No, You Don't Get to Elect the Microchips in Soda Guy

Limits on democracy are necessary

Călin Georgescu is a Romanian agronomist and former UN official. Last year, he ran for president in the midst of a career spent promoting various conspiracy theories, including the belief that the moon landing was a hoax, skepticism about climate change and the existence of Covid-19, and the view that carbonated drinks contain nanochips that infiltrate the human body. He thinks that people in the Marshall Islands lived for up to 200 years before American nuclear tests, which reduced their lifespan to 35-40.

In the first round of the election held in November, Georgescu secured approximately 23% of the vote, leading the race despite initial low polling numbers. This meant he should have been in a run-off with the candidate who finished second. However, the Romanian Constitutional Court annulled the election results on December 6, citing evidence of Russian interference, including coordinated social media campaigns and cyberattacks aimed at boosting his candidacy.

Subsequent investigations led to accusations his campaign had utilized undeclared funds and was linked to fascist organizations. Georgescu was arrested and barred from participating in the rescheduled election set for Sunday.

American rightists are very upset about what has happened in Romania. The criticism writes itself. You believe in democracy, then you annul the results when an unapproved candidate wins. Hypocrites! A similar dispute is ongoing in Germany, as summarized by this exchange between Marco Rubio and the German Foreign Ministry.

I find the rightist argument here that there should be no limits on democracy quite odd. Consider that even though most people in Western countries don’t question the capitalist system, almost everyone supports some restraints on capitalism. This is why we have things like minimum wage laws, government funded or government run healthcare, and bans on prostitution and drugs. People who want something close to unrestrained capitalism – I am among them – are generally considered extreme.

Yet when it comes to democracy, it is seen as intolerable to limit the choices of voters. To say that a country is restricting democracy is thought to be enough to condemn what it is doing.

To be fair, you can accuse European elites of hypocrisy. They don’t just come out and admit that we need limits on democracy. Instead, they assert that they are protecting it. Yet I don’t think that their position is necessarily that incoherent. People often say they’re helping capitalism “work better” by interfering in market transactions. This might be seen as an Orwellian argument, since pro-capitalism just ends up referring to whatever you think it is good to do. But it’s generally taken for granted that any important principle has some limits.

In the end, these definitional questions regarding whether Romanians or Germans are “strengthening” or “harming” democracy are beside the point. Conservatives these days love to focus on elite hypocrisy, while avoiding underlying issues. And in this case, the underlying issue is whether the voters should be allowed to select whichever leaders they want, or whether elites sometimes have the responsibility to step in and ensure they don’t drive the country off a cliff.

We can take issue with Romania blaming Russian interference for Georgescu’s success, and say that they should perhaps be more honest like the Germans are. Ideally, they would have simply banned Georgescu from the race beforehand, and elites would have more confidence in the concept of an Elite Human Capital cartel working together to keep certain figures from achieving power. But the true issue here is that, if the Romanian people want to be ruled by someone like Georgescu, elites are completely justified in making sure he doesn’t take office. The masses don’t even have an excuse like mass immigration or excessive wokeness in this situation. Neither of these grievances pertain to Romania. Georgescu’s success is simply the result of unadulterated mass stupidity.

One could argue that political suppression never works in the long run. Yet if elites are united in wanting to exclude certain parties or positions, we have seen many historical examples of them being able to do so for a very long time. The National Front was founded in 1967 and Jean-Marie Le Pen made the presidential run-off in 2002. Here we are after all these decades, and all the other parties just came together to limit the seats won by National Rally despite it receiving the most votes in the first round of parliamentary elections last year. Maybe right-wing populists will end up ruling France eventually, but they’ve been kept out in the cold for a very long time. Germany has similarly been excluding the far right from positions of authority for decades now, and while the AfD just had a record showing, the other parties still will not form a coalition with it, and the state may even be setting the stage to completely disband it. Perhaps some other right-wing party will pop up, it will take a while to rise again, and then it’ll also be banned, as part of an endless cycle.

The difficulty here of course is knowing where to draw the line. I think Georgescu is the easy case. You’re seriously electing the microchip guy? You’re going to have to try again. AfD provides a more difficult challenge. In the US, there’s no plausible path to banning MAGA, but in retrospect, Republicans would have been smart to vote to convict Trump after the second impeachment so he couldn’t run again.

The absolute awfulness of the Trump administration on multiple dimensions, and its imperviousness to reason, show the dangers of populism run amok. The old adage “the answer to bad speech is more speech” does not seem credible after all that we have seen. Right now, Trump is fundraising off the idea that “the Swamp” is blocking him from sending every American a $5,000 check, which the government can supposedly afford due to all the DOGE savings. The real savings are going to round to about zero, if Elon’s pet project doesn’t end up actually costing money, and there is not even a proposal for $5,000 checks on the table. MAGA is now in a complete fantasy world and distrustful of information that comes from any source other than Trump himself. I don’t see how you fix this. Sometimes, conservatives talk about an IQ test or property requirement to vote. But stacking the odds against right-wing populists seems to have the same effect, setting some minimum threshold for full democratic participation. The fact that the establishment had opportunities to ensure Trump couldn’t run again – including two impeachment trials – but didn’t take advantage of them shows the dangers of an elite that is too tolerant of threats to the system.

Right-wingers like to complain about supposed injustices they face, and the Trump administration now has taken it upon itself to ensure that right-wing populists get a fair shake across Europe. This is kind of funny, since one of intellectual MAGA’s favorite (only?) philosophers is Curtis Yarvin, who believes in absolute monarchy. The only two currently acceptable positions on the right, then, are that democracy should be abolished and that it should be completely unrestrained. Europe has settled on a moderate position, which is to have democracy but limit the principle of popular sovereignty by excluding people like them. Note how extreme and unprincipled the MAGA position is, with JD Vance even complaining that other parties engage in strategic cooperation to freeze out the populist right, which in no way contradicts democratic principles. If 65% of Frenchmen or Germans prioritize keeping Le Pen types out of power, voters and their representatives have every right to act on such views. There is no basis to say an offense against democracy has been committed just because an American politician does not like the fact that other parties choose not to be in a coalition with the AfD.

Bans of course are more potentially problematic. Some nations might go too far, but in the case of someone like Georgescu, the Romanian Constitutional Court clearly got things right. And with the rise in populism across the world, I think we can expect more cases of democracy clearly gone wrong in the coming years.