Democracy in America?

Levitsky and Ziblatt ask:  “Imagine an American born in 1980 who first voted in 1998 or 2000.  The Democrats would have won the popular vote in every six-year cycle in the U.S. Senate and all but one presidential election in her lifetime.  And yet she would have lived most of her adult life under Republican presidents, a Republican controlled Senate, and a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees.  How much faith should she have in our democracy?” 

None, I would say.  That history suggests America is not a democracy.  So asking whether someone has faith in something that clearly does not exist is, perhaps, a false or misleading question to ask.  The more appropriate question being: when will America a become a democracy?

But we cannot get to that more pertinent question until enough ordinary people rebel against the current system.

We are not helped by the extraordinary effort that goes into educating Americans about the myth, rather than the reality, of their system of governance.  No one wants to tell the truth.   As Levitsky and Ziblatt clearly illustrate, American politics is a murky mix of cross currents some of which can be considered democratic in our modern sense — the majority can express its voice and get its way, but others of which are designed to defeat that majority.

This, we are told, is a good thing.  We are taught to suspect majorities.  They might turn ugly.  They might oppress or simply ignore minorities.  And the arc of human rights suggests that protecting minorities is an urgent requirement of modern civilization.  So societies throughout the world have built bulwarks against such majoritarian oppression.  They have sought to weaken democracy.

The problem, as is obvious, then becomes the inverse.  How do we prevent the minority taking advantage of their protections and becoming a dominant, oppressive, force themselves?  How do we avoid the minority frustrating the majority permanently?

In the American context the people who designed its basic law — the Constitution — were so concerned about the preservation of minority rights that they created a system easily perverted and exploited by aggressive minorities.  Which is how that person born in 1980 can live her life under permanent minority rule. 

No wonder people are increasingly expressing a deep aversion to American institutions.  They no longer channel majority views.  It is a broken system — if you believe that democracy is preferable to authoritarian rule.

There is no way out of this box.

The protections of minorities are so fundamental within the system that no improvement appears possible without a crisis of such severity that there would be no predictably improved outcome.   The result might just as easily be a greater descent into authoritarian rule as it might be the establishment of real democracy.

This is the dilemma America faces.

Its foundation needs urgent repair.  Cultural, demographic, and economic realities are out of alignment with the way in which the system brings opinions into the public arena and thus shapes policy.   The polarization and gridlock that so upsets us all is not an outcome of an even split in public opinion.  There is no such even split.  There are clear majorities in support of most major policy options.  And those majorities are expressed regularly at the ballot box.  Yet the anti-majority bias within the system defeats those majorities and perpetuates minority rule.  By so doing it undermines its own democratic legitimacy and creates the very polarization that causes public consternation.

So a downward spiral is set in motion.  The public gets more frustrated that the system appears not to work for the majority.  They turn away from, and increasingly distrust, our core institutions.  They search for ever more extreme ways of breaking free, and they are criticized as being uneducated or populist when they abandon — or appear to abandon — the system.   All the while they are behaving both rationally and democratically.  

The predicament that America finds itself is compounded by the root cause of some of the compromises made back during the writing of the Constitution — they were explicitly designed to protect slavery.  That they also protected minorities was a convenient veil thrown over this ugly truth.  The moral argument to rid ourselves of them is compelling.  Yet they persist.  Modern American politics is built on that heritage of racist based compromise.   The iniquitous so-called Southern strategy of the modern Republican Party is simply an exploitation, and encouragement, of that dark side of American culture.  

We cannot, nor ought we, re-write history.  Its lessons serve to guide us away from repetition of errors.  But that’s the point: we need to learn not to perpetuate those errors.  The current American political system does exactly that.  It continues to impose upon us the errors made at the outset.  Silent and hidden from view the history of slavery echoes on within the edifice.  It is time to eliminate it and establish modern democracy.

But is that possible?

Not when we take another more modern phenomenon into account.

In recent decades the American system of government has been captured by the influence of an elite class determined to protect its own privileges against dilution by democratic consideration.  Our elite has prospered during its indifference to the erosion of democracy and the rise of minority rule.  It has lost empathy with its fellow citizens.  Perpetual minority rule became a useful tool as the elite sought to avoid the pressures of democratic resistance to its veer greater rent-seeking and self-indulgence.

This capture was an organized reaction to the democratic changes induced by the Great Depression and expressed in the New Deal package of legislation.  That democratic turn was resented by those who were called upon to share their wealth and privilege in order to provide a platform for the emergence of the prosperous postwar middle class.   The ease with which this takeover was executed and subsequently maintained illustrates the weakness of the system Levitsky and Ziblatt discuss.  They focus more on the Republican party’s steady decline in its commitment to democracy.  Their identification of the Southern strategy and the rise of White Christian nationalism are the center point of their analysis.  The overlay of our elite power grab adds support to their call for reform.

Whether either the elite nor the Republican Party can ever be motivated to tolerate democracy is, unfortunately, an open question.  I doubt it.

It is, nonetheless, something that needs urgent attention.  It is time for reform.  Levitsky and Ziblatt give us a useful start.  It is up to us to summon the courage to rebel against the minority and to establish democracy.

Democracy in America.  Now that’s a thought!