POPULAR IS NOT THE SAME THING AS RIGHT.

In logic, consensus might be the ad popularum fallacy dressed up in academic regalia.  There's a corollary in politics, where it's Democracy^(TM) as long as the right-thinkers get their way.

George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley is on to the con.

All of these items have been previously raised by liberal professors and pundits as a way to circumvent small-D democratic processes in order to guarantee power for the big-D Democrats for years to come.

It was a telling rationalization. The Democratic Party has become a party of moral and political relativism, embodied in the popular “by any means necessary” mantra used by many on the left today.

But there are bad ideas, just as there are bad people who want to win at any cost.

And he's being gentle.  Tom "Tilting at Windmills" Knighton is harsher.  "What we’ve got is a world where many Democrats seem to think that if things don’t go their way, it can’t be because they’re running contrary to the Constitution."

Enjoy it, he's on a roll.

What matters is that for the left, the term “democracy” really means rule by Democrats. When they win, all is well, but when they lose, they start demanding that the deck get stacked so they won’t lose again, and they pretend it’s about justice.

It’s never about justice, though, because if it were, Virginia would never have tried to disenfranchise millions of voters so that one county would drive nearly the entire congressional delegation for the state. They know that’s wrong, but they didn’t care.

Basically, they’re sore losers, and every time they lose, they want to play Calvinball and change the rules so it doesn’t happen again. This, they argue, is essential for democracy. That works if they’re going by the definition I provided above, but only then, because they don’t actually care about the will of the people.

When the will of the people goes along with what they want, it’s all good. When it doesn’t, though, they suddenly figure that the people shouldn’t be listened to.

They’ve notoriously ignored where most people stand on things like trans athletes in women’s sports, for example, or voter ID or border enforcement. The left is on the wrong side of 80/20 issues, and they don’t even blink. The will of the people doesn’t matter on those.

So why is it so important now that we scuttle constitutional protections? Because the petulant children can’t get their way.

Perhaps because the scuttling, or perhaps the punishment cycles of the grim strategy outcome have been under way for some time.  Thus, Outside the Beltway's James Joyner suggests that even if Democrats are in a position to implement their less incrementalist dreams, many of them, particularly involving apportionment of the House of Representatives, achieve little. "All of this, mind you, just gets us back to the status quo ante."

Perhaps.  And yet dressing up the current bundle of ad popularum fallacies popular with the academic left and their sock puppets in politics is unlikely to turn out well.  That's Professor Turley's conclusion.

These are the same voices that have plagued our system for generations; the siren calls for unleashing forms of direct democracy and removing moderating influences in our system.

The Framers sought to create a system that would avoid the pattern of earlier democracies becoming tyrannies, including Athens. James Madison famously wrote, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

The Framers rejected more direct democratic systems to blunt the impulses and passions that destroyed other systems. They wanted to avoid democracy becoming what Benjamin Rush called a “mobocracy.”

The American Constitution was a rejection of the “bad ideas” that politicians (called demagogues in Ancient Greece) have historically used to marshal the power of the mob.

They did not want an “expanded playbook” designed to secure and retain power for one party. We were the first true Enlightenment Revolution based on the protections of rights derived not from the government but from God.

Now that was a good idea.

Perhaps in a quarter-millennium we got a few things right.  Bet on emergence, not on the wisdom of philosopher-kings whether elected to office or tenured at colleges you might have heard of.