere” lists seven perils faced by the Chinese Communist Party—among them things we hold dear:
1. Western constitutional democracy
2. Universal human rights
3. Media independence
4. Judicial independence
5. Civic participation
6. Western forces hostile to China
7. Dissidents inside the country
These perils face the Chinese Communist Party far away. But it is more than concerning that some of these perils are finding affinity with authoritarian groups here at home. Why else would anti-liberal, antidemocratic forces be raising their voices in support of the theory of a unitary executive. In so many words, an imperial presidency? How did these American forces become allies of Putin? Of Orbán? Of the Chinese Communiqué?
“Historical lessons, it seems, fade after three generations. Warnings of the disasters that engulfed 20th-century Europe under fascist governments tend not to resonate with 21st-century supporters of xenophobic nationalist movements that have none of the militarism of fascism, nor the personality cults of its dictatorial leaders, but are fed by hatred of “the other” and jingoistic hymns to national glory.” - Roger Cohen, New York Times
Whistling Past November
Can we afford to forget? Or to allow? What are we willing to do to defend our democracy? At the very least, defense calls for civic engagement and participation. And yet, on a recent Primary Day, a University student said, “a lot of people are turned off from politics because they don’t want to get engaged in it.”
That is not an option. We are engaged when women’s reproductive freedoms are in shackles. When women are threatened with prosecution. Persecution. We are engaged when contraception is in the crosshairs of the next Supreme Court challenge. We are engaged when vulnerable minorities are threatened with government-sanctioned attacks. When all manner of rights, freedoms, and liberties are restrained by anti-liberal diktat. We don’t have the luxury to be “not engaged.”
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg often quoted Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous line,
“The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.”
The country cannot afford to be convinced of the invincibility of the founding fathers and their documents. They can’t be lulled into thinking that no one would want an authoritarian society… merely different interpretations of democracy built on polite debate. That polite debate is not going to happen. It is a ruse.
January 6, 2025, is not far off. By then, will the woman from Michigan be convinced of a free and fair November 2024 election? Will she be satisfied with the outcome? If not, will she return once again to the Capitol to overthrow the government?
Inertia at the polls in November is not an option.
“If the American system of government fails this year, it will not be because the institutions established by the founders failed. It will not be because of new technologies or flaws in the Constitution. No system of government can protect against a determined tyrant. Only the people can.” – Robert Kagan, Washington Post
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