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In recent years, the Republican Party has been credibly accused of becoming hostile toward democracy. The evidence to bolster the allegations has been overwhelming: From voter suppression measures to election denialism to rejecting the certification of vote tallies, the contemporary GOP has been unsubtle in suggesting that Americans may no longer resolve our differences at the ballot box.
But there’s another dimension to this that’s even less opaque: Some Republicans have been explicit in their rejection of democracy.
AL.com’s Kyle Whitmire, for example, took note of the latest rhetoric from John Wahl, the chair of the Alabama Republican Party, who shared some odd thoughts during an appearance on a local radio program last week.
“The mainstream media wants us to think of ourselves as a democracy because that leads to socialism,” Wahl said on the program. ... “Even our Republican elected officials call us a democracy far too often, and we are not.”
To be sure, that’s quite a conspiracy theory. Rascally journalists, we’re apparently supposed to believe, have secretly launched an effort to convince Americans that they live in a democracy — not just to deceive them, but to advance the cause of “socialism.”
As best as I can tell, Wahl wasn’t kidding.
But the Alabama Republican isn’t alone. A few months ago, GOP officials in the state of Washington assembled for an election-year convention and passed a resolution that read in part, “We encourage Republicans to substitute the words ‘republic’ and ‘republicanism’ where previously they have used the word ‘democracy.’” The same resolution added that Republicans in the state of Washington “oppose legislation which makes our nation more democratic in nature.”
One delegate to the state GOP convention declared at the event, “We are devolving into a democracy. ... We do not want to be a democracy.”
Such thinking has even popped up on Capitol Hill. About a month before Election Day 2020, for example, Sen. Mike Lee raised a few eyebrows by declaring via social media that the United States is “not a democracy.” The Utah Republican added soon after, “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”
Nearly a year later, Sen. Rand Paul made a related argument. “The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for,” the Kentucky Republican argued in June 2021, despite reality.
One need not be a hysterical partisan to accuse the Republican Party of growing increasingly hostile toward democracy; one need only quote Republican officials.