The American system of government is democratic. We are a democracy
There's an odd objection in some quarters that arises from time to time to calling the US a democracy. At other times, we're proud of it. During World War One we became, for instance, the Arsenal of Democracy. Not the Arsenal of Republics.
Some might say, well so what, but that's about as good of set of definitions as any.
Given as we're discussing, principally, the means of choosing our leaders, we can probably exclude topics 3, 4, and 5, for the most part.
That leaves categories 1 and 2.
Some people, on this topic, like to say "we're a republic, not a democracy". That displays, however, an erroneous understanding of what a republic is.
Let's go to the same source. It states:
Definition of republic
1a(1): a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president
(2): a political unit (such as a nation) having such a form of government
b(1): a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law
(2): a political unit (such as a nation) having such a form of government
c: a usually specified republican government of a political unitthe French Fourth Republic
2: a body of persons freely engaged in a specified activitythe republic of letters
3: a constituent political and territorial unit of the former nations of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, or Yugoslavia
We can obviously exclude 2 and 3 here.
Categories 1(a)(b) and (c) apply to the United States.
We choose our national legislature through democratic means. We vote for them. That makes us a democratic republic.
We're a democracy and a republic, just as the United Kingdom is a parliamentary democracy.
The United States has always been a democracy, but over time, its democratic nature has expanded enormously. Only men could vote originally. Indeed, in some colonies only propertied men could vote. Native Americans and the enslaved couldn't vote, no matter where they were born, either. Now all of this is in the past, and the voting age is 18, which it was not originally.
Also, we directly elect Senators, which was at one time not the case. They were originally chosen by State Legislatures, although some case can be made that this might have worked better than the current system.
Operating against this, as the government has expanded enormously, certain legislative functions have been turned over to regulatory bodies, which do not function democratically, although they are required to take public input for their decisions. And the Court started acting extra judicially in the 20th Century, which isn't democratic. Both of these things have recently been scaled back, which has been a subject of controversy.
And we're not a "pure democracy". No modern nation is. A pure democracy is one in which the citizens vote on everything. Examples of that are rare, with only ancient Athens coming to mind. A pure democracy wouldn't work, for obvious reasons, for any sizable nation, or perhaps any modern nation of any type.
Before closing, we should note that we're a federal republic. I.e, a system that brings in regions into the larger government. So, once again, our national legislature is based upon regions, i.e., states. We're not the only nation to have such an arrangement, by any means. Many do, and the varieties of that vary enormously.
Before we depart, the United States has traditionally been a "Liberal Democracy", which doesn't mean what it might at first seem to mean. The Collins Dictionary defines a Liberal Democracy as follows:
a democracy based on the recognition of individual rights and freedoms, in which decisions from direct or representative processes prevail in many policy areas
Pretty broad, but other definitions get quite lengthy.
Recently we wrote on Illiberal Democracy. Wikipedia defines Illiberal democracy as the following:
An illiberal democracy describes a governing system in which, although elections take place, citizens are cut off from knowledge about the activities of those who exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties; thus it does not constitute an open society.
Proponents of illiberal democracy, and it does have proponents, would not define it that way. They'd probably define it as a system of government in which leaders are chosen democratically, but within an overarching set of agreed to principals and values which supersede and override democratic impulses, and control what can legitimately be debated.
Helpful? Probably not much, but keeping in mind the deeper meaning of the terms is useful.
Basically, if people get to vote, and the vote determines the government, it's a democracy. If people get to vote, but that doesn't matter, it isn't.
There’s one overriding theme I’ve heard over and over and over again, and that is: We’re fed up. We’re fed up with seeing young mothers and fathers who can’t find baby formula for their newborns. We’re fed up with $6 gasoline and $6 diesel; we’re fed up with the shortage of fertilizer for our farmers and a supply chain that had been broken by the incompetence of our federal agencies. . . We’re fed up with critical race theory,” We’re fed up with boys competing in girls’ sports. We’re fed up with the radical abortion industry, and those extremists who are willing to destroy the Supreme Court to prevent us from being able to protect life.
