None so blind as those who will not see

I have been trying to avoid a lot of media generated outrage lately by simply not commenting until there is some reasonable record of fact for the issue at hand.  But some of them never get to the facts.  How long has the January 6th Committee been around?  Pelosi announced the creation of a House commission on February 15th, 2021.  Here we are a year and a half later and there have been repeated announcements of major discovery or development and nothing ever actually emerges.  So far, there is no there there.

Same with the Mar-a-Lago raid.  Sure looks like an inappropriate targeting of a political opponent.  Might there be a real underlying crime?  Sure.  But let's see it.  So far, a week or two after the raid, we are still mired in rumors of who did or did not know of the raid, who did or did not approve it, and a constantly evolving swirl of reasons for why it occurred.  Waiting for facts seems like a mug's game some times.

But if you are an empirical rationalist, that's what we do.  What's the law?  What's the facts?

Ann Althouse has a piece, "The spectacle of a former president facing criminal investigation raises profound questions about American democracy, and these questions demand answers." which echoes my sentiments.  She is critiquing an ill-argued New York Times editorial from last week.

The urgency to stop Trump feels like a mistrust of the people. The deplorable subsection of America shouldn't have elected him in the first time — so goes the elite opinion — and we can't let those people have another chance to give this man power. That's anti-democratic, and isn't that why the oligarchy presents itself as serving democracy?

Is that one of the "profound questions about American democracy" the NYT editors address here? I doubt it, but I will finally read this thing and let you know if — by off chance — the elite editors of the NYT notice the contradiction:

Mr. Trump’s unprecedented assault on the integrity of American democracy requires a criminal investigation....

Trump is framed as the attacker of democracy, rather than one of the candidates for election. He's going to wreck elections, not participate in them. 

[D]oing nothing to hold him accountable for his actions in the months leading up to Jan. 6 could set an irresistible precedent for future presidents. Why not attempt to stay in power by any means necessary or use the power of the office to enrich oneself or punish one’s enemies, knowing that the law does not apply to presidents in or out of office?... 

Trump pursued available remedies and didn't get very far, then participated in a big demonstration, but do you want to criminalize seeking court remedies and delivering big speeches? That doesn't approach "by any means necessary." And it's odd to include on that list "us[ing] the power of the office to... punish one’s enemies," because that sounds like what is being done to Trump.

[snip]

Part of democracy is critiquing democracy. Both sides do it, and both sides lie. The "Russia collusion" hoax dogged Trump throughout his presidency. We need to be able to debate about defects in the voting and vote counting process, even as we also need to be able to declare a winner within a practical timeframe. Would the NYT denounce things like "Not My President Day" or all the people who think Al Gore won in 2000?

No, there won't be any principled demand to suppress lies about elections, and if there were, it would be a despicable attack on freedom of speech. The remedy for what they see as lies about the election is simply more speech. I can see the frustration: Why do people keep believing what the NYT believes it knows to be lies? But that's always the problem with freedom of speech. People tell and believe a lot of lies. If you want democracy, you can't let that flip you out into hysteria. Concentrate on the next election and defeat your opponent at the polls.

If your response is, no, because my opponent might win and we can't take that risk, then you don't believe in democracy.

The establishment wing of the national parties as well as academia and the mainstream media, basically the chattering class, are all talking about civil war and threats to democracy and the threat of the far right but all the authoritarian actions and efforts to suppress free speech and efforts to extra-judicially target political opponents seem to originate from the White House and the Congressional Democrats.  

And the chattering class can't seem to see what everyone else does.  The Emperor has no clothes; the establishment is the repressive anti-democratic authoritarians.

UPDATE:  II had not realized that the accusation of something being anti-democratic had become common among the authoritarian left (along with "conspiracy theory", "far right", "unrepresentative", "racist", etc.).  But apparently so.  From Stop Calling Everything You Disagree With ‘Anti-Democratic’ by Tyler Cowen.  

The danger is that “stuff I agree with” will increasingly be labeled as “democratic,” while anything someone opposes will be called “anti-democratic.” Democracy thus comes to be seen as a way to enact a series of personal preferences rather than a (mostly) beneficial impersonal mechanism for making collective decisions.

Closer to home and more controversially, many on the political left in the US have made the charge that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was “anti-democratic.” It is fine to call Dobbs a bad decision, but in fact the ruling puts abortion law into the hands of state legislatures. If aliens were visiting from Mars, they simply would not see that move as anti-democratic.

[snip]

It is also harmful to call the Dobbs decision anti-democratic when what you’re really arguing for is greater involvement by the federal government in abortion policy — a defensible view. No one says the Swiss government is “anti-democratic” because it puts so many decisions (for better or worse) into the hands of the cantons. And pointing out that many US state governments are not as democratic as you might prefer does not overturn this logic.

It would be more honest, and more accurate, simply to note that court put the decision into the hands of (imperfectly) democratic state governments, and that you disagree with the decisions of those governments.

By conflating “what’s right” with “what’s democratic,” you may end up fooling yourself about the popularity of your own views. If you attribute the failure of your views to prevail to “non-democratic” or “anti-democratic” forces, you might conclude the world simply needs more majoritarianism, more referenda, more voting.

Those may or may not be correct conclusions. But they should be judged empirically, rather than following from people’s idiosyncratic terminology about what they mean by “democracy” — and, by extension, “anti-democratic.”