AEI’s Steve Hayward describes liberalism’s love hate relationship with democracy. They love it when the people vote their way, they want and hate it when they don’t. One of his prime examples is Gov. Perdue’s call for suspending Congressional elections.
Liberalism has been schizophrenic about democracy for about a century, alternating between deploring anti-majoritarian features of our system such as the electoral college and the filibuster, or maligning populist democratic majoritarianism when it delivers uncongenial results, such as California’s Proposition 13 or last fall’s midterm election beat-down of the Democratic Party—an election that increasingly looks to be a harbinger of more wipeouts ahead at the hands of ingrate voters. So right now liberals are in one of their periodic anti-democratic moods, most remarkably expressed by North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue’s thought experiment last week about suspending congressional elections for two years so that Congress can “help this country recover.”
