Undemocratic? Antidemocratic?

There are a lot of screeds against the Bush administration that go something like "Bush is stupid" or "conservatives are stupid". Usually, the evidence for the purported stupidity is that the conserviatives have obviously failed to see reason; if they had, they'd have enacted the Democratic agenda, or at least refrained from enacting their own agenda, which is either greedy or rapacious or both.

I've never thought that this was a particularly compelling argument. To the contrary, rather than convince anyone, it merely entrenches the factionalism that already exists. Let's face it -- if you're never going to convince me to become a conservative by telling me I'm stupid to be liberal, why should I think I can convince you to become a liberal by doing the same? But that's where much political discourse seems to be stuck these days.

I also think that the convervative-liberal dichotomy is largely irrelevant to the upcoming elections, since even many conservatives question whether President Bush is himself a conservative. It seems to me that a more compelling argument side-steps the conservative-liberal debate altogether and focuses on the ways in which the Bush-Cheney-DeLay wing of the Republican Party has embarked on a course of conduct that is inimical, and possibly fatal, to the values that underpin our republican (small "r") heritage. From DeLay's unprecedented efforts to subvert the redistricting process to Congressional arm-twisting to pass unpopular legislation to the White House's use of viscious personal attacks against its critics to simply lying, there is a pattern that most mainstream Republicans (that is, Republican voters, if not the Republican leadership) might just see as disturbing, if only someone would just connect the dots.

Fortunately, someone has. As George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now put it, if you only read one political essay this summer, you're not reading enough, but anyway, Jonathan Chait's essay in The New Republic should be the one you read. [link] Chait's thesis is not explicitly ideological. That is, he doesn't argue whether or not any particular position is correct or incorrect. Rather, he argues that the tactics used by the Republicans are anti-democratic and dangerous.

Bush and his allies have been described as partisan or bare-knuckled, but the problem is more fundamental than that. They have routinely violated norms of political conduct, smothered information necessary for informed public debate, and illegitimately exploited government power to perpetuate their rule. These habits are not just mean and nasty. They're undemocratic. 

What does it mean to call the president "undemocratic"? It does not mean Bush is an aspiring dictator. Despite descending from a former president and telling confidants that God chose him to lead the country, he does not claim divine right of rule. He is not going to cancel the election or rig it with faulty ballots. (Well, almost certainly not.) But democracy can be a matter of degree. Russia and the United States are both democracies, but the United States is more democratic than Russia. The proper indictment of the Bush administration is, therefore, not that he's abandoning American democracy, but that he's weakening it. This administration is, in fact, the least democratic in the modern history of the presidency. 

It's a powerful argument that you should encourage your friends -- particularly Republican ones -- to read.