Is liberal indifference sustainable?

You've seen this idea expressed many times on this blog over the past decade: political liberalism, as it evolved during the 20th century, is defined by its indifference to the outcomes of elections. It requires acquiescence in election results because it presumes that no result in a freely contested election can be so unacceptable that it justifies resistance to the winning candidate or party taking office. Because liberalism -- or at least the pluralist liberalism identified with Isaiah Berlin -- takes for granted that there is no ultimate universal standard or good that permits or requires us to override the will of the electorate, it follows that there are multiple if not infinite acceptable outcomes, so long as the process is respected. Modern liberalism -- you could also call it progressivism -- envisions the electoral process as a perpetual-motion machine; its faith is that no idea or policy truly antithetical to democracy can survive the electoral process. Its most fundamental article of faith is that elections in and of themselves can not destroy democracy, though what elected officials do once elected may tell a different story. It occurred to me that this modern attitude diverges significantly from the classical political tradition. That tradition assumed that political history played out in cycles, or in rises and falls, or pendulum swings from one extreme to another. The tradition anticipated decadence to overtake any political order in time, though political theorists, including the American Founders, experimented with building safeguards against decadence into constitutions. Decadence followed certain predictable patterns, most typically when the expansion of voting rights created opportunities for unprincipled demagogues to take power for their own selfish ends by pandering to equally self-interested voters, either on the basis of raw self-interest or through rhetoric that gave self-interest the appearance of principle. In modern times, leftism cast the narrative of demagoguery into disrepute, reducing warnings against it into the self-interested conservatism of established elites. Even without leftism, a democracy tending toward universal suffrage will increasingly resent the demagoguery narrative, while pluralist liberalism absolves the electorate from blame should a demagogue take power, withholding judgment on the actual demagogue until that official abuses his or her power -- by which time, according to critics of so-called authoritarian democracies, it may be too late. Liberalism has no real answer to authoritarian democracy except the idea of term limits, an idea with which many liberals remain uncomfortable because it limits the electorate's options. It would seem that liberalism, to the extent that it's committed to universal suffrage and plural goods, has no structural answer to the threat of demagoguery, except to propose immunizing the masses against demagogic appeals by enhancing their education. Contemporary observers question the effectiveness of that strategy, and a few (as discussed yesterday) go so far as to propose contracting the franchise to ensure that elections are determined more objectively. Democracy's moral claim, however, has nothing to do with any pretensions of objectivity, and while liberals may idealize objectivity as the opposite of irrational passion, they're sure to question any "objective" recommendation to limit either the options available to or the actual composition of the electorate. Liberalism remains convinced that liberal democracy is an end unto itself. In effect, it holds that the electorate and the nation are one and the same, so that there is no separate standard of national interest that could possibly overrule the electorate. While we should all be careful about asserting such a standard, or assuming that it justifies our disapproval of an election, we should be willing to ask whether the nation is something other than the electorate, and whether anything important follows from that, without being accused automatically of authoritarian tendencies. At a point in American history when we seem obliged to choose between demagogues with no other plausible options, we definitely need to rethink a lot of things we took for granted not so long ago.