Title: Tyranny of the Minority
Rating: 5 Stars
I’m not sure if there was a whole lot of information that was new to me in this book, but for whatever reason, it succinctly summed up what’s going on with the Republican Party. There’s been a lot of ink spilled over the rise of Donald Trump and the seemingly inexorable hold that he has on the party, despite his many flaws and, quite frankly, his cartoonishly inane behavior. At least for me, this book added context that I found illuminating.
The root of the problem is, ultimately, like a lot of things in the US, race. According to the authors, there has never been a successful transition to a multiracial democracy. This is exactly what is going on in our country now.
First of all, we don’t actually have a long history of democracy. Sure, there was a Declaration of Independence, a fought war, and a Constitution, but even then, relatively few white men were able to vote. By the time of Andrew Jackson or so, even propertyless white men could vote. It took a Civil War to even have Black people to not be considered property. Although granted citizenship and granted the theoretical right to vote, the reaction to the Reformation was rapid. Quickly, in major parts of the country, Black men lost their right to vote. It took until 1919 and the 19th Amendment for white women to get the vote. Finally, it was the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s that truly enfranchised the entire country. We’ve only been a fully participatory democracy for some sixty years.
On top of that is the change in our population demographics. Put simply, the birthrate for US citizens is below replacement. We’re not as bad as countries like China, Japan, South Korea, or Italy. The primary reason why it’s not more concerning is that we make up the difference with immigration. A good percentage of that immigration comes from Hispanic countries. That, and the fact that the birthrate for white women is lower than the overall US birthrate means that the percentage of white people is decreasing rapidly. Forty years ago or so, white people made up 80% of the population. Now the number is closer to 60%. Considering the fact that white people no longer make up a majority of the younger generation, that number will continue to inexorably head down.
All of this means that the US is heading to a multi-racial democracy. It’s fair to say that there’s a bunch of white people that aren’t happy with that. For them, losing centuries old advantages in the name of equality feels like an injustice.
How big was this advantage? Well, check out these figures. From our nation’s founding to the late 1980s, every single US president, vice president, House Speaker, Senate majority leader, Supreme Court chief justice, Federal Reserve chairman, and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman was a white man. Every single state governor was white until 1989. Every Fortune 500 CEO was white until 1987. For two hundred years, the racial hierarchy was unchallenged.
So yes, change is coming. How did the two parties respond? You’d think that the Republican party, being, after all, the party that was formed to end slavery, would have the inside track to this new world. However, first with Franklin Roosevelt, then continued on with Harry Truman, and then most dramatically with Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic party made the moves to become more racially inclusive.
Seeing an opportunity, the Republicans went the other way. There were a bunch of previously loyal Democrats that were horrified at their party’s new positions. Starting in the 1960s with Barry Goldwater and then with a vengeance with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the Republicans made a big play to be the party to preserve white advantages.
Since, as I said above, white people were some 80% of the population, this was, at that moment, a smart play. In fact, from 1968 through 1988, the Republicans only lost one presidential election, and that was due to fallout from the Watergate scandal.
In 2024, with this approach, the Republicans have painted themselves into a corner. They are closely aligned with a constituency that, relative to others, is decreasing in size. From 1992 to 2020, the Republican candidate have only won the presidential popular vote once.
In normal times, if a party loses seven of its last eight elections, this would force the party to adjust to reality. In the aftermath of 2012, the Republican party actually put out a paper (the ‘post mortem’) challenging itself to figure out ways to reach out beyond their base.
It did not take. Why not? Well, Republican party leaders think that they’ve discovered a cheat code. When creating the Constitution, the convention had to make several compromises. Primarily to mitigate the concerns of small states, in addition to the proportional representation of the House, we ended up with a non-proportional representation of the Senate (ie two senators per state). Instead of a popular vote (which pretty much every other democracy in the world does by now) for president, we ended up with the electoral college, which since it is based upon the state numbers in the House / Senate, it is itself non-proportional.
Add to that the filibuster. Not even called out in the Constitution, it was a rarely used device until the twentieth century. Filibusters used to at least be hard work (someone had to stand and talk for hours on end), but by the 1970s any senator can basically stop the Senate by raising their hand, at which point either the proposed law is stopped or until sixty votes can be found to stop the filibuster. With the current strict party discipline, it’s become virtually impossible to stop a filibuster. One senator can indefinitely prevent a bill from coming to a vote. This is definitely not what the founding fathers had in mind.
What does all of this mean? With the great geographical sorting that has taken place in our country whereby Republicans and Democrats tend to cluster in individual enclaves and with the Democrats clustering in the large cities, the smaller, rural states are now decisively Republican.
Because of that, there is a very narrow path for Republicans to win the electoral college even without winning the popular vote. This was previously a rare event. It’s now happened twice in twenty years. With the electoral college, Republicans have actually won three out of the last eight elections. Not a great result, but apparently one that does not require a dramatic reassessment.
In the non-proportional Senate, there can be a majority of senators that make up only 20% of our nation’s population. Because of the filibuster, senators from only 11% of our nation’s population can stop any law. Although the Republican party has been the Senate majority many times in the period, it has never represented a majority of the voters in the twenty-first century.
This spills over to the Supreme Court. Three of the Supreme Court justices serving today were appointed by a President that lost the popular vote and were confirmed by a Senate representing a minority of our country’s population.
There you have it. That is the tyranny of the minority, or as the authors call it, counter-majoritarian.
Republicans are very much intent upon maintaining this state of affairs. This is at the heart of all of their voting ‘security’ measures that end up doing things like requiring voter ID or closing voting locations. People of color are significantly less likely to have identification than white people. The voting locations being closed are those that are primarily frequented by people of color. Narrowing the window of early voting penalizes Southern Black churches that have Sunday get out the vote drives. This is all by design.
What can be done? Well, the good news is that there is a process to fix this, and it has been used in the past. The bad news is that the process is to amend the US Constitution.
The US Constitution is the world’s hardest constitution to change. It requires supermajorities in both legislative chambers and 3/4 approval of all state governments. There’s a reason that the Constitution hasn’t been changed in thirty years. In contrast, Norway has modified its constitution over three hundred times over the last two hundred years. For the US, there have been over seven hundred unsuccessful attempts just to abolish the electoral college.
We need a bunch of constitutional amendments. I actually proposed my own list of amendments some time ago (here if you’re interested). It won’t be easy. The first attempts at Black equality started around the 1820s and didn’t culminate until the 1960s. It took about eighty years for women to get the right to vote.
What were the recommendations that the authors proposed? Abolish the electoral college. Make the Senate’s representation more proportional. Eliminate gerrymandering. Increase the House of Representatives beyond its current count of 435 to put it more in line with population growth (ie make it more truly proportional again). Abolish the Senate filibuster. Establish term limits for Supreme Court justices. Most importantly, and probably to be done first, amend the Constitution to make it easier to be amended (ie remove the 3/4 state approval requirement).
It’s a tall order, but it’s the only way that we can truly migrate to a multi-racial democracy by removing the counter-majoritarian elements that are currently present in our system.
We need to get started today.
dorkenstein 