The “Democracy Panic” of 2022 Was Fully Justified

Pushing back against Shadi Hamid’s democratic complacency

Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake speaks to supporters during her election night event on November 08, 2022 in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Happy New Year to all! Just a quick reminder that there will be just two posts from me this week—this one and then an “Ask Me Anything” post on Friday. Paying subscribers get to pose the questions, so there’s one very good reason to come on over to the paying side of “Eyes on the Right.” (Other reasons: Paying subscribers get to post comments and take part in the illuminating conversations that regularly take place in the resulting threads! They receive audio versions of each post read aloud by yours truly! And they get to enjoy the psychological satisfaction of helping to make this newsletter possible!) Now, on to today’s post….

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I admire author Shadi Hamid. I appreciate his willingness to challenge assumptions on the left as well as the right. I respect his fearlessness in braving swarms of vituperation on Twitter. I agree with him that efforts to police “misinformation” online are a bad idea and likely doomed to failure. And I enjoy his podcast with Damir Marusic. (I was a guest once and would be happy to return at some point in the future.)

Yet I’ve also been troubled by the some of the positions Hamid has staked out over the last few months as part of his effort to promote his recent book, The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea (which I haven’t read). Prior to the midterm elections, Hamid repeatedly insisted all talk of a rising threat of fascism in the United States was absurd and should be disavowed by small-d democrats on the grounds that it’s designed to delegitimize everyone to the right of the Democratic Party.

Since the midterms, Hamid has gone further, to begin mocking liberals and progressives who spent the past two years fretting about the fate of democracy in America.

Shadi Hamid @shadihamid

It was a great year for democracy—but also a surprisingly good year for the Right. These two facts might seem to be in tension with each other.

shadihamid.substack.comWas 2022 the Year History Ended?It was a great year for democracy—but also a good one for the Right.

Shadi Hamid @shadihamid

This was also the year of a great moral panic. It's been memory-holed now because it was a bit absurd in retrospect, but for a chunk of 2022 the biggest story in American politics was about whether our democracy was about to die. Really. That happened.

Can some on the center-left be justly accused of succumbing to a panic about democracy? Sure. But the reality is that there was, and remains, much to be worried about in American politics—and the lion’s share of what is worrying emanates from the right. Denying this is a form of complacency that needs to be resisted and debunked.

When Democracy Negates Itself

Hamid’s dismissive stance toward the “democracy panic” follows from his distinctive way of defining democracy—in terms of “democratic minimalism.” What he means by the term is nicely summaried in the following passage of an October 2022 essay in the Atlantic that’s adapted from his book:

Democracy as a system and a set of procedures—as a way of regulating politics without predetermining its outcomes—allows voters to decide their own course and determine what values are most important to them. Democracy allows for peaceful transfer of power, even—or particularly—in ideologically polarized contexts. As a set of mechanisms for conflict regulation, it contributes to long-term, if not short-term, stability. Democracy also offers predictability, because the losers of elections have the chance to fight another day. I call this approach “democratic minimalism” because it accepts democracy for what it is rather than what it might, or might not, become.

I appreciate Hamid’s effort to separate out democracy from liberalism and accept the legitimacy of a wide range of electoral outcomes. This commitment no doubt contributes to his passionate support for democratic reforms in the Middle East, even where they might result in illiberal Islamist governments being elected.

In an American context, this implies a victory for the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party must be considered just as legitimate as a win for liberals or progressives. It also implies that suggesting otherwise—that certain electoral outcomes are illegitimate—is at bottom an affront against democracy. To the extent that Democrats have indulged in this kind of ideological line-drawing in recent years, they are the ones in American politics who are guilty of risking a crisis of democracy.

But it can’t possibly be right that every majoritarian outcome must be considered democratically legitimate. What if Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, or some other figure on the right ran for the presidency while promising to change election laws to empower state legislatures to overturn the outcome of state-level popular votes? That would enable a Republican majority in Pennsylvania’s General Assembly to assign the state’s electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate even if a Democrat won a plurality or majority of the votes in the state. That would be a clear example of a democratic election producing anti-democratic results.

If that sounds too abstract and speculative, present-day Israel gives us an alternative real-world example of the problem.

The democratically elected governing coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu includes far-right parties that view Arab Israelis as second-class citizens and Palestinians living in the occupied territories as worthy of expulsion from what these parties consider to be Greater Israel. At the moment, the ability of these parties to act on their convictions is constrained by the less extreme principles and policies advocated by Netanyahu’s Likud Party.

But what happens if violence breaks out on the streets of Israeli cities or in the West Bank over the coming months and years, strengthening the hand of the radicals? Or if those forces demand to be given greater policymaking power in return for supporting moves to shield Netanyahu from conviction in the various corruption trials he faces?

Either of these scenarios would be an example of democracy leading to anti-democratic outcomes—and I have a hard time believing that Hamid would consider a far-right crackdown (or worse) on Arab-Israeli citizens or Palestinians in the occupied territories democratically legitimate.

When One Party Rejects the Rules of the Democratic Game