To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.
But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.
This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called "undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process. (Source)
Douthat is doing his job as the designated cultural conservative at the Times to 'splain conservatism to blinkered liberals. This column on first reading seems kind of silly because the technocratic state isn't a Liberal or Conservative thing; it's a capitalist-elite thing. Capitalist elites don't care about what ordinary people think--except when it's in their interests to manipulate them into believing that what's good for capitalist elites is good for ordinary people.
When I was actively involved in education politics in Seattle a decade ago, the enemy wasn't Liberals because everybody is Liberal--it was corporate education reform, the kind of reform that wanted to impose its top-down, we-business-elites-know-best, Neoliberal ideology on local educational communities. Neoliberal programs like like Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' and Obama's 'Race to the Top' were equally bad because equally "elite" in their provenance, and equally oppressive in their top-down-ness.
The battle lines were between parents and teachers deciding what was best for their kids rather than the folks "downtown" or the bureaucrats in Olympia. Control ought to lie as close as possible to the people who are affected by decisions--and that should be the rule broken only in egregious situations.
If that means that local schools make minor, stupid decisions, that's a price worth paying. In the Virginia gubernatorial, Liberals should be smart enough not to take the culture-war bait. McAuliffe put his foot in his mouth when he made himself too easy to identify with the top-down, centralized education policy that all engaged parents--Liberals and Conservatives--hate. He should have simply pointed that out that critical race theory isn't taught in the public schools and then moved on. Let the locals remove the thing that doesn't exist.
And if the issue is whether to remove a book or two from the library, let the locals fight it out among themselves. If books are banned, they can easily be found elsewhere and will be all the more attractive to the kids who wound'n't have been motivated to read them otherwise.
If the Republican Youngkin was running against the Democrat Arne Duncan (Obama's Education Secretary), I'd hold my nose and vote for Duncan because I think that Republicans need to be completely delegitimated until the Cheney/Kinziger wing of the party restores it to sanity. But I understand why so many people have come to despise Democrats of the Duncan ilk. They're what I call Aspen-Institute Democrats. Completely clueless in their Neoliberal arrogance. This is the kind of Liberalism that Anand Giridharadas skewers in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. They are Liberal in their cultural values, but just as invested in elite control of the system to protect their elite interests as Mitch McConnell. (See Note 1)
I wonder how many Liberal, urban, educated elites in the media and business who watched The Hunger Games and rooted for Katniss and the others from the outer districts realized that everybody in Main Street America sees them as the Capitol elite. The people on Main Street see more of the Stanley Tucci character in establishment Democrats than they see FDR. That's why the ridiculous child-molesting stories stick. And Liberal public intellectuals and policymakers should learn to let people alone in their local communities unless they are doing something that is an egregious abuse of minority rights there. They don't have to impose their prissy, being-right-about-everything on everyone every time.
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Note 1: See Molly Ball's 2017 "On Safari in Trump's America" where she accompanies squishily clueless Neoliberal Third Way Democrats trying to make sense of Trump's America. The naivete and smugness of this "type" of Liberal is something you came up against time and again in the Education Reform wars. There was always this pretense of listening without showing the least aptitude for hearing. They just know better because they're rich and all the rich people they know thinks as they do. Their epistemological bubble isn't quite as thick as the one that enshrouds the cultural Right, but it's pretty thick.