As the last stretch of April’s convention of the Washington State Republican Party got underway, Chairman Jim Walsh took a moment to celebrate the messy process of democracy.
“The large majority of you are first-time attendees to a convention,” Walsh told nearly 2,000 delegates gathered at the Spokane Convention Center. “However we end our business today, go forth and encourage others to join us in this experiment in democratic government.”
But by the time they ended their business, a majority of those delegates had declared that even the words “democracy” or “democratic” were suspect.
The delegates approved a resolution emphasizing that the United States is a republic, not a democracy, and asserting that “every time the word ‘democracy’ is used favorably it serves to promote the principles of the Democratic Party.” The resolution called on Republicans to avoid the word, and opposed not only “efforts to use American military might to spread ‘democracy’ around the world” but also “legislation which makes our nation more ‘democratic’ in nature.” It quoted President John Adams saying democracy is “more bloody than aristocracy or monarchy” and that “there was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”
Other resolutions called for an end to mail-in voting and a repeal of the 17th Amendment, which made the United States more democratic by allowing people to directly elect their senators. Some delegates called for eliminating The American’s Creed — a patriotic resolution adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives more than a century ago — because it refers to America as “a democracy in a republic.”
“We do not want to be a ‘democracy,’” one Republican delegate said. “We are devolving into a democracy because congressmen and senators are elected by the same pool.”
That resolution alarmed Democrats and others, who saw it as part a threat to the country’s foundational values arising from the current GOP’s embrace of former, and possibly future, President Donald Trump — who falsely declared the 2020 election “rigged,” pushed an elaborate gambit to overturn the results and praised his supporters who rioted at the Capitol as “patriots.” For those reasons and others, Democrats from President Joe Biden on down have taken up a refrain: “Democracy is on the ballot.”
In an interview with InvestigateWest, Walsh, the state GOP chairman, bristled at the “unctuous” media coverage of the resolution by left-wing MSNBC host Rachel Maddow and others, calling it “endlessly smug and arrogant.”
Much of the anti-democracy rhetoric is simply a backlash to anti-Trump statements, Walsh said.
“I think there’s a lot of hair-on-fire rhetoric in political circles about ‘threats to democracy.’ This is a counterbalance to that,” Walsh said. “It’s, ‘Wait a minute. We’re not a democracy. We’re a republic. A representative republic.’”
It was a “civics lesson,” he said, part of the distinction between a direct democracy, in which everyone gets to vote on every piece of legislation, and a republic with democratic institutions, in which voters choose their representatives.
Yet Walsh, long a vocal member of the right flank of the party, and the resolutions passed by the GOP both reflect the increasing hold the more conservative base has over the party.
The resolutions can be seen as part of a century-old battle over values, ranging from reasonable debates over the limits of majority rule to a more cynical ploy for partisan advantage — a defense of the structures like the Electoral College that have let Republicans like Trump and George W. Bush win their first terms without garnering the popular vote.
“If [Republican] strongholds were in urban populous areas, they would jettison that commitment overnight,” said Cornell Clayton, head of the political science department at Washington State University. “All of a sudden they’d be against the Electoral College and would want to see reforms to the Senate.”
And at the outer fringes, the anti-democracy rhetoric can represent an outright embrace of autocracy. A YouGov poll in February found that three-quarters of Republicans said that Trump being a dictator for just the first day of his second term was “definitely” or “probably” a good idea.
“There are some elements on the right … who would like to see a strong man, a dictator, or authoritarian, who can enact what they see as the right policies without being fettered by constitutional restrictions,” Clayton said. “I think that’s a much more frightening prospect.”
‘Democracy on the ballot’
To Shasti Conrad, chair of the Washington State Democratic Party, the state GOP’s resolution seemed fitting.
“It was horrifying, but also at the same time, I guess at least they’re being honest,” Conrad said. “At least they’re ‘speaking their truth’ right now.”
As with so much in politics right now, the definition of the word “democracy” has become a referendum on Trump.
“The left loves to say that conservatives are fascists,” Walsh said. “And as it looks like Trump is gaining in the polls, now you’re starting to hear more of the stuff about threats to democracy.”
Much of the reason for calling Trump a threat to democracy culminated with a single date: Jan. 6, 2021.