Harriet Hageman.
Really?
Hageman is actually an establishment Republican, strongly associated with the successful farming class of southeastern Wyoming, and probably darned near 100% in agreement with Cheney on most things. If that's true, it makes her campaign cynical in that the same things she's "fed up" with Liz Cheney is probably also "fed up" with, save for liberal democracy itself, which Cheney is going out on a limb for, but Hageman is willing to work against if it puts her in office.[1].
But, in the Ford Center where she delivered her speech, many of those who are "fed up", are fed up with liberal democracy itself.
That explains a lot about the January 6 insurrection.
For those people, who feel that a certain vague set of "traditional American values" should be universally accepted, and what's more enforced, they're fed up with what they regard as attacks up on it by the politically liberal left. Not only are they tired of them, they'd drive them from the field as wholly illegitimate.
It's not that they oppose the voice of the people. . . it's that only people with the correct views, as they see them, should have a voice at all, and those people don't include the liberal left in the country.
They aren't even included if more of them voted for Hilary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020. Their votes may be simply doubted by many Trump true believes, many who beleive that it can't be the case that a majority of Americans don't hold the same beliefs they do, but for others, the votes of that other group, simply doesn't count.
They're for Illiberal Democracy.
Let's see if we can flesh this out.
And we'll start with this. CPAC is holding its convention in Hungary.
Hungary?
Yes.
Why?
Viktor Orban.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's Fidesz party won the Hungarian election a few weeks ago by a surprising margin, returning Orban to a fourth term.
Eh? So what?
Well, it's more significant, for strange reasons, than a person may think.
Fidez was founded in 1988 as a center left party that opposed the ruling Communist party. It registered officially as a party in 1990, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing, and Orbán was its first leader and, of course, remains its leader. It entered the National Assembly of Hungary that year, at which time it adopted liberal-conservatism as its plant form, causing its left-wing members to depart. It's since became a nationalist conservative party and moved increasingly to the right.
Since that time, it's become one of the most notable political parties of its type. Orbán himself described its existential philosophy as "Illiberal Democracy" rather than "Liberal Democracy", the latter being the type of government which generally describes true democracies. You know, think Edmund Burke and John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and those fellows.
Fidesz describes their philosophy, more specifically, as a "Christian illiberal democracy", which would explain the color orange in their banner, orange being the color of Christian democracy. Whatever it may be, they definitely aren't the same as Germany's Christian Democrats or the American Solidarity Party, two other Christian Democratic parties. Orbán and his followers regard liberal democracy as having undemocratic tendencies as they are, they assert, "intolerate of alternative views". His party is nativist, nationalistic, Hungarian ethnocentric, and self asserted as Christian, although like other governments in the past that have claimed the same, particularly in Catholic countries, some of the policies of the government have found disfavor with the country's presiding Bishops. Orbán himself is a member of the Presbyterian Reformed Church of Hungary which means, oddly enough, like Admiral Horthy of the 1920s through 1940s, who held similar views, he's a Protestant, and a Protestant in a largely Catholic country.
Like a lot of similar movements, and there have been similar ones in the past, they're difficult to describe from an American prospective. They are not easy to compare to the German Christian Democatic Party or Catholic Centre Party, as noted, two historic mainstream Christian democratic parteis. They're more comparable to some branches, but not all, of the Spanish Phalangist or to Francoist in general, to some degree. Perhahps the best comparison might be to Ireland's Christian democratic party, Fianna Fáil, during the DeValera era,
Indeed, the original Fianna Fáil would be a quite good comparison, as it was all of those things just noted, for the most part, and that had a major impact on the constitution and culture of Ireland before the Celtic Tiger era. It might also, it might be noted, have sewn the seeds for a collapse of its political views that came in that era. Culturally and politically, Fianna Fáil worked to make Ireland an institutionally Catholic republic, vesting education, for example, in the Church, over the Church's original objection. Indeed, much of the institutional Catholicism that Fianna Fail created was opposed by the Church and churchmen, who thought that newly independent Ireland should be a conventional parliamentary democracy instead.
