A popular New Yorker cartoon published around the time of the first Trump election features an angry-looking man on a plane saying, “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” Drawing the obvious analogy between the plane and the country, the cartoon is in fact straightforwardly anti-democratic: Voters should, on the view of the cartoon, not be able to elect who they want over the experts who know what they’re doing. This perspective, framed as opposition to a “populism” that itself is just democracy by another name, runs through center-left dogma about academia, media, the courts, the experts, through skepticism of free speech to credentialism about virtually everything.
In short, progressive elitism, the view that credentialed experts will do a better job running things than the masses and so are entitled to run things, becomes incoherent when matched with fevered rhetoric about defending democracy. And, unfortunately, progressive elitists have claimed to be doing just that in the Trump era. In February 2017, a month into the first Trump presidency, the Washington Post changed its tagline to a corny, cape-y slogan that captured the “Resistance” mood of the time: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Donald Trump was an existential threat to American democracy. Our heroic journalists were the only ones who could handle it. In 2024, as Kamala Harris searched in vain for an actual message for her campaign, just as Hillary Clinton had in 2016, this sort of rhetoric returned. Across journalism, job titles such as “democracy editor” and newsroom projects with titles like “Protecting Democracy” proliferated, all framed in language aligned with then-candidate Harris’s statement that, in the coming election, “democracy [was] on the ballot.”
It seems then that while there is a lot of talk invoking democracy in our political discourse, there is an awful lot of unclarity about what democracy actually is. Take The Reactionary Spirit, a book released this past summer by Vox writer Zack Beauchamp, which exemplifies the problem with combining the pro-democratic rhetoric and anti-democratic sentiment we find among prominent members of the center Left. Beauchamp’s thesis is that Trump, or “Trumpism,” is not just a questionable personality within America’s political system but a unique challenge to the survival of the system itself and that the center Left represents the bulwark that can protect democracy in America.
Unluckily for Beauchamp, the book was published five days before Joe Biden dropped out of the race. Needless to say, the dramatic political events of the summer and autumn did not help his case. The Democratic commander in chief and campaign turned out to have been propped up by a mendacious media willing to be silent about his physical and mental unfitness. His vice president, who had led the charge early in 2024 to discredit special counsel Robert Hur for stating that Biden’s memory was “poor” — “we should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw,” she said — then became the presidential nominee and enjoyed an astroturfed surge in positive coverage. It all devastatingly undermined the notion that the center Left is for, while the New Right is against, the practice of collective decision-making by an informed populace.
But even if there had not been such attempts to defraud voters about their electoral options in 2024, Beauchamp’s thesis was always in bad shape, both historically and conceptually. The center Left has never been what Beauchamp thinks it is, and democracy doesn’t mean what Beauchamp thinks it does. Indeed, a major arc of recent American politics is precisely encroachment, by centrist and left-wing judges, bureaucrats, and “experts,” on the democratic political process. This encroachment itself is, more often than actual popular rule, what the formerly mainstream center-left intellectual and journalistic apparatus calls “democracy.”
Beauchamp’s method is to characterize democracy mostly by reference to “associated ideas, like political equality and human rights” and by the changes these ideas “helped fuel,” such as “decolonization and LGBT movements.” So Beauchamp’s treatment ends up being less about analysis and more about vibes. Part of the trouble here is that the word “democracy” has been made into a terminological black hole: Everything that’s conceptually nearby ends up squished into it — from high-level ideas like freedom, equality, and justice to specific aspects of the American political system such as constitutional guarantees of rights that cannot be overruled by the democratic procedure of vote by a simple majority. This comes across in Beauchamp’s treatment of the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt. Faced with the charge that democracy might not actually be identical to liberalism or equality, Beauchamp merely rehashes the “terrible genius” of that charge as though he’s diagnosing an underhanded stratagem: “He has provided a scheme for something called ‘democratic politics’ that replaces universal equality, the foundational idea of democracy as we understand it, with hierarchy.” But universal equality simply is not the foundational idea of democracy as we understand it. And it’s patently not something progressive elitists believe in either.
The ”reactionary spirit” of his title is, for Beauchamp, “the idea that if democracy threatens existing social hierarchies, it is right and maybe even righteous to overthrow democracy rather than permit social change.” For Beauchamp’s definition of political “reaction,” he offers, citing scholar Corey Robin’s book The Reactionary Mind, the idea “that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.” It is counterposed to Beauchamp’s stipulation of what democracy is. As Beauchamp writes, “Democracy’s core principle is that no person is inherently better than any other; for that reason, we all deserve an equal say in how we’re governed.” Beauchamp writes that “democracy, by its nature, encourages the upending of social hierarchies.” This is apparently just a matter of the philosophy of democracy.
This is a bad way of mapping the terrain. First, democracy does not require denying that some are fit to rule others. Instead, especially in representative democracy, we might think of it as a procedure for figuring out who is fit to rule others. But more importantly, even a direct democracy is not a system in which nobody rules others. A direct democracy is a system in which everybody rules others. We might think that behind the universal franchise is the idea that everyone is fit to tell everyone else what to do.
The center-left consensus Beauchamp works under seems not just hostile to democracy but hostile to even conceiving of most politics in democratic terms. For example, Beauchamp inveighs against a Florida law “restricting LGBT education in public schools.” But such laws are, of course, simply what happens when public education is susceptible to the democratic political process. Center-leftists tend to think public education ought, somehow, to be immune to democracy. Similarly, Beauchamp mentions that the Democratic Party achieved ballot-box success in the 2022 midterm elections partly by linking the issues of abortion (live because of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision) and democracy (live in part because of the Jan. 6 riot aimed at stopping the certification of the 2020 presidential election). But this linkage was never coherent. Dobbs made abortion more responsive to democracy, not less, by removing it as a fundamental right and putting it on the ballot.
Perhaps most tellingly, Beauchamp mentions his fears about one of Trump’s “gravest threats” in his first term — “something called Schedule F, an executive order stripping job protections for tens of thousands of civil servants and allowing Trump to replace them with his cronies.” If carried out, such an outcome would simply make the civil service more responsive to the democratic process and give elected officials greater power vis-à-vis unelected bureaucrats. Indeed, judicial review is often taught precisely as a bulwark against the “tyranny of the majority,” a concept Beauchamp brings up but does not think deeply enough about. Failing to confront these challenges means the book ends up having no real theory at all about what democracy is and why it’s valuable.
It would be only a little too cute to suggest that The Reactionary Spirit is as much a symptom of a certain kind of center-left opposition to democracy as it is an analysis of a certain kind of right-wing opposition to democracy. Despite the rhetoric, it is the Democrats, not the Republicans, who have undermined themselves electorally through their opposition to democracy itself. I hope they have learned their lesson.
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Oliver Traldi is a philosopher at the University of Tulsa Honors College.