Or is that wither democracy?
The through line to last week’s Supreme Court decisions on guns and abortion is a deep and enduring antipathy by our flag-waving neighbors to the very idea of the United States itself. The word democracy may appear nowhere in the Declaration or the Constitution, but decision-making by voting appears throughout the latter. While not a direct democracy, the republic rests on the elected representatives making decisions by a majority. Indeed, the court’s decisions last week were decided by the votes of a majority of justices.
Yet since the time of the Roe v. Wade decision the right has carefully, meticulously engineered a democracy in form but not in substance. As Naomi Klein so shrewdly observed, those holding enough power and unpopular views find democracy inconvenient. No matter if the public rejects their radical, even royalist opinions. Or in the case of white Christian nationalists, dominionist ones. The right thumbs applied to the scales can “democratically” veto popular sentiment.
The tyranny of the majority was not the sole of the framers’ concerns, but the tyranny of the minority as well. Giving small states “equal weight in the scale of power” ran counter to justice and common sense, Alexander Hamilton wrote. He believed “the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.” Perhaps a third of our neighbors do not accept that premise and never have. No matter, movement conservatives reasoned after Barry Goldwater’s campaign for president faced overwhelming majority opposition. With enough money, time and tenacity, the minority might bring the majority to heel.
And here we are, Max Boot writes:
Hamilton’s nightmare has become the reality of 21st-century America. We are living under minoritarian tyranny, with smaller states imposing their views on the larger through their disproportionate sway in the Senate and the electoral college — and therefore on the Supreme Court. To take but one example: Twenty-one states with fewer total people than California have 42 Senate seats. This undemocratic, unjust system has produced the new Supreme Court rulings on gun control and abortion.
These are issues on which public opinion is lopsidedly in favor on what, for want of a better word, we might call the “liberal” side. Following the Uvalde, Tex., shooting, a recent poll showed that 65 percent of Americans want stricter gun controls; only 28 percent are opposed. Public opinion is just as clear on abortion: Fifty-four percent of Americans want to preserve Roe v. Wade and only 28 percent want to overturn it. Fifty-eight percent want abortion to be legal in most or all cases.
Yet the Supreme Court’s hard-right majority just overruled a New York law that made it difficult to get a permit to carry a gun, while upholding a Mississippi law that banned all abortions after 15 weeks. This represents a dramatic expansion of gun rights and an equally dramatic curtailment of abortion rights.
The court has already disabled voting protections in the Voting Rights Act, allowed the “speech” of the few with the most money to drown out the voices of the majority, and taken a pass on whether state partisans might legally rig congressional districts to ensure a minority of voters control a majority of the House seats. State legislative seats as well.
Public faith in the Supreme Court is down to a historic low of 25 percent, and there’s a good reason why it keeps eroding. We are experiencing what the Founders feared: a crisis of governmental legitimacy brought about by minoritarian tyranny. And it could soon get a whole lot worse. In his concurring opinion in the abortion case, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the court to overturn popular precedents upholding a right to contraception, same-sex relationships and marriage equality. So much for Hamilton’s hope that “the sense of the majority should prevail.”
This country was founded, with all its flaws, when colonists rejected elite rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. The right’s decades-long program to abuse democracy to neuter democracy is on the verge of restoring rule by the very people the founders opposed.
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