Why is American democracy on the brink?

Why is American democracy on the brink? Blame the Constitution.
© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
You’ve got to hand it to the Norwegians. Democracy won’t soon die under their midnight sun. They borrowed liberally from the United States to establish independence and write a constitution, and then dove enthusiastically into the project. Over two centuries, they have amended that constitution 316 times, tinkering routinely with their founding document as they have sought a more perfect democracy.

By contrast, the United States, Norway’s revered role model, has adopted an ain’t-broke-don’t-fix default mode. Over roughly the same two centuries, the United States has amended its Constitution a mere 27 times. It got 10 amendments done speedily: The right of corporations to spend unlimited dark money on political campaigns? First Amendment. The right of 18-year-olds to openly carry semiautomatic rifles in church but maybe not with bump stocks? Second Amendment. And so on. The 27th and final amendment was ratified more than 30 years ago. It says that if members of Congress give themselves a pay raise, it can’t take effect until after the next election, when voters have a chance to boot them from office. Not nothing, but not democracy-preserving stuff, either.

Why is American democracy on the brink? Blame the Constitution.
Why is American democracy on the brink? Blame the Constitution.
© Crown
American democracy teeters, say Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the authors of the new book “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point,” in significant part because of the immovable object that is the United States Constitution, “a brilliant work of political craftsmanship” that has nonetheless left the country susceptible to the abusive rule of the few. Our citizens are amendment-averse — more so than those of any other democracy — and that’s a huge problem. “Institutions that function well in one context can become ineffective and even dangerously dysfunctional in another,” write Levitsky and Ziblatt.
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in leadership meaning elected officials who claim that 2020 was

The founders were aware, and they fretted. Thomas Jefferson, the authors note, was “critical of those who ‘look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.’” He complained: “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

But we insist on wearing that ill-fitting coat tailored by our barbarous ancestors. We cling to the chief instruments of minority rule, the electoral college and the Senate, two clear instances of constitutional compromise created in what Levitsky and Ziblatt call “a pre-democratic era” but that now, as they argue, allow “partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities.” The authors, whose previous book, “How Democracies Die,” stood out among the alarm-sounders of the last decade, aren’t the first to point out the dangerous obsolescence of these obstacles to democratic reform, but they write with terrifying clarity about how the forces of the right have co-opted the enshrined rules to exert their tyranny.


Americans, the authors write, like to view the Constitution as a “carefully crafted blueprint for a well-functioning republic,” one that serves as a hedge against the mob while prioritizing self-government and civil liberties. Admirable, but a lot of it is really a cobbling of “second-best solutions,” Levitsky and Ziblatt remind us. A mob is more than superior numbers, anyway; a small mob can swarm in a way that disguises its antimajoritarian nature, working stealthily within the lines.

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Levitsky and Ziblatt call this small mob “semi-loyal democrats,” borrowing from the German sociologist Juan Linz. Its members — the accomplices to “democracy’s assassins” — are “mainstream politicians, often in suits and ties, who ostensibly play by the rules and indeed even thrive under them,” they write. “They never engage in visibly antidemocratic acts. So when democracies die, their fingerprints are rarely found on the murder weapon. But make no mistake: semi-loyal politicians play a vital, if hidden, role in democratic collapse.”

At another, less sensitized time, we might have called these accomplices “the good Nazis.” And indeed, one of the most vividly apt examples in the book sounds a little too familiar: France on Feb. 6, 1934. France was Europe’s oldest democracy at the time, but that night, tens of thousands of angry young men, mostly members of various militias “united in their hostility toward parliamentary democracy,” stormed the Parliament building. Some wanted to shut down Parliament, others wanted to “block the official tallying of votes” with the goal of installing a right-wing government. “Hang the deputies!” they shouted as they overran Parliament. They didn’t hang any, but protesters dragged off one government minister, “chanting, ‘Throw him in the Seine!’” Police officers saved him, but democracy was mortally wounded that night.

In the aftermath, most political parties condemned the attack, but the conservatives were at first tolerant and then actively encouraging. It turns out that a number of “seemingly respectable conservative politicians” were part of the mob. Several years later, “good 6 February men” and their like thrived in the Vichy government.

Not all of democracy’s assassins assault the rules quietly. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban plays what the authors call “constitutional hardball.” Even well-designed constitutions “inevitably contain ambiguities and potential loopholes, are open to multiple interpretations, and may be enforced in different ways,” the authors write. Orban took advantage of Hungary’s “first past the post” election system, which allows a party’s representation in parliament to be disproportional to the population, to make his party’s supermajority permanent. He then rewrote the constitution, purged and packed the courts, and took control of public and private media — all largely as a result of Hungary’s legitimately instituted election system.

Even constitutional hardball isn’t always enough to throttle democracy, and the United States post-Reconstruction offers the most potent and particularized example of why this country’s democracy is fraying so badly today. As a proportionally shrinking White population in America was systematically dismantling reforms in the South, a thriving Black-majority and Black-led town, Wilmington, N.C., fell victim to democracy’s assassins in the 1890s. “As one Democratic leader acknowledged at a rally, ‘We cannot outnumber the negroes. And so we must either outcheat, outcount, or outshoot them.’” Which is what they did. A small group of White Democrats, including a newspaper publisher, launched a vicious campaign to restore White rule. On Election Day 1898, heavily armed “Red Shirts” kept the majority citizens of North Carolina’s largest city from voting, and Whites swept to power.

