A sign of distemper or the sign of an enemy

From Voices of Reason—and Unreason by Peggy Noonan.

The screaming from the first seconds of the first hearings, the coordinated interruptions, the insistent rudeness and accusatory tones—none of it looked like the workings of the ordered democracy that has been the envy of the world.

[snip]

The howling and screeching that interrupted the hearings and the voting, the people who clawed on the door of the court, the ones who chased senators through the halls and screamed at them in elevators, who surrounded and harassed one at dinner with his wife, who disrupted and brought an air of chaos, who attempted to thwart democratic processes so that the people could not listen and make their judgments:

Do you know how that sounded to normal people, Republican and Democratic and unaffiliated? It sounded demonic. It didn’t sound like “the resistance” or #MeToo. It sounded like the shrieking in the background of an old audiotape of an exorcism.

Noonan is a wonderful writer with whose opinions I agree just about as often as I disagree. She can often put the best case for a position with which I disagree.

In this instance, however, we are reasonably aligned in our estimation, though I would go one step further.

What dismays me, and I suspect others though I have not seen this much discussed, is that this appears to be more than resistance or protest, this appears to be an attack on our system of government. We are a democratic federal republic. We have built-in principles and checks and balances to constrain government against individuals, to protect minorities from majorities, to constrain passions in deference to deliberation, to ensure the blessings of freedom and liberty while channeling cooperative behavior. These strike me as worthwhile and noble goals. We have not perfectly encapsulated the best of Age of Enlightenment thinking, but it is a pretty robust, pragmatic effort which has stood us in good stead compared to all the rest of the world.

As Tom Wolfe paraphrased the French philosopher Jean-François Revel, "the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe."

The structure of our federal Republic is not haphazard. All the elements have their purpose. All have their drawbacks.

It is distressing enough to see people, professors, professional commentators, etc. trying to launch wholesale attacks on critical elements (Supreme Court, Electoral College, Due Process, Free Speech) simply for expedient short term political gains. Distressing because they are ignorant in their passion (they don't know the purposes served by the Electoral College) or distressing because they are happy to break the system just to get what they want.

More distressing still are the mobs doxxing and stalking our elected representatives, the attempted assassinations, the ambush physical assaults, investing the homes of our appointed executives (for example the FCC), disrupting the orderly governance of our nation. Protesting and editorials are one thing. Trying to coercively impose your will on all your fellow citizens by breaking our government and governance is a step too far.

All of us have experienced elections which we dislike, indeed which we think to be dangerous. Elections, court decisions, government policies, etc. But we all subscribe to one system because it both enables and constrains us all. None of us has the omnipotence to be truly certain that our individual judgment trumps the cumulative wishes and wisdom of all of our 330 million fellow citizens.

Screaming erratic mobs seeking to arrogate to themselves the power of decision making on behalf of all Americans is not just an act of anarchy or a symptom of personal imbalance. They are an attack on the rules we have all gained from, suffered from but also agreed to.

To hijack Noonan's construct, It sounds like an attack on our government, on our country and on ourselves as participants in our federal republican democracy.