Conservatives have never much liked democracy, but the unpopularity of the modern Republican Party’s agenda has made them more contemptuous. The other day, Rick Santorum even denounced ballot measures on “very sexy things” like abortion and marijuana.
Last week, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum made the perplexing case that democratic votes constitute some kind of cheat code. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Last week, voters in Ohio passed a pair of ballot initiatives that were vociferously opposed by conservatives: one to legalize marijuana for recreational use and another to codify abortion rights in the state’s constitution. Approved with nearly 60 percent support, both measures reflect a broader national consensus. According to one Gallup poll published within a day of last week’s elections, public support in the US for legal marijuana stands at a record high of 70 percent. A 2022 Pew study, meanwhile, found that some 61 percent of Americans support abortion in all or most cases.
In the plainest of terms, then, last week’s outcome was a simple expression of democracy. Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on who you ask. During an interview on the far-right network Newsmax that quickly went viral, former Pennsylvania senator and onetime Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum made the perplexing case that democratic votes actually constitute some kind of cheat code:
[The Democratic Party’s] base is more ginned up to go out and vote generally than Republicans. We’ve seen this now for the last several years, and so a base election, they — Democrats — outspend, and you put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out and vote. It was a secret sauce for disaster in Ohio. I don’t know what they were thinking, but that’s why I thank goodness that most of the states in this country don’t allow you to put everything on the ballot, because pure democracies are not the way to run a country.
this Newsmax copium is actually hitting pretty good pic.twitter.com/7UpFEar53Y
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 8, 2023
What Santorum is objecting to is nothing more or less than the basic process of democracy. In this case, two issues were put to a vote, and groups of Ohio citizens that were both more motivated and more numerous than those on the other side made the majority preference clear.
His choice of words, in addition to being bizarre, is also revealing. To call issues like reproductive rights or marijuana legalization “sexy” would seem to imply there’s something inherently dubious about people being able to express their preferences — that particular causes are going to be so attractive to a majority of voters that they should remain outside the scope of democracy altogether.
There are reasonable criticisms to be made of direct democracy. Without strict campaign finance laws, for example, ballot initiatives can easily be weaponized by corporate special interest groups to override democratic institutions. (Look no further than California’s Proposition 22, where tech companies spent an astonishing $200 million to exempt themselves from labor laws designed to protect workers while also codifying a rule that makes it nearly impossible for the state’s legislature to overturn the exemption.) Basic rights — like freedom of speech and assembly or freedom from discrimination — also shouldn’t be subject to direct contestation at the ballot box, because then they will no longer be rights.
In his remarks, however, Santorum was ultimately expressing a deeper right-wing animus toward democracy as such — an animus that has only seemed to grow as the United States becomes more pluralist and socially liberal. Whereas the conservatives of the Reagan era frequently claimed to represent a “Moral Majority” of old-fashioned American values and everyday common sense, Republicans today are often quite open about their hostility to popular democracy and majority rule. The reason for this rhetorical shift is obvious: on both “social” issues like trans rights and abortion and economic questions like the value of unions and the tax rates rich people should pay, conservatism has very much become a minority proposition in today’s United States.
Unable to win in straightforward democratic contests, Republicans have increasingly relied on antidemocratic means like gerrymandering and countermajoritarian institutions like the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College to advance their agenda. In many ways, however, the sentiment Santorum was expressing has a longer lineage in the history of American conservatism. As Chris Maisano once put it:
[The founders] established a republic in which representation was a means of avoiding, not instituting, democratic control of government by filtering popular opinion through a complex of elite-dominated institutions like the Senate and the judiciary. . . . This was premised, first and foremost, on the violent exclusion of indigenous people, slaves, and free African Americans from political life. But it also entailed the assumption that men of property must speak on behalf of the lower orders as a whole, even where they enjoyed the right to speak, assemble, and vote.
Lingering behind every right-wing pedant’s insistence that the United States is a constitutional republic rather than a democracy, there is thus a much older, elitist idea that the demos itself is a dangerous beast to be tamed and controlled. When it rhetorically suits them, conservatives are all too happy to embrace the language of democratic governance and majority rule. But as Santorum’s comments aptly demonstrate, those commitments are quickly jettisoned the moment right-wingers find themselves on the minority side of popular opinion.