When Trump lost the 2020 election, he pursued a convoluted and meritless ploy to overturn the results — one that relied on state legislators to throw out the lawfully chosen electors and replace them with slates of Trump supporters. His current running mate, JD Vance, has said that, unlike former Vice President Mike Pence, he would have tried to go along with a version of the scheme.
Trump has referred to those arrested for rioting on Jan. 6 as “hostages,” played recordings of some of them singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and promised to pardon many of them if he is reelected.
The resulting criticisms have put Trump and his supporters on the defensive. When Trump narrowly dodged an assassination attempt July 13, Republicans attempted to blame overheated criticisms of the GOP leader.
“They keep saying, ‘He’s a threat to democracy,’” Trump told a Michigan crowd last month. “I’m saying, ‘What the hell did I do for democracy? Last week, I took a bullet for democracy.’”
On social media, Walsh took verbal swings at Democrats, slamming “a Left Media Establishment that has for years promoted a hate narrative — casually calling Trump a ‘fascist,’ a ‘dictator’ and ‘Hitler’” and argued that, in fact, their “shameful rhetoric” was itself a threat to democracy.
So far, no evidence has emerged to suggest that the shooter was motivated by left-wing or right-wing political rhetoric.
Yet Trump has stoked the perception of his anti-democratic tendencies in recent months. He’s heaped praise upon foreign authoritarians such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
He told Christian conservatives in July that he’d fix the country so well that, in four years, “You’re not going to have to vote,” and then doubled down on the statement when given an opportunity to clarify.
He told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator on day one — but only on day one — in order to close the border and drill for oil. While Republicans argue that he’s joking or trolling Democrats, Conrad said, “I think we have to take him at his word.”
But while defending Trump is a core concern for Republicans nationally, it doesn’t play well in blue Washington state. Ari Hoffman, a Trump-supporting conservative Western Washington talk radio host, said a focus on defending Trump can be to the party’s detriment in this state.
“I would ask any of those people — and I have asked those people — how does Donald Trump help you get elected in Washington?” Hoffman said. “It’s foolhardy and stupid. It really, really is.”
‘Rabbit holes’
In an increasingly blue state, the controversy over the Washington GOP’s resolutions raises questions about whether the party is out of step with even average Washington Republicans, and whether their delegates are playing directly into the hands of the other side.
“That whole convention shows that they are in their own chaos and disarray,” said Conrad, the head of the state Democrats. “They are completely lost down rabbit holes. I don’t see any signs of them coming up for air.”
At the convention, Washington’s GOP delegates cited deeper and more obscure concerns than simply playing up support for the former president: Trump, and most of his voters, have spent little if any time railing against the direct election of senators made possible by the 17th Amendment. But a number of the Washington State GOP delegates were angry at that amendment passed more than a century ago — repeatedly blaming it for the nation’s slide toward “democracy.”
“Get rid of this bastard piece of s— and the 16th with it,” one delegate said, lumping in the 17th with the amendment that legalized the income tax.
Another speaker dived into conspiracy-theory territory, referencing a 110-year-old plot by industrialists he said is outlined in “The Creature from Jekyll Island” to “control our federal Congress” and arguing the direct election of senators made it possible.
Other delegates were clearly frustrated with the detour.
“We spent more time debating the 17th Amendment than the fact that we just added abortion to the [Washington state GOP party] platform,” a third delegate pointed out.
That’s the kind of thing that drives Beva Miles, a moderate Republican volunteer from Spokane, crazy.
“When there are people dying on the streets from fentanyl, which is handed out like candy, we’re going to sit and argue about what the forefathers meant in 1776 by ‘constitutional republic?’” Miles said.
Walsh said he doesn’t care one way or another about the 17th Amendment issue. But he said he understands the argument that senators were originally supposed to be insulated from the push and pull of populist elections, and didn’t see a problem with letting the “rock-ribbed constitutionalists” who want to return to “the old form of electing U.S. senators have their moment to make the case.”
This is a tension facing local and state GOP organizations across the country: They have been taken over by some of the most hardcore activists of the Republican Party, and old-school moderates have lost influence.
Conrad said she thought that maybe the conservatives had learned their lesson that “maybe they needed to move back to the middle” after their 2020 nomination of Loren Culp for governor. Culp cried fraud after losing to Gov. Jay Inslee by more than 13 percentage points, and more recently made headlines after calling a Republican state representative a “back-stabbing … female dog.”
