The Tax Bill Shows the G.O.P.’s Contempt for Democracy

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The Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is notably generous to corporations, high earners, inheritors of large estates and the owners of private jets. Taken as a whole, the bill will add about $1.4 trillion to the deficit in the next decade and trigger automatic cuts to Medicare and other safety net programs unless Congress steps in to stop them.

To most observers on the left, the Republican tax bill looks like sheer mercenary cupidity. “This is a brazen expression of money power,” Jesse Jackson wrote in The Chicago Tribune, “an example of American plutocracy — a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy.”
Mr. Jackson is right to worry about the wealthy lording it over the rest of us, but the open contempt for democracy displayed in the Senate’s slapdash rush to pass the tax bill ought to trouble us as much as, if not more than, what’s in it.

In its great haste, the “world’s greatest deliberative body” held no hearings or debate on tax reform. The Senate’s Republicans made sloppy math mistakes, crossed out and rewrote whole sections of the bill by hand at the 11th hour and forced a vote on it before anyone could conceivably read it.

The link between the heedlessly negligent style and anti-redistributive substance of recent Republican lawmaking is easy to overlook. The key is the libertarian idea, woven into the right’s ideological DNA, that redistribution is the exploitation of the “makers” by the “takers.” It immediately follows that democracy, which enables and legitimizes this exploitation, is itself an engine of injustice. As the novelist Ayn Rand put it, under democracy “one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority.”

On the campaign trail in 2015, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, conceded that government is a “necessary evil” requiring some tax revenue. “But if we tax you at 100 percent, then you’ve got 0 percent liberty,” Mr. Paul continued. “If we tax you at 50 percent, you are half-slave, half-free.” The speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, shares Mr. Paul’s sense of the injustice of redistribution. He’s also a big fan of Ayn Rand. “I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it,” Mr. Ryan has said. If the big-spending, democratic welfare state is really a system of part-time slavery, as Ayn Rand and Senator Paul contend, then beating it back is a moral imperative of the first order.

But the clock is ticking. Looking ahead to a potentially paralyzing presidential scandal, midterm blood bath or both, congressional Republicans are in a mad dash to emancipate us from the welfare state. As they see it, the redistributive upshot of democracy is responsible for the big-government mess they’re trying to bail us out of, so they’re not about to be tender with the niceties of democratic deliberation and regular parliamentary order.

The idea that there is an inherent conflict between democracy and the integrity of property rights is as old as democracy itself. Because the poor vastly outnumber the propertied rich — so the argument goes — if allowed to vote, the poor might gang up at the ballot box to wipe out the wealthy.

In the 20th century, and in particular after World War II, with voting rights and Soviet Communism on the march, the risk that wealthy democracies might redistribute their way to serfdom had never seemed more real. Radical libertarian thinkers like Rand and Murray Rothbard (who would be a muse to both Charles Koch and Ron Paul) responded with a theory of absolute property rights that morally criminalized taxation and narrowed the scope of legitimate government action and democratic discretion nearly to nothing. “What is the State anyway but organized banditry?” Rothbard asked. “What is taxation but theft on a gigantic, unchecked scale?”

Mainstream conservatives, like William F. Buckley, banished radical libertarians to the fringes of the conservative movement to mingle with the other unclubbables. Still, the so-called fusionist synthesis of libertarianism and moral traditionalism became the ideological core of modern conservatism. For hawkish Cold Warriors, libertarianism’s glorification of capitalism and vilification of redistribution was useful for immunizing American political culture against viral socialism. Moral traditionalists, struggling to hold ground against rising mass movements for racial and gender equality, found much to like in libertarianism’s principled skepticism of democracy. “If you analyze it,” Ronald Reagan said, “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”

The hostility to redistributive democracy at the ideological center of the American right has made standard policies of successful modern welfare states, happily embraced by Europe’s conservative parties, seem beyond the moral pale for many Republicans. The outsize stakes seem to justify dubious tactics — bunking down with racists, aggressive gerrymandering, inventing paper-thin pretexts for voting rules that disproportionately hurt Democrats — to prevent majorities from voting themselves a bigger slice of the pie.

But the idea that there is an inherent tension between democracy and the integrity of property rights is wildly misguided. The liberal-democratic state is a relatively recent historical innovation, and our best accounts of the transition from autocracy to democracy points to the role of democratic political inclusion in protecting property rights.

As Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and James Robinson of Harvard show in “Why Nations Fail,” ruling elites in pre-democratic states arranged political and economic institutions to extract labor and property from the lower orders. That is to say, the system was set up to make it easy for elites to seize what ought to have been other people’s stuff.

In “Inequality and Democratization,” the political scientists Ben W. Ansell and David J. Samuels show that this demand for political inclusion generally isn’t driven by a desire to use the existing institutions to plunder the elites. It’s driven by a desire to keep the elites from continuing to plunder them.

It’s easy to say that everyone ought to have certain rights. Democracy is how we come to get and protect them. Far from endangering property rights by facilitating redistribution, inclusive democratic institutions limit the “organized banditry” of the elite-dominated state by bringing everyone inside the charmed circle of legally enforced rights.

Democracy is fundamentally about protecting the middle and lower classes from redistribution by establishing the equality of basic rights that makes it possible for everyone to be a capitalist. Democracy doesn’t strangle the golden goose of free enterprise through redistributive taxation; it fattens the goose by releasing the talent, ingenuity and effort of otherwise abused and exploited people.

At a time when America’s faith in democracy is flagging, the Republicans elected to treat the United States Senate, and the citizens it represents, with all the respect college guys accord public restrooms. It’s easier to reverse a bad piece of legislation than the bad reputation of our representative institutions, which is why the way the tax bill was passed is probably worse than what’s in it. Ultimately, it’s the integrity of democratic institutions and the rule of law that gives ordinary people the power to protect themselves against elite exploitation. But the Republican majority is bulldozing through basic democratic norms as though freedom has everything to do with the tax code and democracy just gets in the way.

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