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Lee's statement that "we are not a democracy" has a long genealogy on the American right, and is not that different from what others have said recently. /1 https://twitter.com/SenMikeLee/status/1314089207875371008
Remember that in 2016, Trump economic advisor, Stephen Moore, said, "I'm not even a big believer in democracy." /2 https://theintercept.com/2016/08/09/capitalism-is-a-lot-more-important-than-democracy-says-donald-trumps-economic-adviser/
As Lisa McGirr shows in the "Preface to the New Edition" of her classic study of conservatism, Suburban Warriors, such statements are not uncommon. In 2014, Tea Party Rep. Fred Yoho confessed to "radical ideas of democracy" by limiting voting rights to property owners (p. xxi) /3
In 2010, Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips said restricting voting to property owners "makes a lot of sense." (Quoted in McGirr, p. xxii) /4 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/60727330/
Going back further in time, the idea that we are a "republic" and not a "democracy" was central to John Birch Society rhetoric. This passage is from a full-page JBS advertisement in 1966. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/60727404/
According to this JBS member in 1961, "The country was considered a republic and NOT a democracy until the commies decided to call us this./6 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/60727482/
Such rhetoric extends back to the anti-New Dealers. H.W. Prentis, Jr., later the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, complained in 1939 about the "favorable connotation that the word democracy possesses in the mind of the masses."/7 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/60727569/
The distinction was also critical to the anti-communist columnist, Westbrook Pegler, who was both a New Deal opponent and, later, a JBS supporter. This is from 1950./8 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/60727746/
Gore Vidal's 1961 analysis seems strikingly relevant today: "What the reaction really wants to say is that the will of the majority as expressed through elections should be circumvented." /9 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/60727892/