Yet this year in Washington state, instead of endorsing former longtime King County Sheriff Dave Reichert for governor, the candidate leading in polls and fundraising, the delegates endorsed Semi Bird, a former Richland School Board member with a criminal record who has faced questions about whether he has misrepresented his military service.
In May 2021, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, believing the GOP hadn’t done enough to support Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, called on voters to take back the Republican Party “village by village … precinct by precinct.”
It quickly became known as the “precinct strategy,” one that took advantage of a vulnerability in the representative system of government: recruiting far-right candidates for the low-level “precinct committee officer” positions.
Precinct committee officers, the worker-drones of local parties, are elected positions that often go unchallenged or unfilled. Simply by recruiting hard-core ideological candidates to run for these positions, the far right could take control of their local parties, and then — by sending their preferred delegates to the state conventions — shift control of the party.
In red states like Idaho, these tactics have helped push the state sharply to the right. But in blue states like Washington and Oregon, where hewing to the center can be crucial for Republicans to have a chance, some Republicans worry they’re at risk of sabotaging their party’s chances, consigning them to irrelevancy.
“Every four years we get a new crop of zealots,” Miles complained. “Sooner or later they’ve got to wake up and realize that we live in a Democratic state.”
Walsh recognizes the ideological change within the party.
“I think the state party has become a little more populist,” Walsh said.
Walsh, who was voted into leadership by the party last year, is evidence of that shift. He’s known in the House as a bombastic speaker who railed against COVID mandates and Democratic health care policies in fiery speeches on the floor.
Conrad calls him “as far-right as they come,” and points to a 2022 Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights report cataloging the large numbers of far-right Facebook groups that Walsh had joined, including those with names like “2020 PLANDEMIC CORONA PSYOP MIND CONTROL ANTI NEW WORLD ORDER, VACCINES, 5G.”
Walsh, who calls himself a constitutionalist, had been part of the wave of Ron Paul supporters who took over county parties across the state a little over a decade ago. Paul was a libertarian congressman from Texas and presidential candidate who argued for decades that by “wallowing in a pure democracy against which the Founders had strongly warned,” they risked allowing the majority to vote away fundamental liberties.
But today, even Walsh gets accused of being a “Republican in Name Only” by new members of the party.
“Invariably we all become ‘RINOs’ at some point,” Walsh said.
The old republic
The insistence from some Republicans on not calling America a democracy goes back a lot further than the Trump years.
The Spokane County Republican Party platform, for example, has had a plank calling for mandatory civics education — specifically including the idea that America was a constitutional republic, not a democracy — since 2014, when the party was dominated by Ron Paul supporters.
Clayton, the WSU professor, said GOP critics of the word “democracy” are right about one thing: The framers of the Constitution, as much as they could agree on anything, really were terrified of pure democracy. They were reacting to the looming French Revolution, where a populist uprising resulted in guillotines on the streets of Paris.
In that sense, it’s no surprise that Republicans, who tend to exalt the vision and virtues of America’s founders, may share the suspicions about democracy.
But Clayton said they miss the significant point that the Constitution has changed. The founder of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, “is considered our greatest president because he fundamentally transformed the basis for American constitutionalism,” he said.
“Everything since the Civil War, all of our major constitutional amendments have been about democratizing institutions,” Clayton said.
The 13th Amendment ended slavery. The 15th gave voting rights to Black people. The 19th gave it to women.
“All of them are expanding the franchise … making our institutions more democratically accountable,” Clayton said.
In fact, Washington state was a big part of the wave of populist and progressive reforms that led to the 17th Amendment’s right to directly elect senators. In 1899, the Legislature of the recently formed state passed a resolution declaring that requiring legislatures to select U.S. senators was “expensive, unsatisfactory and ruinous to the best interests of the people.”
And at least some delegates at this year’s GOP convention acknowledged that there’d been a historical shift from a republic toward democracy — they just wanted to reverse it.
“We were a republic until 1913, where with the progressive amendments like the income tax, the 17th Amendment was passed,” said Kaj Ahlburg, a Clallam County delegate, wearing a tie patterned with tiny elephants. “This was to make us more like a democracy.”
That’s why Ahlburg, who once achieved minor fame for a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, wanted to repeal the 17th Amendment. Ahlburg argued that the 17th was a betrayal of the original design for America and that the republic risked being lost on the “shoals of democracy.”