Still, Fianna Fáil always existed in the context of parliamentary democracy, and it acceded to defeat when it lost, which it frequently did, and Ireland had and still has a vigorous parliament. So irrespective of its massive influence, and that of its founder, maybe the example isn't a good one, as the first principal for it turned out to be democracy, once it had turned to democracy in the first place.
Another example would be the Union Nationale of Quebec, which was extremely similar, and whose history and fate tells much of the same tale.
The Union Nationale was a fiercely Québécois party, seeking no favor for or from English-speaking Quebecers at all. Like Fianna Fáil, it was aggressively Catholic, and it was also aggressively agrarian, something that Fianna Fáil was also early on. It sought a Francophone enclave within Canada that had little to do with the rest of the English-speaking nation, and it often took positions diametrically in opposition to the rest of the nation, at a time in which the rest of Canada was aggressively English. Also like Fianna Fáil, in the highly federal Canada, it worked to institutionalize this by incorporating the Church into civil roles, such as education, by also health.
The result there, of course, was ultimately the Quiet Revolution, which destroyed the Union Nationale and put in its place an aggressively secular Francophone view. Often missed, the Church initially was one of the backers of the Quiet Revolution, although ultimately it got far out of hand and lead to a sort of collapse of Québécois culture, seeing the times as evidence that it should separate itself from roles better fulfilled by government.
And we should note, the party wasn't always in power, and when it wasn't, it accepted that. So again, maybe it isn't the best example.
Maybe Vichy France is.
Petainist France rejected, by fiat, the ideals of the Revolution, which were often honored frequently in the breach rather than the observance, and in France the Revolution itself had never really been fully accepted by a large percentage of the population. A sort of democracy lived on, but only one that was strictly confined within Petainist ideas, which were summed up by his motto "Work, Country, Family". A very secular man himself, Petain's conservatism was much like pre-war German conservatism, in that it was based on a set of social ideals, but not on religious ones. Like the German variant, they were social in nature, and highly nationalistic. And like the pre Nazi German variant, they were willing to endure some democratic institutions, but only to the extent that they were controlled within that context.
And next, perhaps, you have Franco's Spain, where no democracy was tolerated at all.
All of which takes us to Patrick Deneen.
Eh?
Deneen is a political science professor at the Notre Dame. He came into prominence in 2018 when he authored Why Liberalism Failed, a major work criticized heavily by the mainstream press and deeply studied by conservatives. Yale's snippet on the book states:
Has liberalism failed because it has succeeded? "Why Liberalism Failed offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril."—President Barack Obama "Deneen's book is valuable because it focuses on today's central issue. The important debates now are not about policy. They are about the basic values and structures of our social order."—David Brooks, New York Times Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.
Apparently Dineen takes a really dim view of things, noting that, as this states, "centripetal forces now at work. . . are generating their own failure". To put it mildly, his adherents, and probably Dineen himself, feel what might basically be described as a sense of doom about things as liberalism is inherently anti-democratic at the point at which it begins to attack its own culture's foundational principles.
This in fact was recently apparently a topic on First Things, the notable journal, and that resulted in a Catholic Answers Focus podcast on the topic, entitled:
A debate is raging within Catholicism over the legitimacy of modern liberalism. R.R. Reno, editor of First Things magazine, stops by to help us understand the stakes in the debate. Cy Kellet: Modern ideas about freedom are not setting people free.
re debating what to do about it. .R. Reno is next.
Heavy stuff.
Inside the covers of First Things, and elsewhere, there are in fact debates on this. Apparently the hardcore Dineen followers feel things are hopeless and are headed in the Fidesz direction. In contrast, individuals like George Weigel feel that things are messed up, and it's hard to disagree with that, but that this can be corrected with in the foundations of the liberal democracy itself. Weigel, I'd note, just authored The Fragility of Order, which I do have, but have not yet read. It's related to this topic, apparently.
