It seems the insurrection and attempted coup on January 6th, 2021 opened the eyes of a lot of people to the lengths Republicans were willing to go to hold power, in spite of the will of the majority and their loss in our somewhat democratic system. A new book by Harvard professors, doctors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt attempts to understand what led to that day and how U.S. democracy can be improved so that the government is more responsive to the needs of the people expressed through elections. In Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point, the authors give an overview of the founding and history of democratic institutions in the U.S. and then compare it to other countries around the world and the institutions they have developed over time.
The picture that emerges is one of a flawed constitutional system in the U.S., innovative and daring for the time, but with many unjust and ultimately harmful compromises required to unite the diverse interests of the colonial aristocracy. The authors detail the historical reasoning behind the electoral college (a last resort solution when no other options could be agreed upon), as well as the evolution of the senate and other counter-majoritarian institutions. By examining the arguments founders like Madison and Hamilton made, and the fraught nature of the discussions, with (all white, all wealthy) men working with limited information and a variety of personal motivations to create a new system of government, Levitsky and Ziblatt make a strong case for the value of continuing to evolve our constitution. Many of its worst provisions (the three-fifths compromise for example), were created to uphold slavery, perpetuate inequality, and entrench the power of the colonial aristocracy.
A good portion of the book reminded me of Noam Chomsky’s lecture A Critique of Democracy, which you can watch in full below, where he describes some of the ideas discussed at the 1787 constitutional convention. Around 8:35 in the video Chomsky quotes Madison at the convention I’ve copied Chomsky’s words from the YouTube transcript here:
“Madison eloquently upheld the call for the preservation of the sacred fire of Liberty that he wrote into George Washington's inaugural dress but it's important to understand his quite clear and explicit ideas about the kind of Liberty that had to be preserved. These ideas perhaps come out most clearly in the debates on the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Madison focused on England naturally that's the model for a democratic society that they would look at at the time and he pointed out that, I'm quoting him in England, at this day if elections were open to all classes of people the property of landed proprietors would be insecure and agrarian law would soon take place what we would call agrarian reform which would infringe on property rights and the sacred fire of Liberty that he spoke is to burn most brightly to preserve the rights to own property which are privileged above all others.
Madison went on in the debates to warn that the new government that they were framing that they were constructing has to be designed in such a way to ward off the injustice that would come from a functioning democracy as in the example mentioned that is it would have to, I’m quoting him again, ‘it would have to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation with a variety of devices to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority’ … meaning that democracy has to be a very limited system. Well that remained the guiding principle from the framing of the Constitution up until today, not only here but also in the forms of democracy that the United States has been willing to tolerate elsewhere.”
The whole lecture is worth watching and it highlights that the terms of U.S. democracy have always been contested and the rules that originally won out were those that most benefitted the already wealthy (the slaveholders and landowners). In the end, the constitution gave us a very limited democracy which hundreds of years of protest have slowly changed, bringing it closer to realizing the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, but which still has a long way to go.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
The second half of Tyranny of the Minority compares the evolution of U.S. democracy to that of other countries. It highlights the shared features, as well as the changes that most healthy democracies have implemented which the U.S. has so far failed to do. The authors make a very strong case for reforming or removing the counter-majoritarian institutions in the U.S. that have lagged far behind those of other countries. For example, until 1913 and the ratification of the 17th amendment to the Constitution, the senate was not directly elected by the people. However, it is still a highly anti-democratic institution, giving outsized power to land over people. The authors describe how Germany explicitly rejected a U.S. senate-style chamber when reforming their bicameral parliament after WWII under Allied occupation.
With abundant examples showing how U.S. democracy has stagnated while most other healthy democracies have reformed their least democratic institutions, the authors make the case for the abolition of the electoral college, reforming of the filibuster and the senate in general, term or age-limits on supreme court justices, a less onerous process to amend the constitution, and larger, more regular voting districts with proportional representation. All of these are reforms that most other democracies have implemented long ago and most of are pretty self-explanatory. The examples of successful reform we can draw from include Denmark, New Zealand, and Sweden. The final point about proportional representation bears further examination. Basically, the authors discuss the harm that comes from winner-take-all electoral districts in which a party can receive a bare majority of votes and have the same number of representatives in the House of Representatives as a party which receives thousands more votes in another district. When you look across a whole state or the whole country, this can lead to tens or hundreds of thousands more people voting for one party over the other, but a much narrower gap in the number of representatives each party elects. More regularly sized districts, in which the number of representatives elected from each party is proportional to the vote share in that district would ensure more equal voting power of each voter. This would ensure fairer representation and reduce political polarization.
By basing their arguments in the historical and current state of U.S. democracy, tracking the changes that have occurred over the centuries (including progress that was rolled back), and comparing U.S. democracy to countries around the world, Levitsky and Ziblatt show clearly how the U.S. has fallen behind most other major democracies in the world. Our counter-majoritarian systems subvert the will of the people in ways that most other democratic societies have declared unacceptable, and in ways that are admired by aspiring dictators like Orbán in Hungary. However, history has shown us a path to change through popular protest and state-level reforms that eventually build popular support and pressure for federal reform.