Debunking Charlie Kirk on our democratic republic

Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA, has been known to tweet the claim that the United States is not a democracy, but a constitutional republic. See here his October 2018 tweet and one year prior:

The question is a settled one. Kirk is offering a false dichotomy. We are both. UCLA law school professor Eugene Volokh in The Washington Post notes: “There is no basis for saying that the United States is somehow ‘not a democracy, but a republic.’”

Why the Distinction?

So the question becomes why does Kirk want to maintain the distinction?

First, there is the fear appeal. As Kirk makes clear in his tweet from October 2018, if 51% (actually it’s 50% plus 1 as definition of majority) can take away “100%” of your rights, then democracy is bad. This is fear mongering — the theory behind the spike in gun and ammo sales during the Obama era, during which so many thought the “government was coming for our guns.” That specific fear, though lessened, still exists for Kirk. Kirk has expanded that fear of no guns into fear of no speech, particularly as he plays conservatives as victims on college campuses.

In theory, yes, under a constitution all rights are protected, but US history teaches us if nothing else that the Constitution is sadly just as political as laws and so in the wrong hands, rights are abridged. See slavery, education, voting, etc. Kirk has attested again and again to many rights being abridged.

The dividing line for Kirk is to honor the Constitution, not the democracy it built.

Far Right Talking Point

This “republic but not democracy” line is a talking point on the fringe of the conservative movement, a fringe given mainstream opportunity if not status under Trump.

For example, thefederalistpapers.org is a extreme right-wing site that made this meme:

The site then writes: “Republics are the best form of government for protecting the individual from the tyranny of the majority. And there most certainly is a tyranny of the majority that always manifests in democratic style systems.”

[By the way, the quote attributed to Jefferson above in the meme is fake. According to Jefferson’s Monticello site, “We currently have no evidence to confirm that Thomas Jefferson ever said or wrote, “Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%” or any of its listed variations. We do not know the source of this statement’s attribution to Thomas Jefferson.”]

Then there is the self-described “political action committee committed to wholesale, conservative change of the Washington political scene” called the Madison Project. It writes “Most people often mistakenly refer to our nation as the greatest democracy on earth. They are mistaken because we are not an absolute democracy; we are a constitutional republic. That is what makes our nation great, for if we were merely a democracy, we would be anything but great. And to the extent that we no longer function as a constitutional republic, that greatness is rapidly ebbing away.”

Finally there is Wall Builders, the website of discredited Christian “historian” David Barton, which claims that “the transcendent values of Biblical natural law were the foundation of the American republic. Consider the stability this provides: in our republic, murder will always be a crime, for it is always a crime according to the Word of God. However, in a democracy, if majority of the people decide that murder is no longer a crime, murder will no longer be a crime.”

Libertarianism, too

The idea of “republic but not a democracy” is also a libertarian idea. Philip Wallach at Cato-Unbound, the journal of the libertarian Cato Institute, notes that “libertarians are famously ambivalent about democracy…”

For example, the site libertarianism.org interviewed the author of the book “Against Democracy.” In that interview, the author notes “I’m against the bad voters, not the good voters. It’s just the bad voters greatly outnumber the good voters.”

Libertarian economist Walter Williams notes also in the far-right Daily Signal that those who want to abolish the Electoral College want to weaken the constitutional protections of the republic: “My question is: Is it ignorance of or contempt for our Constitution that fuels the movement to abolish the Electoral College?”

The key difference for libertarians is the “seat” of power. Consider the site The Blind Libertarian which argues: “A democracy gives sovereignty to the citizens as a whole group, or majority, while a republic gives sovereignty to the individual and the people. Our government is supposed to protect those rights. In a democracy, rights are determined by the majority, granted by the government, and given to the majority whether or not the subservient minority agrees.”

Religion, Individualism, and Elitism

As you can see there is for Kirk and some others a strong tie between religion (here a form of Christianity) and individualism as a political philosophy. Kirk combines those two ideas in tweets about the Constitution:

Kirk is applying the Christian idea of the Bible as “divinely inspired” (some say inerrant) to the political document. He then suggests that through such divine inspiration come rights that are given by God, though merely written down (perhaps for the first time) in the political document. Talk of “rights” is a political move begun in the 1700s. In fact the “divine right” of kings to do as they pleased preceded such concepts. God didn’t seem too concerned during that era about rights, if we take Kirk’s claim seriously.

