The author’s closing point here is one often made by Jonah Goldberg: the historical mistakes of conservatives are “things conservatives got wrong” while the historical mistakes of progressives are “things that America got wrong.”
Excerpt from Michael Brendan Dougherty in Are Conservatives Anti-Democratic? Not Peculiarly So:
The admission that it’s possible to critique democracy in constructive ways is obvious. Our Founders did so, and many since then. Not just conservatives, but liberals — who, again, saw that democracy needed to be restrained by doctrines of inalienable rights or other republican structures as a bulwark against passing or popular prejudices and bigotries.
Finally, Tait turns to the obvious point that conservatives sometimes put themselves forward as champions of democracy, tribunes of the people against elites or the managerial class, etc.:
Can these two seemingly contradictory conservative strains—Buckley’s “phonebook” populism and the longstanding skepticism of democracy—be reconciled? It is best not to even try, nor indeed to grant much coherence to the practice of right-wing politics. Ultimately, the American right shifts between populist and anti-democratic arguments depending on which is appropriate to achieve its political goals. [Emphasis added]
On the surface this is an attempt to indict or charge the Right uniquely with incoherence, hypocrisy, or stupidity. But in fact, this is the inevitable condition of all thinking political actors whose politics have been formed by and must be expressed in a mixed regime like that which exists in the United States. It just so happens that, living under our Constitution, the shortest path for protecting the First Amendment protections of speech and religion is not democracy. Yet we hardly get long-winded diatribes against the ACLU for pursuing privately funded legal strategies rather than popular apologetics and campaigns.
Anyone claiming, as conservatives do, to operate with some fidelity to the American Constitution and the Founders will not be entirely democratic or anti-democratic. They will find some decisions of democracy harmful to other values that are protected by the Bill of Rights, or by republican institutions. Just as everyone else does.
Tait’s only substantive critique is that conservatives have too often resorted to anti-democratic means for racist ends. True. But America’s racist past doesn’t cut in only one direction. The same charge could be hurled at progressives who went about sterilizing those they deemed unfit, disproportionately non-whites, into the second half of the 20th century. Similar charges of anti-Catholic bigotry could be hurled at the same and their predecessors in the Liberal Leagues and supporters of Blaine Amendments in the 19th century. Like conservatives, American progressives are Americans. That is, they are both formed by our legacy of a mixed regime, loyal to it, and not 100 percent democrats or anti-democrats. And sometimes, they share American prejudices, too.
The moon in daylight 