“For a moment, one could see in Wilmington the stirrings of a multiracial democracy,” the authors write. But the stirrings have always been up against a mighty resistance.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
© Adam DeTour
Readers have to reach the last chapter to find hope for American democracy. The authors have depicted the threats so well, though, that it’s difficult to see that hope. The chapter is prescriptive to a point, listing 15 reforms that would go far toward “Democratizing our Democracy,” as it is titled. The reforms, mostly familiar and seeming to emphasize a circular argument, include passing a constitutional amendment establishing a right to vote for all citizens; making Election Day a Sunday or a national holiday; making the Senate “more proportional to the population of each state”; abolishing the filibuster; establishing term limits; and making it easier to amend the Constitution by eliminating the states’ ratification process.

But is there enough magic left in the wand?

“The acute constitutional crisis triggered by the Trump presidency might have passed,” the not wholly optimistic authors write toward the end, “but rather than regarding those four years as an exception, we should regard them as a warning.”

I paused at the words “might have passed.” As I read them, the crisis in question was blasting past his opponents in Republican primary polling, basically tied with President Biden in a hypothetical general-election rematch and entertaining invitations to replace a House speaker ousted by a tyrannical minority — all while facing four criminal indictments. It seems unthinkable, and to what is for now a majority of Americans it probably is. But in the book’s stark telling, Trump and the steamrolling far right didn’t get to where they are despite our revered Constitution. They got there because of it.

Tyranny of the Minority
Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

***
Mellman: How our Constitution works against majority will
Opinion by Mark Mellman, opinion contributor
10/11/23

’m certain I disagree with Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) on scores of issues, but he seems like a reasonable, thoughtful, somewhat moderate fellow who looks younger than his years and wants to get things done.   

 In those respects, he reminds me of the Dakota Democrats for whom I used to work, and who, back when that was possible, held all the House and Senate seats in those two states. 

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 After Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) tumble from the Speakership, the current Rep. Johnson told CNN he hated to blame the rules. 

 James Madison must be spinning in his grave. The whole thrust of Madisonian political science, and Madisonian constitution-making, is that the rules matter — a lot.

  Today, the rules devised by Madison and his fellow Framers are creating enormous frustration, and their suitability for current circumstances are being sorely tested.   

As they debated the nascent constitution that summer of 1787, Americans were animated by competing imperatives: They wanted a national government that worked, but one that would not become a source of tyranny. 

 Having just overthrown a king, they were acutely aware of the ways in which monarchs (and their descendants: executives) could foster tyranny. After all, kings took people’s sons to fight their wars, took people’s daughters to their beds on the bride’s wedding night and took people’s money (property and crops) to finance their wars and whims. 
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 Unlike government today, Kings did not provide health care, education, retirement security or broadband, and they didn’t have to confront a debt ceiling or care for veterans.   

Kings were about taking, not giving, and they regularly took too much.   

 Early among his colleagues, Madison also saw public opinion, or a legislature in its sway, as a potential source of tyranny.   

 The Framers wanted a national government that was tractable, but to prevent tyranny they wanted to make it difficult for their government to act.   

 To that end, they separated powers and inserted a variety of veto points. U.S. government still has more veto points than any other democracy in the world. 

Most long-term democracies have just one or two veto players. 

 In the contemporary United Kingdom’s parliamentary system, the executive (the government) and the legislature (Parliament) are essentially one, under the leadership of the prime minister.   

 The monarch has no real power, nor does the “upper house” (House of Lords). Britain’s Supreme Court may not overrule an act of Parliament. Just one veto point. 

 Contrast that with our system in which the House must agree with the Senate, and the president must sign off on their joint product. In addition to those three veto points, the Supreme Court arrogated to itself the power, unmentioned in the Constitution, to review and potentially overrule any decision, not to mention the role states play in our federal system.   

 Beyond its veto points, the system built by the Constitution, whose authors were suspicious of popular democracy, has an anti-majoritarian caste reflected in a Senate where California and Wyoming get equal representation, though their voters do not, and an Electoral College grafted in part onto that unequal Senate apportionment.   

 The result: Over the last three election cycles, during which all 100 Senate seats were in the hands of voters, Democrats won 53 percent of the national vote for Senate, but Republicans held the majority of seats in two of those three Senate sessions.   

 Democrats also won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but because of the bias in the Electoral College, lost the presidency three times. The Senate further imposed on itself a 60-vote threshold, giving the minority the power to stop a 59 percent majority.   

 When government plays an intricate and vital role in everyday life, and when politics is characterized by partisanship, polarization and parity, it’s a recipe for lurching from crisis to crisis and failing to get important things done.   

 In an era that honors one-person, one-vote democracy and majority rule, it’s difficult to articulate a principled justification for keeping it. 

 Upon reflection, it’s no wonder Dusty Johnson wants to keep the rules of the game out of the fight. They’re indefensible, but they are the only thing giving him any power.

Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has helped elect 30 U.S. senators, 12 governors and dozens of House members. Mellman served as pollster to Senate Democratic leaders for more than 20 years, as president of the American Association of Political Consultants, a member of the Association’s Hall of Fame, and is president of Democratic Majority for Israel. 

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