And then there's a generally disgusted George F. Will.
Huh?
Will is, of course, the most prominent of the remaining Buckleyite conservatives, and is generally disgusted with everything right now.
During a recent episode of Meet The Press, Will was one of the panelists and in response to a question about why some elements of the GOP, albeit a minority, have had a love affair with Putin, he spouted off, in a somewhat angry tone, that it was "because they loved Orban first". He was clearly mad and upset about it, but a little bit of explanation would have been helpful.
In fairness, he did expand a bit, but the expansion was oblique and probably nonsensical to all but the most informed. Basically, he was making the point that American conservatives admire Orbán, or at least some do, as he's maintaining a certain very conservative line on things that they wish to maintain here. By extension, they see Putin in the same light.
And indeed Orbán is an open ally of Putin, although it's certainly worth questioning if they are in fact anything really alike, politically. While critics of Hungary have labeled the country's current commitment to democracy imperiled, it does in fact function democratically if in a semi authoritarian way. Orbán could have lost the recent election. To a degree, those who criticize Orbán do so as they feel that his policies are anti-democratic, but what they really are is anti-liberal. It is different.
Putin, on the other hand, is anti-democratic and where he fits on the conservative/liberal scale is pretty hard to figure out. He's made a point of being aligned with the Russian Orthodox Church, and vice versa, and some of his policies, such as his policies on homosexuality, square very much with Orbán's views on the same things. It seems, however, that what Orbán is, is an Illiberal Democrat, and what Putin is, is an Illiberal Authoritarian. They aren't the same thing.
And that takes us to CPAC.
What?
Yes, the Conservative Political Action Conference.
CPAC used to essentially be the political equivalent of Comic Con, quite frankly, and wasn't taken much more seriously than a big Star Trek convention. That's really changed in recent years, and all the hopefuls on the right who are hoping to gain traction show up at it and give firey far right speeches. In recent years, CPAC has had the impact of taking the GOP further and further into the right wing camp. It's also had an impact on the states, as various organizations with very specific goals hand out predrafted legislative bills that state legislators pack home and submit to their state legislative bodies. There have been several that have been introduced in the Wyoming legislature in recent years. It's having quite an impact, even though most have failed.
Essentially, CPAC is going global and it's endorsing Fidesz.
And that's where things tie together.
But not before we consider Rod Dreher.
Readers of this august cyberjournal may recognize Dreher as he's the dour social critic and conservative who, a few years ago, issued a book called The Benedict Option. I've not read it, but the gist of it is that Christians should take a page out of the history of St. Benedict, as Dreher understands it, and essentially form Christian enclaves in what he regards as a Barbarian sea.
Lots of modern Christians have taken up seeing the world sort of this way, in a "post-modern" or "post Christian" way, but frankly their points are very much over done. Christianity fundamentally and irrevocably changed the Western world, but it frankly simply is not the case that after the year 450 thigns were just completley Christian until 1968.
And this is an important fact, as it forms much of the central world view of those who are now on the far right.
In reality, adherence to Christian morality waxed and waned over the centuries, with there being eras in which the tide seemed to be going out, and others when it came back in. Much of the Age of Englightment, from which Liberal Democracy comes we should note, was a freaking moral sewer, at least to the degree that classes with some means were involved. There's a delusional group of people who believe that monarchy upheld the moral standards, for example, but they hardly did, with royals leaping out of various people's beds so quickly that its a wonder they had any time for affairs of state at all. Even in the high Medieval Age, the offspring of monarchs usually is divided into legitimate and illegitimate, with a long list for both.
As noted, the Age of Englightment was a real moral sewer. Often poorly understood, this was exhibited by at least some of our "Founding Fathers", who were part of that age. Benjamin Frankly was a self-confessed practitioner of "wenching" when he was young. Thomas Jefferson had children by his wife and his wife's half sister, the latter who a product of a union between a slave and his wife's father, and who was held in bondage herself.
Pretty icky.
This is "Pride Month".
