The Kindergarten Logic: How Elite Republicans Sold Democracy Down the River

On the moral insanity of enabling authoritarians while counting on others to contain them

James Comey’s indictment by Trump’s weaponized Department of Justice should serve as the final, undeniable proof that the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board and their fellow “responsible conservatives” gave Americans catastrophically dangerous advice in 2024. They promised that institutional guardrails would constrain Trump’s authoritarian impulses, that courts and Congress would prevent constitutional destruction, that voters could safely enable someone they acknowledged wanted to be king.

Now we’re watching the systematic prosecution of political enemies while the very Republicans who promised institutional constraint sit in comfortable silence. It’s time to acknowledge what should have been obvious from the beginning: their position was never respectable—it was morally insane.

It’s never safe to vote for the guy who wants to be king. This isn’t complex political analysis requiring sophisticated institutional theory—it’s the most basic principle of democratic governance. Yet somehow, this became a controversial position among supposedly serious conservative intellectuals who spent 2024 convincing voters that empowering authoritarians was safe because other people would prevent the authoritarianism.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, the “responsible conservative” think tank fellows, the “adults in the room” voices—they all made the same fundamentally psychotic argument: “Yes, Trump wants to destroy constitutional governance, but vote for him anyway because Congress and courts will stop him from doing what you’re empowering him to do.”

This is like putting a known child rapist in charge of a kindergarten and saying, “Don’t worry, it’s better than that leftist teacher. The other staff will watch and make sure they don’t rape the kids.”

The analogy isn’t hyperbolic—it’s precise. Both scenarios involve knowingly placing someone with acknowledged dangerous intentions in position to harm vulnerable systems while counting on safeguards that the dangerous person will systematically work to corrupt or eliminate.

That they saw Kamala Harris as equally dangerous because of her left-wing ideology should now reveal them to be completely unserious people. They looked at a prosecutor who spent her career working within institutional frameworks and someone who explicitly wanted to eliminate institutional constraints, and concluded these represented equivalent threats to constitutional governance.

This wasn’t sophisticated analysis—it was tribal blindness so complete that they couldn’t distinguish between policy disagreements and existential threats to the democratic system itself. They treated differences about tax rates and healthcare policy as equivalent to systematic constitutional destruction, revealing people so captured by partisan thinking that proportional threat assessment became impossible.

The Institutional Faith Fraud

These supposedly sophisticated analysts convinced themselves that institutions constrain themselves, that constitutional limits enforce themselves, that democratic norms survive without democratic defenders. They treated constitutional governance as automatic rather than contingent on human choice, as self-preserving rather than requiring active protection, as independent of the very electoral decisions they were encouraging.

“Vote for the authoritarian because institutions will stop the authoritarianism” assumes those institutions operate independently of electoral outcomes rather than being shaped by them. It’s circular logic that would be embarrassing in a high school civics class: enable the capture of institutions while counting on those same institutions to prevent their own capture.

The responsibility evasion is breathtaking. They wanted analytical credibility for recognizing authoritarian threats while externalizing all risk to the very institutions they were encouraging voters to place under authoritarian control. They got to feel sophisticated about understanding dangers while avoiding any accountability for enabling those dangers.

The Catastrophic Results

Now we’re living with the consequences of that moral insanity, and the Comey indictment represents only the beginning of what they enabled:

The Department of Justice has been transformed into Trump’s personal revenge operation while Republican senators who spent careers defending prosecutorial independence discover sudden appreciation for executive flexibility. The same voices who screamed about politicization under Democratic administrations now explain why systematic weaponization of federal law enforcement represents necessary reform.

Trump’s former personal attorney, Lindsey Halligan, now serves as top prosecutor bringing political prosecutions while career prosecutors resign in protest. Comey’s own son-in-law, a federal prosecutor, resigned immediately after the indictment with a one-sentence letter invoking his “oath to the Constitution and country.”

Civil service protections are being eliminated while the House Republicans who built careers on oversight suddenly lose interest in checking executive power. Courts are being captured while constitutional conservatives find sophisticated reasons why judicial independence was always overrated anyway.

The Apology They Owe

The “responsible conservatives” who convinced voters that constitutional destruction was safe because other people would prevent it owe American democracy an acknowledgment that they were catastrophically wrong about the most important political judgment of our time.

Their position wasn’t just incorrect—it was morally insane. They literally told people to enable systematic threats to constitutional governance while counting on the very governance being threatened to somehow survive the enabling.

But acknowledging this error would require the moral courage that preventing the error would have required in the first place. They can’t admit they were wrong because they would have to explain how supposedly sophisticated political analysts could advocate for something so obviously dangerous based on reasoning so transparently circular.

When supposedly serious political analysts can’t tell the difference between normal Democratic governance and authoritarian capture of democratic institutions, they’ve forfeited any claim to intellectual respect. Their “institutional analysis” was tribal preference dressed up in theoretical complexity, their “strategic wisdom” was moral cowardice disguised as analytical sophistication.

The Fundamental Betrayal

The most contemptible aspect is how they now treat the constitutional destruction they promised wouldn’t happen—the political prosecutions, the DOJ weaponization, the systematic elimination of institutional independence—as somehow natural or inevitable rather than the direct result of choices they encouraged voters to make.

They told educated Americans: “Trust our institutional judgment about constitutional safeguards.” Then they abandoned those same safeguards the moment defending them required political courage. They promised protection while actively eliminating the protectors.

The Comey indictment should end any pretense that their advice was within the realm of reasonable disagreement. When you watch career prosecutors resign rather than participate in political prosecutions, when you see the systematic transformation of law enforcement into regime protection service, when you witness the DOJ become a weapon against political enemies—you’re seeing exactly what anyone with basic understanding of authoritarian psychology should have predicted.

It was never respectable to vote for someone who wants to be king. Anyone who said otherwise was either lying to themselves or lying to you. The sophisticated analysis, the institutional theory, the strategic complexity—all of it was elaborate rationalization for the most basic failure of democratic judgment possible.

When history judges this moment, it will remember that supposedly serious conservative intellectuals convinced Americans to hand power to someone they acknowledged wanted to abuse that power, based on magical thinking about institutional constraints that required no effort or sacrifice from the very people making the recommendation.

They wanted to be remembered as sophisticated realists who navigated complex institutional dynamics with strategic wisdom. They will be remembered as the useful idiots who provided intellectual cover for the most dangerous electoral choice in American history, while the prosecution of political enemies proceeds exactly as any competent analyst should have foreseen.

The kindergarten logic reveals their moral insanity: you don’t put predators in charge of the systems they want to destroy and count on those systems to protect themselves. And you don’t get to claim respectability for advocating such obvious moral bankruptcy while watching the inevitable consequences unfold.