Sen. Mike Lee received heaps of unfair criticism for his Oct. 8, 2020 tweet: “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”
If by the term “rank democracy” Lee means a political set-up in which a minority of voters and their elected representatives can render the thoughtful preferences of the majority ineffective, his statement is beyond criticism.
Lee is correct on the other point. Clearly, democracy is not the objective of good governance. The debate should focus on whether or not one-person-one-vote representative democracy is the best means for achieving human flourishing and “liberty, peace and prosperity.”
It seems that Lee, like many Republican officeholders, believes that as one-person-one-vote democracy advances, the ranker democracy becomes. How else are we to interpret present GOP efforts to obstruct voters’ access to the polls and to otherwise undo the Voting Rights Act of 1964?
Conservatives like Lee are given to saying: “America is a republic not a democracy.” Glossaries of political terms indicate that the following are fundamentally equivalent in meaning: “democratic republic” and “representative democracy.” Both terms apply to America’s form of constitutional governance. Conservatives who ignore the foregoing equivalencies also ignore the import of a number of constitutional amendments, most notably the 14th and 15th.
For such “conservatives” glossaries are “fake news.”
Andrew G. Bjelland, Salt Lake City
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