THE DEMOCRACY DELUSION.

The spats between the communists and corporatists in the Democrats' coalition never cease to amuse.  The latest example comes from Nation contributor Maxwell Burkey, who asserts, "The Democrats’ repositioning as the party of 'normalcy' undercuts its history of emancipatory social movements and participates in an antidemocratic ethos."   He's calling attention to a challenge confronting any social organization, whether it is a model railroad club, a university faculty, or a tribe, namely that the very act of organizing an organization implies the existence of members and non-members.  Mr Burkey recognizes my point,  "There might be evolutionary advantages for insiders receptive to good ideas from outsiders.  Denigrating people for their benightedness only gets you so far."

For the past ninety years or so, the Democrats have anointed themselves as the emancipators.  To Mr Burkey, that means being disruptive, which is not the same thing as constructive.

The promulgation of normalcy is incongruous with the Democrat’s most paramount aim: the defense of democracy. The democratization of American politics has advanced through emancipatory social movements that found it necessary to challenge the contours of normal politics. At its best, the Democratic Party has functioned as a coalitional force harnessing the energy of movement politics to defamiliarize normalcy and open policy windows for democratic reform. However effective as an electoral strategy, the Democrats’ repositioning as the party of normalcy undercuts this history and participates in an antidemocratic ethos.

“Normal” became common in the English language only in the mid-19th century, initially used in the context of medical science. Physicians of that era developed the concept of a “normal curve,” or the statistical “norm,” to catalogue the biological features of the average human being.

In that passage, he's engaging in positive policy analysis, up to a point.  "Emancipatory social movements" that call attention to discrepancies between the Scottish Enlightenment principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution are very different from social movements that turn their members' outsider status into the paradigm of fascist repression.

Unfortunately, of late, the so-called progressives with their deconstruction of norms have created a different sort of tyranny.  Power Line's John Hinderaker gets it.  "Liberals have mounted campaigns, intended to shame the rest of us, on behalf of ever-smaller slices of the population. That process has come to its logical end point, as the Left’s most prized victim group is now vanishingly small, at nowhere near 1% of the population."  It's dangerous, as Jonathan Turley notes.

The United States Constitution is the oldest and most successful Constitution in history. It has survived crises that have destroyed other nations. Yet, we are a people who have not experienced true tyranny.  We can lose our appreciation for how fortunate we are to have this system and the stability that it has afforded this country.

In challenging constitutional values like the system of checks and balances, these academics are seeking to strip away the very elements that have forced compromise and moderation throughout our history. It is the very genius of James Madison that allowed the most pluralistic nation on Earth to govern as one.

But because the positive theory of central tendencies takes on a normative cast through the very use of "normal" in their description, majority rule becomes tyranny. (Many libertarians will be pleased to concede that point, but for different reasons.)

The “normal” or average human was also the ideal, healthy human. This development was integral to eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which deployed the science of “normal” health to proffer racialized notions of the ideal citizen and a healthy body politic. As it migrated from professional to popular discourse in the 20th century, “normal” shed some of its original resonance in racialized science, becoming a powerful political framing. Like its usage in eugenics, “normal” was a way of conveying what is natural (the norm) and what is desirable (normalcy). As homeostasis was the ideal state of the normal human body, so stability and tranquility were the ideal state of the American body politic.

Stability and tranquility are right there in the Preamble to the Federal Constitution.  Properly applied, its principles do more for the small, noisy factions that fill the likes of Common Dreams and The Nation with their unending wailing.  There's another recent Jonathan Turley column (via Cafe Hayek) that suggests the evolutionary advantage of so doing.

The constitutional system was designed for bad times, not only good times. It seeks to protect individual rights, minority factions and smaller states from the tyranny of the majority. The result is a system that forces compromise. It doesn’t protect us from political divisions any more than good medical care protects us from cancer. Rather it allows the body politic to survive political afflictions by pushing factions toward negotiation and moderation.

It's in rejecting that negotiation and moderation, or those central tendencies, that Mr Burkey will get into trouble.

In practice, tranquility at home meant the quelling of dissenting movements amid the first Red Scare, which saw the then nascent FBI quash anti-war activism, harass the newly emergent ACLU, censor dissenting political publications, and repress a labor movement that included unionists, socialists, and anarchists. “Normalcy” had the benefit of suggesting a cool, calm, and rational politics, but it served as a comforting façade for precisely the antidemocratic, authoritarian impulses that worry so many about a second Trump term today.

For most of the history of political thought, democracy has been considered a radical aberration, the least desirable form of governance, unlikely to usher in normal political order. The founders of the American state and the principal authors of The Federalist Papers, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, shared this view as critics of democracy. Madison and Hamilton echoed canonical thinkers in Western political thought, like Plato and Aristotle, who understood democracy as inherently prone to disorder. Madison and Hamilton didn’t have the word “normal” at their disposal in the 1780s, but their rationale for the US Constitution reflected the desire for normalcy as Harding fashioned it in 1920. Hamilton, in Federalist No. 49, writes of “the danger of disturbing the public tranquility by interesting too strongly the public passions,” and concludes his defense of the Constitution, in Federalist No. 85, with an appeal to national tranquility. And Madison, in Federalist No. 10, devises a scheme of governance to preserve normal order in politics by insulating elite rule from democratic pressures.

America’s tradition of democratizing movements is a series of rebukes to the Federalists’ plea for tranquility and to Harding’s call to normalcy, as models of a democratic public sphere. For nearly a century beginning with the New Deal, the Democratic Party was an engine of progressive change, building political constituencies that overlapped with movement constituencies, and giving voice to a robust understanding of liberal democracy, one that at least implicitly legitimized the disruptive power of movements and the centrality of protest to the development of American democracy.

Arguably, a "cool, calm, and rational politics" might be more effective at damping down the disruptive power of the Militant Normals than the deplorable-shaming, disinformation-censoring tactics being deployed in defense of Our Democracy^(TM) at the same time that the vanishingly small protest communities antagonize the majority.  Get woke, go broke is part of the market environment.  "I hope we'll continue to see brands that put consumers before far-left activism."