On the heels of my earlier post comes a conversation at Slate with filmmaker and author Astra Taylor. She tells Joshua Keating that more white men (always white men) on the street bring up the phrase “We are a republic, not a democracy,” these days. Meaning (if they think that deeply), that we are not an Athenian-style direct democracy:
And the thing is that there’s something to their perspective. Political institutions in this country are not majoritarian. There is a long history of exclusion. And there are quite a few veto points in the political system that obstruct majoritarian policies. So they have a lot to draw on and it’s not a novel political philosophy. It’s a reversion to the American norm in some way. Because we haven’t really been a fully inclusive democracy, ever. And to the degree that we have, it’s been for just a generation—since the Voting Rights Act—and they’re already giving up on that.
Just as David Frum warned they would.
The Founding Fathers did not understand minority rights as we do, Taylor argues. “[T]hey were very concerned with the rights of the opulent. And that’s one of their words, right? Madison said that it’s very important to structure the Senate as they did to protect the rights of the opulent minority against the landless masses,” i.e. to fend off redistribution of wealth.
The G.W. Bush administration indulged a fantasy about spreading democracy abroad, but use of the phrase [“republic, not a democracy”] here and now reflects a party looking for ways to rationalize “the further entrenchment of minority rule.”
Still, democracy has deep roots in this country, Taylor says, and they will be difficult to yank out. Liberal warnings about populism miss the point, she believes. “The real worry right now is not tyranny of the majority…. The problem is the tyranny of an elite minority.”
People who are annoyed by that phrase, they tend to do this counter-originalist argument. They’ll say, “Oh, you stupid conservatives, don’t you realize that actually the Founding Fathers meant representative democracy when they said republic, right?” But the Founding Fathers did not want the United States to be a direct democracy, which is how they understood Athenian democracy, to be a purely direct form of democracy. They thought that that was very unstable and risky.
I guess I have two responses to that. One is, I don’t really care what the Founding Fathers thought. They also thought I should have no political rights. So I’m not here to live in their world forever. And there was a lot of disagreement among the people we count as the founders, right? There were some of them who were far more small-d democratic than others. But I think the point is that the battle was never just, “Are we a direct democracy?” But rather, “How representative of a democracy are we?” In my opinion, it’s never been representative enough, but that’s really what this conversation is about.
Of course, the U.S. is not as representative as it could be. But we must not take even basic political rights for granted, Taylor warns. Wealth inequality is rotting the roots litigation, gerrymandering, and court packing have failed to tear out. “But we also have to vote,” she insists. “We can’t take the progress that’s been made for granted because there’s a deeply undemocratic anti-democratic strain to American politics.”
Tune into the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings this morning to see that strain on display. And get your asses to the polls.
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