Whenever partisans develop strong opinions about structural provisions of the Constitution, Clayton said, look for where they see a tactical advantage. Since the days of Lincoln, the power base of the Republican Party shifted dramatically in the 1960s and ’70s to the American South.
“The Republican Party used to be in favor of small-d democracy, because they controlled more populous states,” Clayton said. “Today, it finds its strength in rural areas, so now they’re all in favor of republicanism.”
Republicans have won the popular vote for the presidency only once since 1988, but have managed to take control of six of the nine Supreme Court seats. They’ve also won control of the majority of state legislatures.
“I was asked about the practical impact,” Ahlburg said at the convention, referring to repealing the 17th Amendment. “There are 27 states with Republican legislatures. And 20 states with Democrat-controlled legislatures.”
If it wasn’t for the 17th Amendment, in other words, Republicans would still have control of the Senate.
In recent years, some on the left have called for sweeping reforms, such as abolishing the Electoral College or the Senate, each time making the case that these institutions were “undemocratic,” empowering a minority over a majority of voters.
“We are a republic, not a democracy,” became a standard Republican rebuttal.
That’s where George Thomas, a professor of American Political Institutions at Claremont McKenna College, said that some Republicans have veered off the course set by the founders — at times in dangerous ways.
“There’s some disingenuousness on the part of some who are invoking ‘We are a republic and not a democracy,’ who are looking toward ‘We want to keep in power and we don’t really care if that power is a minority of the country,’” he said.
The Constitution’s framers didn’t envision the Electoral College as “empowering minority rule,” he said.
The representatives were supposed to represent the will of the people, within defined constitutional limits. If those in control of the country stray too far from the majority, he worries, that’s a recipe for instability.
“I think the idea that you could have sort of sustained minority rule, potentially?” he said. “It’s not sustainable.”
‘Democracy’ in quotes
Thomas sees a contradiction: Even as some within the Republican Party have been critical of “democracy,” they’ve simultaneously “embraced this sort of populist spirit that characterizes itself as small-d democratic.”
Whether it’s a commitment to “democracy,” “states’ rights” or a “strong presidency,” Clayton says, both Republicans and Democrats are typically willing to jettison their positions for strategic reasons.
In her interview with InvestigateWest, Conrad, with the state Democrats, cited Republicans’ celebration of the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe vs. Wade as evidence of their opposition to “democracy.” Right now, the majority of Americans favor abortion being legal in all or most cases. But Republicans also argue that decision actually expands the scope of democracy: Voters and elected officials are now allowed to vote in a broader scope of laws restricting abortion.
Conrad uses the term “democracy” as a kind of stand-in for all American institutions with checks and balances, including the kind of rights she believes the Supreme Court should prevent from being put to a vote. Republicans, meanwhile, are more than happy to embrace the rhetoric of “democracy” when it benefits them: After President Biden announced he was discontinuing his reelection bid, Democratic delegates quickly lined up behind his endorsed replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“This is not democracy,” Walsh wrote on social media. “It’s a small group — more extreme than ordinary voters — putting Party over People.”
As the party continues to evolve, so do the incentives. For decades, Democrats had assumed that high voter turnout helped them, while Republicans pursued voting restrictions. But voting patterns have changed in the Trump years, thanks to educational polarization. Evidence now suggests that high-turnout elections are helping Republicans. The opposition to vote by mail could backfire.
In fact, the most powerful weapon Republicans have in Washington state right now — the one tool they’ve used to reverse Democratic bills — is their most purely, directly democratic one: the state initiative process, an innovation that came from the same wave of democratic reforms that brought the 17th Amendment.
By pushing for six state initiatives this year, Republicans have put Democrats on defense. The Legislature has already passed three initiatives into law, and three more — repealing the state’s carbon fee program and capital gains tax, and weakening the long-term care tax program — are heading to the ballot.
Walsh has repeatedly celebrated such a process as democracy at its finest.
“You want democracy? We’ve got democracy,” he wrote on social media to promote a rally. “Six Initiatives from the People that will Fix What’s Broken in WA!”
“Except,” came the inevitable reply from a follower, “we are not a democracy.”
InvestigateWest originally published this article on Aug. 6, 2024.
Topics: