‘What Szalai praises as ‘mass democratic politics,’ others would call mob rule’
By Laura Hollis
Ah, the Left. Ever ready to burn the foundations of America to the ground in pursuit of … progress.
The latest example is a New York Times article by Jennifer Szalai titled, “The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” You can guess what her conclusion will be, but the subhead nevertheless provides an additional clue: “One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document.”
Unsurprisingly, Szalai starts out by casting everything in terms of current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. He is not only a threat to the Constitution according to Szalai, but – more alarmingly – the Constitution is to blame for his political existence. “Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution,” she argues, “making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional.”
As proof, Szalai complains that Trump lost the “popular vote,” and that two of his three Supreme Court nominees were confirmed by a majority of the U.S. Senate that only represented 44% of the population. She points accusingly at the provisions of the Constitution containing the Electoral College (Article I), the composition of the U.S. Senate (Article II) and the method of selecting federal judges (Article III).
Szalai ignores that the United States is not, in fact, a democracy, but a constitutional republic. She repeats the trope that creation of the Electoral College was all about slavery – it was not – and she disregards that the Constitution was a treaty of sorts, between 13 independent states that agreed to cede some but by no means all of their sovereignty to a federal government of deliberately limited powers. It was intended by the founders that the larger populations of states like New York (which was not a slave state) and Virginia (which was) would not be able to simply outvote the citizens of smaller, less populated states like Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Just so, today, California and Illinois are not supposed to outvote Wyoming and Iowa. Our bicameral Congress was established with the composition of the House of Representatives based upon population, but states having equal representation in the Senate, for the same reason – giving less-populated states a meaningful voice in federal governance.
Szalai sees the lack of raw majoritarianism as a flaw, and she quotes legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky for support. Chemerinsky writes, “It is important for Americans to see that these failures stem from the Constitution itself.” Szalai points out that Chemerinsky is not alone. “The argument that what ails the country’s politics isn’t simply the president, or Congress, or the Supreme Court, but the founding document that presides over all three, has been gaining traction,” she writes, “especially among liberals.”
But what Szalai praises as “mass democratic politics,” others would call mob rule.
This is how it starts: “Fringe” pieces are written and viewed as outliers. Then come the academics, whose role it is to give outrageous ideas “scholarly” credibility (even though a shocking amount of what gets published in the humanities and social sciences is unmitigated garbage, as scholars Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay revealed to academia’s great embarrassment in 2018).