Secularists have generally been eager to challenge religious authority, and almost everyone thinks it A Good Thing to challenge political authority. There is typically some selectivity in both cases. Religious skeptics in the civil rights community were glad to borrow the authority of liberal clergy who could say God was on their side. And the challenging of political authority seems on careful examination to be acceptable only when the authority is telling you to do something you think you shouldn’t have to do. We think Thomas More was a man for all seasons because he obeyed his conscience in defiance of his king. But what his conscience was telling him was that the king’s authority had to be subordinate to that of the pope. More didn't have a problem with authority. He had a problem with Henry's claim to be the authority.
We are just as selective with our praise of nonconformity. The boy who resisted all that peer pressure to say the emperor was naked was a hero. Flat-earthers, who are no less defiant of peer pressure, are ridiculed. Evidently, whether nonconformity is a good thing depends on what you are refusing to conform to. Context matters. There is no rule you can follow that will guarantee you never make a mistake either in accepting authority or challenging it. The authorities themselves, though, are always mistaken if, when asked "Why should anyone believe that?" they reply "Because we say so."
This one of many mistakes Trump is constantly making. Whatever he says, we're supposed to just take his word for it. If we question him, we're at least stipid and maybe even traitorous. But what do we get from his adversaries when they call him a racist? Nothing better. It's just "Trust us, we know racism when we see it, and if you don't believe us, then you must be racist, too, or else really stupid."
Do I doubt that he is a racist? I don't know whether he is a racist, and frankly I don't give a damn. Even if his character were irreproachable, I would not want someone as stupid as he is to be serving as president of my country. But the liberal opposition hardly cares about intelligent governance any more. It cares only about moral governance, and it furthermore claims to be the sole authority on what constitutes moral governance. That is why he won the election and why he will probably win re-election. He is a thug, yes, but so are his adversaries. And to a very large segment of the electorate, his thuggery is not as apparent as that of his adversaries.
Why not? It gets back to consent of the governed. Countless Americans do not consent to the progressive agenda. Trump told those people that he was on their side. The progressives meanwhile told those people, "Your consent is irrelevant. When we are in power, you will do as we say because we are good people and you are bad people."
Progressives will object: "That is a gross misrepresentation. We're not saying anything like that." Not in so many words, of course. But when the people of the Confederate states said, "We do not consent," the Union's reply was: "We don't need your consent, because we have the means to compel your compliance." Of course they had to justify that, but justification was easy enough. Slavery was evil, and so any means necessary to abolish it was justified.
As for the presidency, the Constitution does not require the direct consent of the electorate because the founders never intended for the nation's chief executive to be a representative of the people. For that function, they established an institution called the House of Representatives. The current imperial presidency has evolved in defiance of the founders' intentions. That does not alone make it a bad thing. We should never suppose that the founders were infallible. But we do need to ask why they wanted the executive to be so disconnected from the popular will, and then to ask whether their reasons have become irrelevant over the past 230 years.
We keep hearing how much the founders "didn't trust the people to govern themselves." That is one way to characterize their attitude toward democracy. Here is another: They understood how great a threat the majority could be to the personal liberties of any minority, and it never occurred to them that it should make any difference whether that minority had suffered any prior history of oppression. They seemed to believe that the government just ought not to oppress people, period.
In the 18th century, this seems to have been a progressive idea.
Next: The Democrats today
(This page last updated on September 17, 2020.)