Facebook Follies of Friends and Families

[Habbaku]

Agreed, fewer Republican voters will help us all.

[Barrister]

Because I figure you're probably not a regular National Review reader, but Kevin Williamson is a pretty smart and talented writer that usually delights in taking a fairly contrarian position.

He's also strongly anti-Trump.

The article itself is here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/why-not-fewer-voters/  You can agree or disagree with it as you like, but the article isn't as stupid as you probably think it is.

One excerpt:

Voters — individually and in majorities — are as apt to be wrong about things as right about them, often vote from low motives such as bigotry and spite, and very often are contentedly ignorant. That is one of the reasons why the original constitutional architecture of this country gave voters a narrowly limited say in most things and took some things — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. — off the voters' table entirely. It is easy to think of critical moments in American history when giving the majority its way would have produced horrifying results. If we'd had a fair and open national plebiscite about slavery on December 6, 1865, slavery would have won in a landslide. If we held a plebiscite on abolishing the death penalty today, the death penalty would be sustained.

[Valmy]

Would this free and fair plebiscite include the black voters?

I also have a hard time imagining all the northern whites who just lost 300,000+ lives securing the territories for small farmers would still vote for upholding the slave power and their paranoia of aristocratic control.

[The Brain]

"The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians."

[alfred russel]

Would this free and fair plebiscite include the black voters?

I also have a hard time imagining all the northern whites who just lost 300,000+ lives securing the territories for small farmers would still vote for upholding the slave power and their paranoia of aristocratic control.

That is a cool question - what would the results of a plebiscite have been? I'd assume abolition - the whites of the south would be roughly offset by former slaves, and the opinions of the north generally seem to be for abolition considering the dominance of the party that actually enacted abolition (and was rather open about the intention).

The only way I would expect the author's conjecture to be right is if blacks could not vote in the "free and fair election" but white former confederates could - so that the former confederate states could run up a +1 million net vote against abolition. Considering Lincoln's margin of victory in 1864 was about 400k, it seems like that would be a reasonably likely outcome, but that is a really odd definition of "free and fair". But if you used just the people eligible to vote at the moment of December 1865, I think that was before most confederates were disenfranchised, and before most freedmen were franchised, in most of the south.

[Jacob]

You can agree or disagree with it as you like, but the article isn't as stupid as you probably think it is.

I don't think it's stupid, I think it's pernicious.

The GOP is heavily pushing towards voter disenfranchisement as a means to hold on to power. I'm sure they can find smart and well spoken people to generate arguments to provide intellectual cover, but that doesn't change that it is anti-democratic. Nor does it change that the push for voter disenfranchisement is venally self-serving.

[alfred russel]

You can agree or disagree with it as you like, but the article isn't as stupid as you probably think it is.

I don't think it's stupid, I think it's pernicious.

The GOP is heavily pushing towards voter disenfranchisement as a means to hold on to power. I'm sure they can find smart and well spoken people to generate arguments to provide intellectual cover, but that doesn't change that it is anti-democratic. Nor does it change that the push for voter disenfranchisement is venally self-serving.

Conservatives have been rather openly anti-democratic for a while (you could snidely say for centuries). "We are a republic not a democracy" has been a line of though among conservatives for at least a decade.

[The Brain]

You can agree or disagree with it as you like, but the article isn't as stupid as you probably think it is.

I don't think it's stupid, I think it's pernicious.

The GOP is heavily pushing towards voter disenfranchisement as a means to hold on to power. I'm sure they can find smart and well spoken people to generate arguments to provide intellectual cover, but that doesn't change that it is anti-democratic. Nor does it change that the push for voter disenfranchisement is venally self-serving.

Conservatives have been rather openly anti-democratic for a while (you could snidely say for centuries). "We are a republic not a democracy" has been a line of though among conservatives for at least a decade.

A line of thought endorsed by President Bartlet, a supposedly liberal politician.

[Barrister]

You can agree or disagree with it as you like, but the article isn't as stupid as you probably think it is.

I don't think it's stupid, I think it's pernicious.

The GOP is heavily pushing towards voter disenfranchisement as a means to hold on to power. I'm sure they can find smart and well spoken people to generate arguments to provide intellectual cover, but that doesn't change that it is anti-democratic. Nor does it change that the push for voter disenfranchisement is venally self-serving.

Okay, but Williamson isn't a politician.  He doesn't identify with the GOP.  He doesn't even mention the Georgia rules.  And he literally wrote a book entitled "The Case Against Trump".

I don't think you actually wrote the article.

He also wrote a follow-up, as he gathered some criticism.

In it he wrote:

The emotional incontinence of the responses and the accompanying lack of anything that might be considered a genuine argument is further confirmation that what we are dealing with here is not a political idea at all but instead that very American form of idolatry: democracy as a religion — the supernatural belief that "voting is sacred," as Deb Haaland and many others have put it. But we should not allow that kind of figurative hyperbole to lead us astray: Voting is not sacred — it is, at best, useful, a way of organizing government that is, for all of its many faults, more convenient than bonking one another on the head.