In those who follow “republic, not a democracy” there is also a deep distrust of government, what the Cato Institute and others call the “administrative state.” What Kirk has called the “deep state.”

The implications of “republic not democracy” are clear to voting rights. There is a distrust of those voters a democracy lets into the political system. Despite what Kirk argues, the move toward a republic — and quotes of the “founding fathers” despising the hoi polloi — can also be a move to take the ballot from many groups.

What should also be noted, as a further debunking of this binary, is that most of those forcing this choice put “pure” or direct democracy against a republic. For example, Daniel Horowitz argues in the conservative RedState.com that (my emphasis in italics) “a pure unbridled democracy is a political system in which the majority enjoys absolute power by means of democratic elections. In an unvarnished democracy, unrestrained by a constitution, the majority can vote to impose tyranny on themselves and the minority opposition. They can vote to elect those who will infringe upon our inalienable God-given rights… Thus, a constitution that limited and divided the power of government was necessary to preclude elected officials from imposing tyranny on the people.”

As the Post and others note, America is a mix of democracy and republic.

And when the libertarians and others put the Constitution up against the “mob” of the majority, they treat the Constitution as a timeless (i.e. unchanged) document, as Kirk often notes. Kirk does not note the times the document was changed and how it was changed through Article V — by majority vote at different levels of government.

Kirk’s Inconsistency

Finally Kirk is not consistent on the key libertarian claim on the seat of power, the individual versus the people as a group. Here is his July 2018 tweet:

While the “people” in this tweet could surely be a reference to the “people” that the Blind Libertarian noted above (a good group), Kirk aims his ire at the elites. Kirk’s populism here contradicts his libertarianism, the latter wanting either to restrict the vote to an educated few or to make sure the individual is not at the whim of the “mob.”

Kirk distrusts the “powerful elites.” But the “powerful elites” of 1776 are often cited by “republic, not democracy” believers as those that made the nation a republic and kept the mob at bay. Kirk is suggesting of course that the “powerful elites” of today are somehow different than the ones of 1776, though he doesn’t say how.

On those 1776 elites, the Constitution, as the “republic, not a democracy” believers note, did not put the power in the hands of the people, but a limited power in the hands of the government, elected representatives who had power but who also would, hopefully, use wisdom and not be beholden to the people’s whims. That has not been the case for most of US history.

The conservative Austrian economic website (out of Alabama) Mises Institute also debunks Kirk’s binary. It writes: “Consequently, in contemporary usage, there is no relevant difference between the words ‘republic’ and ‘democracy.’ Thus, claiming a preference for a republic over a democracy communicates essentially zero information unless one precisely defines the two terms in a way that departs significantly from Madison’s definitions.”

It then adds, in direct reply to Kirk’s fear of “mob” majorities: “But, if anyone wants to argue against majoritarianism, he should simply do so. There is no need to rely on a half-baked usage of the writings of ‘the Founding Fathers’ who clearly supported a political system in which majority votes play a big part in selecting elected officials, and which is obviously a democracy according to the modern usage of the term.”

And of course the biggest inconsistency for Kirk on this issue is his sycophancy for Trump.

As Harvard scholar Yascha Mounk notes in The Atlantic: “Trump has no real intention of devolving power back to the people. He’s filled his administration with members of the same elite he disparaged on the campaign trail. His biggest legislative success, the tax bill, has handed gifts to corporations and the donor class… It would be easy to draw the wrong lesson from this: If the American electorate can be duped by a figure like Trump, it can’t be trusted with whatever power it does retain. To avoid further damage to the rule of law and the rights of the most-vulnerable Americans, traditional elites should appropriate even more power for themselves. But that response plays into the populist narrative: The political class dislikes Trump because he threatens to take its power away. It also refuses to recognize that the people have a point.”