Tyranny of the Minority

 

Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Decrmoacy Reached The Breaking Point,” Crown, 2023, 258 pp.

By Michelle Goldberg

NYT: Opinion Columnist

One of the most influential books of the Trump years was “How Democracies Die” by the Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Published in 2018, it served as a guide to our unfolding ordeal. “Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States — but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places,” they wrote.

Because that volume was prescient about how Donald Trump would try to rule, I was surprised to learn, in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s new book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” that they were shocked by Jan. 6. Though they’ve studied violent insurrections all over the world, they write in this new book, “we never imagined we’d see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the 21st century.”

What astonished them the most, Levitsky told me in an interview last week, “was the speed and the degree to which the Republican Party Trumpized.” In “How Democracies Die,” he and Ziblatt had reproved Republicans for failing to stop Trump’s rise to power. But at the time, he said, “we didn’t consider or call the Republican Party an authoritarian party. We did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.”

“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 counter majoritarian provisions, combined with profound geographic polarization, have locked us into a crisis of minority rule.

Liberals have been preoccupied with minority rule for years now, and you’re probably aware of the ways it manifests. Republicans have won the popular vote in only one out of the last eight presidential elections, and yet have had three Electoral College victories. The Senate gives far more power to small, rural states than large, urbanized ones, and it’s made even less democratic by the filibuster. An unaccountable Supreme Court, given its right-wing majority by the two-time popular-vote loser Trump, has gutted the Voting Rights Act. One reason Republicans keep radicalizing is that, unlike Democrats, they don’t need to win over the majority of voters.

All liberal democracies have some counter majoritarian 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.

It’s worth remembering that in 2000, when many thought George W. Bush might win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral College, Republicans did not intend to quietly accept the results. “I think there would be outrage,” Representative Ray LaHood, a Republican from Illinois, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Bush camp planned to stoke a “popular uprising,” in the words of The Daily News, quoting a Bush aide: “The one thing we don’t do is roll over. We fight.”

Most Democrats, however, feel little choice but to acquiesce to a system tilted against them. Depending on the Constitution for protection from the worst abuses of the right, they’re reluctant to delegitimize it. Besides, America’s Constitution is among the hardest in the world to change, another of its counter majoritarian qualities.

 

Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t have any shortcuts for emerging from the straitjacket of minority rule. Rather, they call on readers to engage in the glacial slog of constitutional reform. Some people, Ziblatt told me, might think that working toward institutional reforms is naïve. “But the thing that I think is really naïve is to think that we can just sort of keep going down this path and that things will just work out,” he said.

Personally, I don’t know anyone who is confident that things will just work out. It’s possible that, as The New York Times reports, Trump’s Electoral College edge is fading because of his relative weakness in battleground states, but he could still, running on a nakedly authoritarian platform, be re-elected with a minority of the vote. I asked Levitsky and Ziblatt how, given their work on democracy, they imagine a second Trump term unfolding.

“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.

My Notes:

Pg. 4:  The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act finally established a legal foundation for multiracial democracy in America.  But even today, access to the ballot remains unequal.  Latinos and Blacks are three times as likely as whites to be told they lack the proper identification to vote and twice as likely to be told, incorrectly, that their names are not listed on voter rolls. 

Pg. 6: Meaningful steps toward democratic inclusion often trigger intense reactions.  In 2015 the US score on Freedom House’s Global Freedom Index declined steadily from 90 to 83 on a scale of 0-100. This score is lower than every established democracy in Western Europe and even lower than historically troubled democracies like Argentina, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Taiwan.

Pg. 15ff:  On March 4, 1801, the US became the first republic in history to experience an electoral transfer of power from one political party to another.  On that day, the incumbent president, John Adams, a leader of America’s founding Federalist Party and a clearly defeated candidate, left D.C. before dawn, President-elect Jefferson of the rival Democratic-Republican Party, was inaugurated several hours later. 

But the election exposed a problem with the electoral process.  While it was clear that Adams lost, the two Democratic-Republican candidates, Jefferson (the party’s presidential candidate) and Aaron Burr (the presumed vice-presidential candidate), found themselves in a tie, with seventy-three electoral votes each.  That sent the election to the lame-duck House of Representatives, where the Federalists still maintained a majority.  For six days the fight over the election continued until one Federalist finally decided to withdraw his support of Burr and favored Jefferson.

Pg. 59fff:  Most twenty-first-century autocracies are built via constitutional hardball.  Democratic backsliding occurs gradually, through a series of reasonable-looking measures: new laws that are ostensibly designed to clean up elections, combat corruption, or create a more efficient judiciary; court rulings that reinterpret existing laws; long-dormant laws that are conveniently rediscovered.  A perfect example of this is Viktor Orban in Hungary who consistently captures two/thirds of Parliament with less than half the vote.

