The Republican Party’s attempt to overturn an election their candidate lost by more than seven million votes caps a growing movement among a wing of the Republican Party to attack democracy as much as liberalism, if not more so. In the aftermath of January 6, 2021, it is harder to sustain Francis Fukuyama’s argument in “Liberalism and Its Discontents” that, “The ‘democracy’ under attack today is a shorthand for liberal democracy, and what is really under greatest threat is the liberal component of this pair.” What we are witnessing right now is the democracy component under siege.Īnd while we are hard-wired to look for symmetry in the world-or what Fukuyama calls “parallel” threats coming from the Left and the Right-Janushould put those notions of false equivalency to bed. Instead, they attacked the citadel of democracy itself: Congress sitting in session to count and certify the votes of an election to effectuate the peaceful transfer of power.
Despite decades of fury from the American Right that the judiciary’s unelected judges were a form of “tyranny,” the insurrectionists didn’t attack the branch most representative of liberalism’s rule of law.
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