"Pride Month" image published by the United States Marine Corps, which was the last branch of the military to accept women, and very reluctantly at that, into combat roles (a decision that I disagree with). When average Americans, many of whom have not really accepted that current Western liberal concept of homosexuality being normal, see this in one of the most manly of American institutions, they're going to react somehow. FWIW, I've known a Vientam vet who was a Marine in that country and, indeed, was homosexual. He was a really tough guy as well. That isn't the point, but rather the public requirement of acceptance.
So, you may ask?
Well, it relates more than a person might suppose. Let's consider one of Hageman's "fed ups" once again.
We’re fed up with boys competing in girls’ sports.
Truth be known, a lot of rank and file average people are fed up with just that, and much of what's related to it, even those who aren't saying so. At a deep down level, a lot of people who are socially conservative are reeling with the thought that things that were regarded as deeply abnormal, and indeed perverse, just recently are now celebrated with "pride". And this is forcing a social view down the throats of a large section of the population. Indeed, just as the left decries the right for acting anti democratically, the left is fueling the fire by acting massively anti democratically itself. It's mostly just tearing down, with no guardrails at all as to what is left up.
And this hits people at all sorts of different levels, and not just those who are universally conservative on all of their views. That's because big portions of the country are forcing a social construct on traditional beliefs, even if they have to counter science to do it.
That this was going to create a massive problem in society was obvious at the point, ironically now given the left wing displeasure with the Supreme Court, when the Supreme Court issued the Obergefll decision. As long ago as that, which isn't all that long ago really, we predicted that this would be a massive turning point in acceptance of the status quo in the country, and we've proven right.
It isn't the only one. Things have been slow in building. And populism, which is a separate movement, but one which is feeding into this, and vice versa, has its roots in a lot of other issues, including massively high immigration and the loss of blue collar jobs, both of which are tied to together and feed into each other.
All of these together, however, are a poisonous brew that we've been adding ingredients into since the 1960s.
So now we have a Republican Party that's split between populism, establishment conservatism, and illiberal democracy conservatism. It's an odd mix. It's like mixing, in one Uber ride, Huey Long, Mitt Romney and Rod Dreher, with Donald Trump trying to tell the driver where to go.
By State Archives of North Carolina - https://www.flickr.com/photos/north-carolina-state-archives/21548679213/, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54996137
Something to consider here, however.
Fianna Fáil, which dominated early Ireland, but never lost its democratic principles, evolved and ultimately Ireland went through a large, and frankly tragic, shift. I think the Ireland before the Celtic Tiger was a better Ireland, but as at least one prominent American Catholic churchman noted at the time, the system was setting Ireland up for later social problems.
Quebec underwent a Quiet Revolution, which the Church supported, but with equally tragic social results. In some ways, Quebec has become pathetic among the Canadian provinces due to what it experienced, which can in part be argued that this was due to the revolution coming too late.
Vichy fell with Nazi Germany, and the French right has never recovered. Only now is there a serious right wing in France, and it continues to struggle with the legacy of Vichy.
The point is that, generally, bad ideas die in the sunlight. Times do change. The United States is going through a massive period of internal turmoil, and it seems, only just now, 50 plus years of the United States Supreme Court being a quasi legislative branch of government are ending, to much left wing ire.[2].
Imposing an illiberal democracy in its place probably stands, ultimately, to arrest the return to real democracy, and to sanity as well, and to damage the very principals that those now enamored with it espouse.
Footnotes:
1. Hageman makes missteps in what she's pitching to. Is the average Wyomingite fed up with the "shortage of fertilizer for our farmers"? No, most of us know nothing about that whatsoever. That reflects the southeastern Wyoming agricultural view that everyone has the exact same concerns that they do, a common affliction for most people. Not that it doesn't matter, but it isn't something most people spend much time thinking about.
2. It may be worth asking, as part of this, how much of a return those showing up in these crowds really want.
Hageman's list of offenses list some, but how much further beyond that would people really wish to go? Before the Courts and Legislatures really started down the current path, a lot of things now taken for granted were illegal.
