A Different Democracy, Indeed
A trip through comparative democratic reform.
Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die, have a new book coming out, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point which is excerpted in The Atlantic (thanks to Kingdaddy for the heads up). I very much suggest everyone read the piece: How American Democracy Fell So Far Behind.
The piece is long, but well-written and an easy read. It highlights a key problem that I often discuss here at OTB (and reinforces a lot of points made in A Different Democracy), which is the degree to which our constitutional order is far too skewed to empower a political minority over the will of the majority.
Indeed, I could have easily written the following paragraph:
[T]he problem lies in something many of us venerate: the U.S. Constitution. America’s founding document, designed in a pre-democratic era in part to protect against “tyranny of the majority,” has generated the opposite problem: Electoral majorities often cannot win power, and when they win, they often cannot govern. Unlike any other presidential democracy, U.S. leaders can become president despite losing the popular vote. The U.S. Senate, which dramatically overrepresents low-population states by giving each state equal representation regardless of population, is also frequently controlled by a party that has lost the national popular vote. And due to the Senate’s filibuster rules, majorities are routinely blocked from passing normal legislation. Finally, because the Supreme Court’s composition is determined by the president and Senate, which have often not represented electoral majorities in the 21st century, the Court has grown more and more divorced from majority public opinion. Not only does the Constitution deliver outsize advantages to partisan minorities; it has also begun to endanger American democracy. With the Republican Party’s transformation into an extremist and antidemocratic force under Donald Trump, the Constitution now protects and empowers an authoritarian minority.
America was once the standard-bearer for democratic constitutions. Today, however, it is more vulnerable to minority rule than any other established democracy. Far from being a pioneer, America has become a democratic laggard.
The bulk of the Levitsky and Ziblatt piece is a comparative journey through the evolution of various democracies to being more inclusive of majority rule instead of promoting minority rule, which I commend in full.
In broad brushstrokes:
Over the course of the 20th century, however, most of the countries that are now considered established democracies dismantled their most egregiously counter-majoritarian institutions and took steps to empower majorities. They did away with suffrage restrictions.
[…]
Indirect elections also disappeared.
[…]
Most European democracies also reformed their electoral systems—the rules that govern how votes are translated into representation. Countries across continental Europe and Scandinavia abandoned first-past-the-post election systems when they democratized at the turn of the 20th century. […] By World War II, nearly all continental European democracies used some variant of proportional representation, and today 80 percent of democracies with populations above 1 million do so.
Undemocratic upper chambers were tamed or eliminated…
[…]
Most 20th-century democracies also took steps to limit minority obstruction within legislatures, establishing a procedure—known as “cloture”—to allow simple majorities to end parliamentary debate.
[…]
Every democracy that has introduced judicial review since 1945 has also introduced either a retirement age or term limits for high-court judges, thereby limiting the problem of long-tenured judges binding future generations.
In sum, the 20th century ushered in the modern democratic era—an age in which many of the institutional fetters on popular majorities that were designed by pre-democratic monarchies and aristocracies were dismantled. Democracies all over the world abolished or weakened their most egregiously counter-majoritarian institutions. Conservative defenders of these institutions anxiously warned of impending instability, chaos, or tyranny. But that has rarely ensued since World War II. Indeed, countries such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the U.K. were both more stable and more democratic at the close of the 20th century than they were at the beginning. Eliminating counter-majoritarianism helped give rise to modern democracy.
Let me pause and note two things. First, majority rule does not mean that a system does not protect minority rights. Such protections are endemic to democratic government. We are talking here about whether majorities or minorities get to make binding decisions for a society. Second, by definition allowing numeric minorities to make binding government decisions (or to block majorities from making decisions) is inherently anti-democratic, and therefore authoritarian.
The piece does go on to detail some movement made by the US in these areas (such as the popular election of Senators, and various extensions of the franchise).
In terms of assessment of where the US is at the moment, the following paragraph is an accurate summary.
In 2016, the Democrats won the national popular vote for the presidency and the Senate, but the Republicans nonetheless won control of both institutions. A president who lost the popular vote and senators who represented a minority of Americans then proceeded to fill three Supreme Court seats, giving the Court a manufactured 6–3 conservative majority. This is minority rule.
What makes the situation so dangerous is that this privileged partisan minority has abandoned its commitment to democratic rules of the game. In other words, the Constitution is protecting and empowering an authoritarian partisan minority.
But that Constitution appears nearly impossible to reform.