But there are lots of very democratic political situations that produce terrible outcomes (India for much of its modern history) and situations in which the strict limitation of democracy creates superior outcomes (the Bill of Rights). Unlimited, unqualified democracy has been such a dangerous mess in so many contexts for so many centuries that our Founding Fathers despised the very word — and blessed their countrymen with a form of government in which majorities do not get their way when it comes to many very important things.

Contrary to our national political faith, voting is not a precondition of legitimacy. The People's Republic of China is an awful and evil state in many ways, but it is not an illegitimate one in the estimate of the people who consent to be governed by it. We don't have to like that to understand it, and we'd be better off understanding it. The European Union is a non-democratic superstate that is legitimate in spite of what some of its leaders concede is a "democracy deficit."  The U.S. Senate was not an illegitimate body when its members were not elected by the people; the Supreme Court is not made illegitimate by the fact that its members are not elected; nobody walking this earth voted for the Bill of Rights — an antidemocratic measure that puts certain things beyond the reach of mere elected majorities — but it is not for that reason illegitimate. Sixteen-year-olds are not oppressed by the fact that don't have the vote, even though some of them pay taxes. The District of Columbia is not oppressed by its constitutional status. Etc.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fewer-voters-continued/

[The Brain]

He sure likes digging, doesn't he?

[PDH]

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time...."

[DGuller]

The fact that not everything should be left to the voters is obvious, or else you'll have a Soviet style communist party democracy where the winners vote to have the losers shot.  I don't see how that follows that some people should not be voting.

It's a very old argument that some people are too stupid or irresponsible for voting, so it would be better if they were in some way relieved of the franchise.  People putting forth these arguments seem to forget that the stupid or irresponsible people are still subject to the power of the government.  I think that "taxation without representation" was a big issue a while ago.

[Jacob]

Okay, but Williamson isn't a politician.  He doesn't identify with the GOP.  He doesn't even mention the Georgia rules.  And he literally wrote a book entitled "The Case Against Trump".

Cool. I don't expect the public intellectuals and writers who provide lay the intellectual groundwork and provide the rhetorical cover for various political groupings to be actual politicians. It'd be kind of weird -or at least noteworthy uncommon - for someone like Williamson to be a politician, whatever his political leanings.

I don't think you actually wrote the article.

Definitely not. I doubt the National Review would publish anything I wrote

(More to the point, I didn't actually read it either.)

He also wrote a follow-up, as he gathered some criticism.

In it he wrote:

The emotional incontinence of the responses and the accompanying lack of anything that might be considered a genuine argument is further confirmation that what we are dealing with here is not a political idea at all but instead that very American form of idolatry: democracy as a religion — the supernatural belief that "voting is sacred," as Deb Haaland and many others have put it. But we should not allow that kind of figurative hyperbole to lead us astray: Voting is not sacred — it is, at best, useful, a way of organizing government that is, for all of its many faults, more convenient than bonking one another on the head.

But there are lots of very democratic political situations that produce terrible outcomes (India for much of its modern history) and situations in which the strict limitation of democracy creates superior outcomes (the Bill of Rights). Unlimited, unqualified democracy has been such a dangerous mess in so many contexts for so many centuries that our Founding Fathers despised the very word — and blessed their countrymen with a form of government in which majorities do not get their way when it comes to many very important things.

Contrary to our national political faith, voting is not a precondition of legitimacy. The People's Republic of China is an awful and evil state in many ways, but it is not an illegitimate one in the estimate of the people who consent to be governed by it. We don't have to like that to understand it, and we'd be better off understanding it. The European Union is a non-democratic superstate that is legitimate in spite of what some of its leaders concede is a "democracy deficit."  The U.S. Senate was not an illegitimate body when its members were not elected by the people; the Supreme Court is not made illegitimate by the fact that its members are not elected; nobody walking this earth voted for the Bill of Rights — an antidemocratic measure that puts certain things beyond the reach of mere elected majorities — but it is not for that reason illegitimate. Sixteen-year-olds are not oppressed by the fact that don't have the vote, even though some of them pay taxes. The District of Columbia is not oppressed by its constitutional status. Etc.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fewer-voters-continued/

Cool.

We are at a time when a morally bankrupt white supremacist populist nationalist movement is attempting to disenfranchise large parts of the electorate in an attempt to gain and seize power on a permanent basis in the US. No matter how unaligned you may feel you are, and no matter how intellectually rigorous and objective you may feel you are acting, you will be providing them rhetorical ammunition if you argue that it's okay to disenfranchise voters.

But since you read the article in question, maybe you can clarify who the people he believes should be relegated to the status of 16-year olds? Whose citizenship should be downgraded to have the influence on government equivalent to those of Chinese citizens?

[The Brain]

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess non-whites.

[Zanza]

Why would the Bill of Rights be beyond the power of voters? I thought congress can pass constitutional amendment and then the state legislatures can ratify these? That's how the Bill of Rights was originally created as well...