A person can argue on moral bases that perhaps many are still bad ideas, and people do, but do people want the law to return to these topics? For example, no-fault divorce was not a thing. Cohabitation was illegal in many states. Homosexual activity was illegal in some states. Birth control was illegal in some states.
I'd note this as I suspect in any crowed of people cheering for those who are pondering illiberal democracy there are, for lack of a better blunt way to put it, cohabiting birth control users.
Of course, that highlights once again that the rank and file of the far right camp isn't really in touch with some other aspects of this far right movement. Hageman is an establishment Republican, or was. She's espousing a set of ideas that fit into the illiberal democracy book, however. But then many of these ideas cross over.
Anyhow, it's pretty hard to imagine Rod Dreher being comfortable with tattooed Trump rally goers. Would he be comfortable with Frank Eathorne?
Observers here may have noted that I failed to put up a post for Memorial Day when this post was first made, in 2012.
This is in part due to Memorial Day being one of those days that moves around as, in recent years, Congress has attempted to make national holidays into three day weekends. That's nice for people, but in some ways it also takes away from the holiday a bit. At the same time, it sort of tells you that if a holiday hasn't been moved to the nearest Friday or Monday, next to its original location on the calendar, it means that the holiday is either hugely important, a religious holiday, or extremely minor. The 4th of July and Flag Day, one major and one minor, do not get moved, for example.
Anyhow, Memorial Day commenced at some point either immediately after or even during the Civil War, depending upon how you reckon it, and if you are date dependent for the origin of the holiday. In American terms, the day originally served to remember the dead of the then recent Civil War. The holiday, in the form of "Decoration Day" was spreading by the late 1860s. The name Memorial Day was introduced in the 1880s, but the Decoration Day name persisted until after World War Two. The holiday became officially named Memorial Day by way of a Federal statute passed in 1967. In 1971 the holiday was subject to the Uniform Monday Holiday Act which caused it to fall on the last Monday of May, as it does now.
The day, therefore, would have always been observed in Wyoming, which had Grand Army of the Republic lodges since prior to statehood. But, like many holidays of this type, observation of the holiday had changed over the years. In the 1960s and 1970s, by my recollection, the day was generally observed by people visiting the grave sites of any deceased family member, and therefore it was more of a day to remember the dead, rather than a day to recall the war dead. This, however, has changed in recent years to a very noticeable extent. Presently, it tends to serve as a second Veterans Day, during which veterans in general are recalled. This year, for example, Middle School children in Natrona County decorated the graves of servicemen in the county with poppies, strongly recalling the poppy campaigns of the VFW that existed for many years.
Wyoming has a strong military culture, even though the state has lost all but two of its military installations over the years. The state had the highest rate of volunteers for the service during World War Two, and it remained strongly in support of the Vietnam War even when it turned unpopular nationwide. The state's National Guard has uniquely played a role in every US war since statehood, including Vietnam, so perhaps the state's subtle association with Memorial Day may be stronger than might be supposed.
On remembrance, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out our Some Gave All site.
It's worth remembering here that Memorial Day has its origin in a great act of national hatred, the Civil War. That is, the day commenced here and there as an effort to remember the Civil War dead, which, at the end of the day, divide sharply into two groups; 1) those who gave their lives to keep their fellow human beings in cruel enslaved bondage, and those who fought to end it.
Now, no doubt, it can be pointed out that those who died for slavery by serving the South, and that is what they died for if they were killed fighting for the South, didn't always see their service that way. It doesn't matter. That was the cause they were serving. And just as pointedly, many in the North who went as they had no choice were serving to "make men free", as the Battle Hymn of the Republic holds it, irrespective of how they thought of their own service.
And it's really that latter sort of sacrifice this day commemorates.
The first principal of democracy is democracy itself.
And because of that, it is inevitably the case that people will win elections whom you do not wish to. Perhaps you may even detest what they stand for.