When Orban came to power in 2010, he had already been prime minister once before, from 1998 until 2002.  Orban had governed democratically during his first term, and his Fidesz party had positioned itself then as a mainstream center right.  After losing the 2002 election, however, Fidesz moved in a sharply conservative ethno-nationalist direction.  Orban’s politics, it would later be revealed, shifted with his party.  His landslide victory in 2010, inflated by Hungary’s ‘first past the post’ election system, turned 53 percent of the vote into a two-thirds parliamentary majority.  That was enough for Fidesz to rewrite the constitution.  One of Orban’s first moves was to purge and pack the courts.  Prior to 2010, justices of the Constitutional Court were selected by a parliamentary committee composed of representatives of all the political parties.  The new constitution allowed Fidesz to use its supermajority to unilaterally appoint justices.  Another amendment then expanded the Constitutional Court from eleven to fifteen, which created four vacancies for Fidesz to fill with allies.  Next: the independent-minded Supreme Court president, Andras Baka, via a law requiring Supreme Court presidents to have a least five years of judicial experience in Hungary.  This was a clear instance of lawfare: the new law obviously targeted Baka. But that was not enough.  Parliament also passed a law lowering the retirement age for judges from seventy to sixty-two.  A total of 274 judges were forced out.  This law was later repealed under pressure from the European Union but many of the retired judges never returned. 

Then Orban used ‘legal’ means to capture the media.  Rich people bought up the independent media and either closed them down or controlled the output.  Fidesz official sacked more than a thousand public media employees.  The positions were filled by political loyalists, and public media coverage grew nakedly partisan.

Pg. 78ff:  In response to the wave of terrorism in the South following the Civil War, Congress, under President Grant, passed a series of Enforcement Acts that empowered the federal government to oversee local elections and combat political violence.  These unprecedented laws giving the federal government the authority to intervene in states to protect basic civil and voting rights, initially worked.  Hundreds of Klan members were arrested and prosecuted in 1871 and 1872.  By 1872, federal authorities had broken the Klan and produced a dramatic decline in violence throughout the South.  Then Grant’s successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, withdrew most of the federal troops overseeing the South in 1877 (as part of a negotiated settlement of the disputed 1876 presidential election).  Reconstruction effectively ended and Redemption (think retaliation) began the Jim Crow Southern era of laws that lasted until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Pg. 91:  Without federal protection of voting rights, any semblance of democracy in the South was soon extinguished.  Black turnout plummeted from 61 percent in 1880 to an unthinkably low 2 percent in 1912.

Pg. 102:  Religious diversity increased as America grew markedly less Christian.  Whereas more than 80 percent of Americans identified as white and Christian (Protestant or Catholic) in 1976, only 43 percent did so in 2016.

Pg. 147f:  The US constitutional system contains an unusually large number of counter-majoritarian institutions.  These include the following:

*The Bill of Rights, which was added just after the Constitutional Convention.

*A Supreme Court with lifetime appointments and power of judicial review, or the authority to strike down as unconstitutional laws passed by congressional majorities.

*Federalism, which devolves considerable lawmaking power to state and local governments, beyond the reach of national majorities.

*A bicameral Congress, which means that two legislative majorities are required to pass laws.

*A severely malapportioned Senate, in which all states are given the same representation, regardless of population.

*The filibuster, a supermajority rule in the Senate (not in the Constitution) that allows a partisan minority to permanently block legislation backed by the majority.

*The Electoral College, an indirect system of electing presidents that privileges smaller states and allows losers of the popular vote to win the presidency.

*Extreme supermajority rules for constitutional change: a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress, plus approval by three-quarters of US states.

Of these, the Bill of Rights is the most unambiguously protective of democracy.  Others are double-edged.

Pg. 173f: All states (except for Maine and Nebraska) allocate Electoral College votes in a winner-take-all manner.  The net result is that US presidential elections have not been very democratic in the twenty-first century.  Between 1992 and 2020 the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in every presidential election except 2004.  Yet Republican Party candidates have won the presidency three times during that period.  And worse is the US Senate which allows states representing 11 percent of the population to block legislation via a filibuster.

Pg. 195:  The Robert’s Supreme Court with a 5-4 majority in Rucho v. Common Cause I 2019 ruled that federal courts lack the authority to decide cases of partisan gerrymandering in the states.  

Pg. 236:  Established democracies like Denmark, Germany, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden have made it simpler to vote, ended gerrymandering, replacing the Electoral College with a direct popular vote, eliminating the Senate filibuster, making Senate representation more proportional, ending lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court, and making it a little easier to reform the Constitution; all changes if The US made would allow us to catch up to the rest of the world.