Designed-in countermajoritarian features contribute to minority rule
Michelle Goldberg speaks with Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The authors of “How Democracies Die” (2018) released “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point” this morning. What shocked them since 2018 was how swiflty the GOP slid sown the behavioral sink into insurrection. They did not consider the Republican Party an authoritarian party in 2018, and “did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.”
Goldberg writes:
“Tyranny of the Minority” is their attempt to make sense of how American democracy eroded so fast. “Societal diversity, cultural backlash and extreme-right parties are ubiquitous across established Western democracies,” they write. But in recent years, only in America has a defeated leader attempted a coup. And only in America is the coup leader likely to once again be the nominee of a major party. “Why did America, alone among rich established democracies, come to the brink?” they ask.
A disturbing part of the answer, Levitsky and Ziblatt conclude, lies in our Constitution, the very document Americans rely on to defend us from autocracy. “Designed in a predemocratic era, the U.S. Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them,” they write. The Constitution’s countermajoritarian provisions, combined with profound geographic polarization, have locked us into a crisis of minority rule.
These features have enabled Republicans to chalk up three Electoral College wins despite having won a majority of presidential votes “in only one out of the last eight presidential elections.” Add in their post-2010, RedMap gerrymandering and Republicans “don’t need to win over the majority of voters.” As their base has become more radical, so have elected Republicans.
All liberal democracies have some countermajoritarian institutions to stop popular passions from running roughshod over minority rights. But as “Tyranny of the Minority” shows, our system is unique in the way it empowers a minority ideological faction at the expense of everyone else. And while conservatives like to pretend that their structural advantages arise from the judicious wisdom of the founders, Levitsky and Ziblatt demonstrate how many of the least democratic aspects of American governance are the result of accident, contingency and, not least, capitulation to the slaveholding South.
“The poor you will always have with you,” Jesus said. And the legacy of slavery, the country’s original sin?
Levitsky and Ziblatt think it is unavoidable that reformers “engage in the glacial slog of constitutional reform,” and naive to think things will just work out if the country keeps on as it is.
More consolidation of population in cities in blue states will simply exacerbate the antimajoritarian lean of the Senate and of state legislatures if Democrats keep ceding the countryside.
Goldberg concludes:
“I think the United States faces a high risk of serious and repeated constitutional crisis, what I would call regime instability, quite possibly accompanied by some violence,” said Levitsky. “I’m not as worried about the consolidation of autocracy, Hungary or Russia-style. I think that the opposition forces, civil society forces, are probably too strong for that.” Let’s hope that this time he’s not being too optimistic.
I did not think Americans were dumb enough or crazy enough to elect Donald Trump in 2016. Now reading David Dayen’s pre-insurrection “Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power” (2020). It’s enough to make me crawl into a hole. I’m not sure which will end us first, metastasized capitalism or allied autocracy.