Democracy is a messy business and people, no matter what they claim to espouse, will often operate against democratic results if they don't like them. In the 1950s through at least the 1990s, the American left abandoned democracy to a significant degree in favor of rule by the courts, taking up the concept that average people couldn't really be trusted to adopt a benighted view of the liberalism that they hoped for which would be free of anything, ultimately, liberally. An enforced libertine liberalism.
The results of that have come home to roost in our own era as a counter reaction, building since the 1980s, has now found expression in large parts of the GOP which have gone to populism and Illiberal Democracy.
We have a draft thread on Illiberal Democracy, which is a term that most people aren't familiar with, but it's best expressed currently by the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, to the horror of Buckeyite conservatives like George F. Will.
Defining illiberal democracy isn't easy, in part because it's most commonly defined by its opponents. Setting aside their definitions, which it probably would be best defined as is a system in which a set of beliefs and values are societally defined and adopted which are external to the government and constitution of a county, and a democracy can only exist within it. The best historical example, if a good one can actually be found, might be Vichy France, which contrary to some assumptions was not a puppet of Nazi Germany so much as a species of near ally, but which had a right wing government, with elections, that operated only within the confines of the beliefs of the far right government.
Much of what we see going on now in the far right of the country, which is now the province of the GOP, is described in this fashion, although not without its ironies. Viewed in that fashion, the January 6, insurrection actually makes sense, as the election was "stolen" because it produced the wrong results, culturally. I.e., if you assume that the basic concepts of the Democratic Party fall outside of the cultural features which the far right populist wing of the GOP holds as legitimate, such an election would be illegitimate by definition.
The United States, however, has never viewed democracy that way. Not even the Confederate South, which may be the American example that treads on being the closest to that concept, did. The Southerners felt comfortable with human bondage, but they did not feel comfortable instituting an unwritten set of values into an unwritten constitution. Slavery, the core value of the South, was presumed justified, but it was written into the law.
Much of the nation now does.
Indeed, in the Trump wing of the GOP, or the wing which came over to trump, and brought populist Democrats into the party, that is a strong central tenant. When the far right in the current GOP speaks about being a "Constitutional Conservative", they don't mean being Constitutional Originalists. Rather, they are speaking about interpreting the Constitution according to a second, unwritten, and vaguely defined "constitution".
The ironies this piles on are thick, as the unwritten social constitution this piles on looks back to an American of decades ago, much of which has indeed unfortunately changed, but much of which the current backers of this movement are not close to comporting with themselves. The imagined perfect America that is looked back towards, the one that we wish to "Make Great Again", was culturally an Anglo-Saxon Protestant country, or at least a European Christian one, with very strong traditional values in that area. Those who now look at that past as an ideal age in part because social movements involving such things as homosexuality and the like need to appreciate that the original of the same set of beliefs and concerns would make heterosexual couples living outside of marriage and no fault divorce just as looked down upon. Put another way, the personal traits of Donald F. Trump, in this world, would be just as abhorrent as those of Barney Frank.
This is not to discuss the pluses or minuses of social conservatism or of social liberalism in any form. That's a different topic. But American democracy, no matter how imperfect, has always rested on the absolute that its first principal of democracy is democracy. Taken one step further, a central concept of democracy is that bad ideas die in the sunlight.
That has always proven true in the past, and there's any number of movements that rose and fell in the United States not because they were suppressed, but because they simply proved themselves to be poor ideas. In contrast, nations which tried to enforce a certain cultural norm upon their people by force, such as Vichy France or Francoist Spain, ended up doing damage to it, even where some of the core values they sought to enforce were not bad (which is not to excuse the many which were).
All of that may seem a long ways from Memorial Day, but it's not. No matter how a person defines it, as the end of the day the lost lives being commemorated today were lost for that concept of democracy and no other. Those who would honor them, from the left or the right, can only honor them in that context.
That means that those who would support insurrections as their side didn't win, aren't honoring the spirit of the day. And those who would impose rule by courts, as people can't be trusted to vote the right way, aren't either.
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