Majority Rule and Democracy Aren't Synonymous

It's not a coincidence that all of the proposed democracy reforms undermine people's check on power.

Harvard professor Steven Levitsky recently appeared on The Daily Show, discussing with Jon Stewart his and Daniel Ziblatt's book, Tyranny of the Minority, released last year. They are Ivy League academics proposing radical ideas to overhaul a democracy they perceive as governed by an outdated eighteenth-century document and at risk of crumbling unless seismic constitutional reforms are enacted. Specifically, Levitsky argues that for America to thrive as a multiracial democracy, it must abandon institutions that impose "minority rule," such as the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College, which, in recent elections, have enabled a minority of Americans to wield outsized influence over federal politics.

The logic behind Levitsky’s argument, and those similar to it, posits that minority rule is to anti-democracy as majority rule is to pro-democracy. If America continues to be governed by minority rule, it will cease to be a democracy. Conversely, if America reforms itself to operate under majority rule, it will continue as a democracy, assuming federal power is the only relevant form of government. This assumption is a significant red flag.

Several issues arise with this framing:

Firstly, Levitsky and Ziblatt have previously discussed democracies such as Weimar Germany, Venezuela, Turkey, and Hungary, which were largely governed by majority rule or involved popularly elected parties. These nations have moved closer to authoritarianism. Thus, being governed by federal-level majority rule may theoretically enhance democracy in a vacuum where majoritarian institutions never interact with others, but it is not determinative of a country remaining a democracy. Moreover, several democracies, including Germany, Switzerland, Australia, and Canada, grant equal or outsized relative power, akin to the U.S. Senate, to subnational entities regardless of population and are considered among the world’s most stable democracies.

The second issue is the false dichotomy between America being governed by majority or minority rule. The reality is that American democracy is as much a multiracial democracy as it is a multi-majoritarian democracy. American multi-majoritarianism does not jeopardize multiracial democracy, as Levitsky implies. Instead, it protects the representation of millions of racial minorities, whose partisan predispositions are evolving, and who live in less populous states with deep historical and cultural roots. The country was founded on a fundamental skepticism of consolidated power. The debate among the founders was not whether to impede federal power, but how. The resulting constitutional order requires modern political parties to achieve durable multi-majorities to govern progressively larger portions of the union—a progressive tax on righteousness, so to speak.

The third issue is equating majority rule with democracy. It is possible for a country to be run by a single-vote federal majority that sacrifices avenues for public recourse in the name of virtues like equity, national glory, or progress. Such a country would sacrifice significant democratic input and representation for majority rule, a principle more challenging to justify during periods of polarization and skepticism over election results.

What makes America more democratic than many Western countries is its delegation of powers to the states, checks on centralized power, and the recourse available to the people through a tiered and staggered system of broad representation, increasingly relevant in a diversifying demography. Conversely, the democracy Levitsky and others advocate for seeks to "flatten" American democracy, making all consequential policymaking dependent on political parties winning absolute federal power with bare majorities. This emboldening of political nationalization, which has left millions of Americans with unnecessary existential dread over artificially elevated stakes, is what’s eroding democracy more than anything else Levitsky and his colleagues cite.

We’re at a point where, in elite circles over-invested in American politics, what appear to be cogent, dispassionate observations about democracy are really expressions of people losing faith in American democracy, whether because of short-term partisan outcomes or the long-term legacy of impediments it places on power seekers. Reforms motivated by these factors will erode democracy more in the long term than any one felon breaking into the federal capitol building. Advocates for reform who conflate dysfunction with the challenging work of pluralism, and whose impatient reform ideas represent a dissatisfaction with a self-correcting system, will undermine federated democracy. What we risk ending up with may not be democracy—or majority rule, for that matter.

That Patchwork is a first-of-its-kind newsletter about democracy, economics and culture from a decentralist angle. Today, fewer people are seeking more power over American life. To preserve a pluralist democracy will mean challenging the premise that observations, ideas and solutions are best made with a federal or national interest. Subscribe and share That Patchwork with a friend.