At Discourse, I have a review of a new book about the rise of populism. Believe it or not, this article was originally commissioned by a different journal, which then rejected it for being too "pro-Trump." Seriously. The editor said I was "wearing my MAGA hat while writing it." I'll let you judge for yourself. Here's an excerpt:
In the sixth century B.C., Pisistratus rode into Athens in a chariot beside an actress dressed as Athena, to wow the hoi polloi into thinking he was divinely selected for dictatorship. Episodes like that were precisely why the classical liberals who founded the United States fashioned a constitutional state instead of a pure democracy. They did so with a clear eye to the underlying principle that democracy is legitimized, and thus necessarily limited, by deeper principles of individual liberty—principles we flout at our peril.
Issacharoff makes no mention of this. Instead he asserts that “a well-functioning democratic state should offer citizens a sense of individual dignity emanating from control over their political fate and a sense of collective gain from an accountable state delivering material improvements over time.” He maintains that “wrest[ing] popular support for democracy back from authoritarian demagogues” depends on proving that democracies can give people a “sense of common mission” by engaging in public works projects such as railroad construction and green energy programs.
But the authors of the Constitution believed the opposite: that a properly designed state would preserve freedom by so severely restricting what citizens could accomplish through politics that they would concern themselves with productive private-sector undertakings instead. The American Constitution’s legitimacy rests not upon a desire for government munificence, but on the wish, as George Washington liked to say, for the freedom to rest under one’s own vine and fig tree, with none to make him afraid.
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