Comments Elsewhere

Brandon Berg:

Note in particular that Jim Crow laws were passed because white voters were unhappy that many merchants refused to discriminate against blacks.

Well, no, not quite. Jim Crow laws were passed because white supremacist terrorists systematically stopped Black people from going to the polls to stop them from being passed (or to stop candidates who would pass them from being elected). It’s not an accident that massive disenfranchisement of the Black population was one of the central planks of Jim Crow; there were many communities in the South, prior to the mass migrations of the 1920s, in which Blacks were the numerical majority, and they exercised substantial power in state politics when they had the chance (as they did in the 1860s-1870s, and as they did again in the 1960s-1970s) to vote.

Eric:

I have tried to say that Populism/Democracy leads to less freedom, not more, and you have presented irrelevancies that distract from that core concept rather than address it. The increased freedoms you constantly discuss did not result from Democracy.

Maybe you could explain more clearly what you mean when you distinguish the Republican parts of the American constitution from the Democratic/Populist ones. What makes a particular aspect of the government Republican as opposed to Democratic/Populist?

I ask this because a lot of libertarian discussions that I’ve seen on this topic end up simply defining Republicanism and Democracy in such a way that one’s guaranteed to have better outcomes than the other by linguistic fiat—e.g., by stipulating that part of what it means to be a “Republican” form of government is to have a constitution that effectively limits government power, while giving a definition of “Democracy” in some sort of purely structural terms (e.g.: election of legislators or 50%+1 referenda). Of course if you define one of them by reference to achieving the goal you want to achieve, and define the other only in terms of the means of decision-making, one of them’s going to look like a much stronger candidate for achieving that goal than the other. But it’s unclear what intellectual gains you make with that sort of apples-and-oranges comparison.