The history of an attempted Electoral College reform in the late 1960s detailed in the piece underscores how the deck is stacked against majority sentiment, specifically how minorities empowered by the Constitution can easily thwart numerically massive majorities.
I would add that a huge problem for us all here is that a major reason why the Republican Party is cleaving to authoritarian politics is that it understands that it is currently in the minority and that our constitutional structures give it control (partial or complete, depending on the given electoral outcome) while a reformed system that actually allows for majority rule would not be to its advantage.
This is all simply raw power politics and incentivizes Republican elites to promote the parts of the system that empower their positions. A reformed system would require them to compete in fairer contests, and the risk of losing is simply greater in that context. So, they would prefer to appeal to myths about the Framers, or lean on “we’re a republic, not a democracy” tropes without acknowledging all that means is that they prefer the minority-empowering elements of the US Constitution as long it is their minority that benefits.
This isn’t hard to understand. As I have repeatedly noted, the Republicans have only won the popular vote one time from 1992 to 2020. That was in 2004, to re-elect a president who won the first time with a close EC win and close popular vote loss. In fact, the last time the Republican Party won the popular vote without being the incumbent party was 1980. The incentive, therefore, is to double down on support for the Electoral College, which allows the minority to govern the majority, and to also then cloak that support in mythologizing the Framers (which is a potent appeal for an ostensibly conservative, but in reality reactionary, movement).
The US has clearly fallen behind the rest of the democracies world. We are stuck in pathways created over two hundred years ago, for a far different country (in a far different world).
At any rate, I highly recommend the Atlantic piece and I have already pre-ordered the book.
I need to go afield a bit to set up an analogy. Back in the 60s Whalen I got interested in Formula One racing aside from Ferrari most teams were “alley shops”. Cooper was a large car dealership. McLaren started with Bruce Mcalaren, his wife, and a couple of guys in a rented corner of someone’s shop. Now, trying to maintain a competitive show, and failing, F1 imposes a 135 million dollar cap on each teams spending. Similar stories could be told about other sports, and entire industries. Everything in the 21st Century has become big money. Including politics.
I agree with this post 100%. I’d go 110 if it included the effect of money. And I’ll be ordering the book.
I wish the NYT would actually read some of its bestselling authors.
While I agree with almost all of this, I’m going to quibble with the claim that minority rule is inherently authoritarian. It’s certainly anti-democratic, but whether or not it manifests as authoritarianism depends entirely on which policies reward the ruling minority at the polls. Not all minorities are inclined to authoritarianism. The early US was less democratic than today, but somehow managed to also be less authoritarian, perhaps in part as a reaction against well-remembered monarchy.
I think a hypothetical minority rule by libertarians would look very different from what we’re getting today. It’s not even that hard to imagine an alternate history featuring a strong libertarian bias in the overrepresented rural parts of America, with resulting minority libertarian rule.
As I have (probably) repeatedly noted, if we had a popular vote election of the President, it would have changed behavior, and possibly those outcomes.*
I think this further undermines the credibility of the electoral college — it distorts both the inputs and outputs of voting.
*: it gives me some pause to realize that Donald Trump has said, essentially, the same thing after the 2016 vote, that if popular vote mattered he would have run a different campaign. I am “heartened”that he then decided that he did win the popular vote after all once you remove the illegals and the fraud.
(Perhaps had he stuck with his original assessment, rather than veering into conspiracies and fantasies, he would have been a different enough president that it wouldn’t be horrifying to agree with him on anything, even momentarily.)
Within that timeframe, yes, but end of 20th century to now… I would be less sanguine about it.
There’s definitely an authoritarian assault on democracies of late that is weaponizing free speech. I think it’s very similar to the fears the late 19th century conservatives had, except it’s promoting a reactionary politics rather than the dreaded socialism.
The Constitution was written long ago in an entirely different world. The people who claim to be constitutionalist or originalists are like those who claim to be religious; it’s all a sham. The first priority of any political winner is to ensure the hold on power. Citizens United is a decision that was clearly novel. Clearly, the minority GOP leaders intend to maintain their power and regain any losses. Any outcome other than victory is considered illegitimate, and they are willing to threaten violence.
OK, read the article, ordered the book. I had forgotten we came so close to getting rid of the Electoral College in 1969. The article tells the story. It passed the House handily, President Nixon backed it, 63% of the public were in favor, getting the necessary 38 states to ratify looked good — and it was filibustered by Southerners in the Senate.
