Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru explain at National Review Online why Democrat Hillary Clinton’s brand of politics is bad for democracy.
Many liberals, and even some non-liberals, have suggested that Donald Trump is a threat to democratic, constitutional government in America — what the Founders and Lincoln called “republicanism.”
They have a point. …
… But the observers who raise these concerns tend to perceive such dangers only with regard to Trump, whom they consider a singular menace. Hillary Clinton, they say, is by contrast a run-of-the-mill liberal politician. As the libertarian writer and humorist P. J. O’Rourke put it this spring in endorsing Clinton, she may be “wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
It’s true that Hillary Clinton is a mainstream contemporary liberal, albeit a disturbingly unethical one. She stands out for decades of brazen and unscrupulous dishonesty wielded to advance her and her husband’s political and financial interests — for curiously lucrative investments explainable only by files that have conveniently gone missing, for vicious character assassination against victims of Bill Clinton’s misogynistic abuses of power, for recklessness with national secrets in the service of protecting personal secrets. These would be alarming traits in a president. But the constitutional order could likely withstand, as it has withstood in the past, presidents with similar traits.
Instead, it is precisely in the way in which Clinton seems normal that she poses a serious danger to American democracy. The mainstream contemporary liberalism she represents so well is itself a threat to constitutional government in America. And it is a more concrete and specific threat than Trump — with his bizarre inclinations, his ignorance and carelessness, and his sheer unpredictability — can pose.
Mainstream liberals now advance a vision of American government that is increasingly contemptuous of our system’s democratic character and that seeks to break through the restraints of the constitutional system in pursuit of their policy ends.
