Rand Paul is not a big fan of, uh, democracy?

Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large

Rand Paul has a very interesting view on American democracy: He’s not a fan.

“The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for,” the Kentucky Republican Senator told The New York Times in a story published Monday. “The Jim Crow laws came out of democracy. That’s what you get when a majority ignores the rights of others.”

So, er, what?

Paul’s point, I think, is that the rights of the minority party in the Senate are sacrosanct because we have a representative democracy (where people elect representatives to cast votes on policy) rather than a direct democracy (where people decide the policies they want). Paul means to argue that because people elected to have members of Congress represent their interests, they inherently believed that simple majority rule was not the best answer. And, therefore, the current obstruction by Republicans in the Senate — on the January 6 commission bill, among other things — is entirely in keeping with the founding principles of America.

Paul’s view echoes that expressed by Utah Sen. Mike Lee, an ally of the Kentucky Republican, last October. “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are,” tweeted Lee. “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

So, what Paul (and Lee) are trying to do is make a political science argument about representative democracy and its inherent superiority to simply allowing the majority to rule. (Sidebar: I always thought we were an autonomous collective…)

But the way Paul (and Lee) are going about it is all wrong.

For starters, democracy is not solely about majority rule. It is about the right of citizens to have a free and fair say about the way in which the country they live in is governed. That usually takes the form of representative democracy, like what we have in the United States — including one chamber where majority rules (the House) and one where any single Senator has the ability to slow or stop action on a particular policy, thanks to the filibuster.

Then there’s Paul’s attempt to use Jim Crow laws as evidence of the dangers of majority rule. Which doesn’t, candidly, make a ton of sense. Jim Crow laws — passed primarily in southern and border states immediately following the end of the Civil War — were primarily intended at lessening Black Americans’ ability to exert influence and power over the political system. Jim Crow’s root goal was to keep a small number of (white) people in power — at the expense of Black majorities.

Which, well, has some unfortunate parallels in the modern moment for Paul. Already more than a dozen Republican-controlled states have passed laws that make it harder to vote since the 2020 election alone. Study after study shows that limiting polling hours, requiring an ID to vote and limiting early voting disproportionately impacts communities of color. Those sorts of laws do the exact thing that Paul is touting as proof-positive of the negative effects of majority rule governance.

Three things have always been true of Paul: 1) He is utterly convinced he is smarter than just about anyone, 2) He tends to think and talk in broad theoretical terms without considering lived experiences and 3) He loves to create controversy via trolling.

When all three of those character traits combine, you get moments like this from Paul. Moments in which he sounds more like a college student in a late-night riff session over Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” and a lot less like a United States senator.