Why this Liberal Hysteria?

Once upon a time if a party (or individual) lost an election fairly, they would accept the verdict. Once upon a time, if a legislation that one disliked was nonetheless passed through parliament according to constitutional procedures, one accepted it. One just bit one’s tongue and waited for the next elections to get back in power and do things differently, if that was what the (new) majority of the people wanted.

Not today. With the rise of illiberal parties world over from the US to Turkey to Poland to Hungary to Brexit (to India?), Adrian Vermeule writes that:

“Academics, journalists and other intelligentsia… spend their careers in a state that can only be described as professional hysteria.”

But why has the acceptance of the verdict gone for a six? Why, wonders Vermeule, it is that “experimenting with nonliberal versions of democracy” provokes such rabid breast beating?

Vermeule’s answer is provocative. He says that historically liberalism “made an alliance of convenience with democracy” to fight the common enemy: monarchy. But once monarchy fell, advocates of liberalism as far back as John Stuart Mill in 1861, were worried that the tiger called democracy might go rogue:

“It has since become undeniable that liberalism both needs and fears democracy. It needs democracy because it needs the legitimation that democracy provides. It fears, however, that its dependence on, yet fundamental difference from, democracy will be finally and irrevocably exposed by a sustained course of nonliberal popular opinion.”

The solution they came up with?

“The solution of the intellectuals is always to try to idealize and redescribe democracy so that “mere majoritarianism” never turns out to count as truly democratic. Of course the majority’s views are to count on certain issues, but only within constraints so tightly drawn and under procedures so idealized that any outcomes threatening to liberalism can be dismissed as inauthentic, often by a constitutional court purporting to speak in the name of a higher form of democracy… In this way, liberalism attempts to hollow out democracy from within, yet retain its outward form as a sort of legitimating costume.”

But increasingly, says Vermeule, that cordon sanitaire has been broken. Which is why the intellectuals and media are continuously up in arms against democratic verdicts and legislations.

Henry Ford famously that you can have any color you want as long as it is black. Apparently, liberals will let us have any form of democracy as long as it is liberal.