The left side of the political aisle seems to have lost its mind.
The Democrats are down so bad that they are demanding we overturn America's institutions?
This opinion piece comes from an hour-long podcast interview by Ross Douthat with radical leftist and New Republic writer Osita Nwanevu.
Nwanevu is convinced that abolishing the Senate, ending the Electoral College, and packing the Supreme Court are the only ways to push back against the gains made by Trump.
I don't think that's merely an academic point. You hear in school that this is balanced out by the House. It's not really, in a substantive way. The Senate shapes the judiciary, it shapes the executive branch, and obviously, it's a veto point for the passage of even ordinary legislation.
Right away — and I think the Senate is the crux of a lot of this — we have a fundamental piece of our system that flouts basic democratic principles and basic democratic intuitions, again, more so, by international comparison, than some of our peers. No country gets it perfect. There's no ideal democracy out there in the world.
So, to be clear, his argument is not that the Senate doesn't work as intended. It's that it IS working as intended.
As James Madison wrote in Federalist 55 when warning against the mob rule of straight democracy, "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob."
America was never intended to be a democracy. That's Nwanevu‘s problem.
He admits as much:
So when you raise some of the objections that I've raised about the nature of our system, conservatives will often say: well, we're a republic, not a democracy. I think liberals, by habit, say: No, no, no, that's not true — the founders actually intended democracy, but they messed up in 50 million different ways.
I think the conservatives have the better side of the argument when you actually look at the historical record. People should understand that the Constitution is forged in a particular political and economic context.
So The Times is running op-eds calling for the overthrow of American government and its charter after spending years calling grandmas who were at the Capitol on J6 terrorists?
Given the unpopularity of their platform, how do leftists plan to accomplish that exactly?
Anyway, that's your update from The New York Times, everyone!
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