“We’re not a democracy,” U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) Tweeted Oct. 7 setting off a minor storm in an election season made up of almost nothing but storms.
The next day Lee followed up his first Tweet with another stating “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”
Of course, what Lee means by the U.S. not being a democracy is pretty much the same as the Founding Fathers meant: Concentrating power into the hands of a property-owning and wealthy aristocracy. Of course, Lee’s definition has probably expanded to include “evangelical Christians and whatever other group votes for the GOP” since that’s who that line tends to appeal to. In turn, that’s who Trump is leaning on to be the muscle in forcing through victory despite its his ever-narrowing path.
Put simply, Lee wants people like himself to make decisions for the rest of us.
The vision they want to impose, much like the one that troubled Plato and other Greek philosophers in their criticism of democracy, is a form of tyranny. Tyranny rooted in power that is handed over to them by using the framework of the system they’ve made their careers in. It’s not unimaginable, many democracies have voted themselves into autocracy several times in…