On the Open Forum there’s a thread about identifying problems without proposing solutions. So what do we do? Most of this requires amending the Constitution, which the article points out is harder than in any other country. But the filibuster is a Senate rule. As long as the Senate is anti-majoritarian, I suppose it makes some sense to Ds to preserve it. But getting rid of it would be a start.
All you need for the GQP to want to reform or eliminate the EC, is for a Democratic candidate to win in the EC, while losing the popular vote by as much as one voter.
@DrDaveT: The rhetoric involved has an appeal to authority (no pun intended) quality to it, in my view. What many people are saying when protesting that some specific situation is inherently authoritarian (or communistic, socialistic, or an affront to the rule of law for that matter) is that it leads to an outcome that they dislike or disdain.
Which sounds more serious: “X leads to a situation that I don’t prefer” or “X leads to a situation that is inherently authoritarian?” Note: I know nothing about Levitsky or Ziblatt that makes me want to accuse them of rhetorical chicanery.
@DrDaveT:
Quite often monarchists can be anti-authoritarian, oddly enough.
There are big differences between eg Tsarist autocracy, the Germanic/French “lawful monarchy”/ rechtsstaat, and British “Crown in Parliament” plus Common Law.
Never mind the rather minimal monarchies of the Middle Ages.
Just as some Greek tyrants and Roman dictators were actually less oppressive then either oligarchies or democracies.
@DrDaveT:
A very small minority forcing an incredibly unpopular political philosophy on a much larger and reluctant majority?
And somehow that won’t immediately devolve into an authoritarian regime?
@JohnSF:
If you look at a very small part of society, perhaps. But ask the Chartists how well English Common Law worked for them. Quite a few of them ended up at Botany Bay…
The thing is that non-authoritarian minority rule only works if there limited political plurality and low popular mobilization. Uneducated peasants tugging their forelocks who cannot conceive of a viable alternative social order.
But that ship has sailed, I would say.
@DrDaveT:
I would argue that definitionally any anti-democratic form of governance is a form of authoritarianism. It may be a soft authoritarianism or even benevolent, but it’s still authoritarianism. We are not quite there, but we are ranging in that direction.
This reminds of this this post: The Mundanity of Authoritarianism.
Except for all the slavery, lack of legal rights for women, and the like…
(I know I am being a bit glib, but surely this makes the point).
@JohnSF: Being less oppressive doesn’t make a monarchy less authoritarian. It just is a metric of how they are using their authoritarian power.
I would suggest that perhaps you all are conflating tyrannical with authoritarian.
A benevolent dictator is still a dictator. And, without any doubt, a dictatorship is an authoritarian form of government.
I am asking the following questions in all seriousness: Outside of a revolution, how do we fix it? We may be able to fix the EC with the states that agree to vote for the popular winner. But what about the Senate and everything else that is baked into the constitution?
@BugManDan: In simple terms I see the following scenarios:
1. Enough public education creates pressure on Democrats to enact the reforms that they can, which would include expanding the size of the House (which would require doing away with the filibuster)–also fixed terms for SCOTUS. There are a handful of other possible reforms, but it would require the Dems to be unified around such changes. We then limp along with the other problems likely in place.
2. A massive crisis causes a serious rupture in the operation of the federal government.
Else, we limp along. Maybe we can limp along in a way that doesn’t further degrade democracy, or maybe we continue to slip into a soft authoritarianism.
@Steven L. Taylor:
If it’s a tautology for you, then I will just take the point you are making and move on. For me, authoritarianism goes beyond exercising power to a claim about the legitimacy of that exercise under some “natural order”. For the authoritarian, obedience to authority is the purpose, not a means to some end. A benevolent dictator is still a dictator, but might actually not be authoritarian — she might just happen to be in charge, and taking advantage of that fact to promote egalitarianism.
@DrDaveT: I don’t consider that a tautology. To speak in terms of clear categories is not a tautology.
I would also note that your definition does not comport, in the least, with standard political science definitions.
The notion that a dictatorship is not in many ways the apotheosis of authoritarianism is a novel notion.
@Steven L. Taylor:
You said “definitionally”. By definition, if it’s anti-democratic then it’s authoritarian. Any A is by definition also B. How is that different from tautology?
In the standard political science definitions, are “anti-democratic” and “authoritarian” synonyms? If not, which is a subset of the other, and what does the part that doesn’t overlap look like?
@DrDaveT:
Yes.