The Tyranny of the Minority

A Marxist Appreciation and Critique

Originally published on CounterPunch, August 16, 2024

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, The Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (New York: Crown, 2023)

It is possible to embrace, learn from, and strongly criticize an academic book at one and the same time.

Good Stuff

Take Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s volume, The Tyranny of the Minority (New York: Crown, 2023). It is a sophisticated, readable, deliciously comparative, and properly historical analysis of how and why the “democratic” United States’ (US) political is plagued by Minority Rule. As Levitsky and Ziblatt show, the US is an extreme Minority Rule “outlier” compared to other contemporary (unmentionably bourgeois) “democracies”:

* The US is the planet’s sole “presidential democracy” in which the chief executive is indirectly elected through an Electoral College instead of directly by the voters. Only in the self-declared “world’s greatest democracy” can a president be elected in violation of the popular vote, as occurred 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. Thanks to the rightward bias of the Electoral College, a Democratic Party candidate today effectively needs to defeat their Republi-fascist opponent by 4 or more percentage points in the popular vote to win the US presidency.

* The US is one of the last few “democracies” with a bicameral legislature containing a powerful upper chamber (the US Senate) functioning as an anti-majoritarian check on its more majoritarian lower chamber.

* The US is one of even fewer “democracies” where this powerful upper chamber is extremely malapportioned thanks to “equal representation” being granted to states with vastly unequal populations (this is true also in Argentina and Brazil) – a privileging of territory over people, of land over the elementary democratic principle of “one person, one vote.”

* The US is the world’s only “democracy” with both a powerful and malapportioned upper legislative chamber and a de facto “legislative minority veto” (p. 217) granted to that upper chamber. The Senate filibuster requires the support of 60 of the body’s 100 members to permit consideration of a bill, meaning that 40 Senators can block a bill.

* The US is one just one of a small handful of “established democracies” with anti-proportional “first-past-the-post” electoral and representation rules that permit parties to win legislative majorities without winning the majority of popular votes in legislative elections (the other ones are Canada, England, India, and Jamaica).

* The US is the world’s only “democracy” to grant lifetime tenure to its Supreme Court justices.

* The longstanding constitutional federalism of the US grants substantial policy and lawmaking authority to local and especially state governments, regardless of national majority opinion and beyond the reach of the national government.

* The US is home to rampant gerrymandering, whereby the geography of voting districts is manipulated for partisan advantage – another triumph of territory over people.

* The US Constitution is the most difficult national constitution to change in the “democratic” world. Under Article V, a single constitutional amendment in the US requires supermajorities in both branches of Congress plus support from three quarters of states. These are incredibly high barriers.

The Tyranny of the Majority argues that these Minority Rule institutions and practices carry lethal authoritarian consequences. One result is a government “glaringly at odds with public opinion” on one key issue after another. The authors focus on three especially egregious examples of this anti-democratic disconnect between citizen views and state policy: abortion rights, gun rights, and the federal minimum wage.

Beyond the cancellation of majority opinion, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, American Minority Rule entrenches “authoritarian extremism” by “shielding authoritarian parties from competitive pressures,” allowing them to hold power while appealing to “just a narrow extremist base.” Electoral institutions that “overrepresent certain territories or groups” let parties “win elections without capturing the most votes,” thereby “weaken[ing] the[ir] incentive[s] to adapt” and to “broaden their appeal” rather than to “turn inward and radicalize.” The obvious leading embodiment of this problem is Donald Trump and his takeover of the election-denying Republi-fascist Party.

Thanks to its extreme anti-majoritarian political order, Levitsky and Ziblatt show, the US Republi-fascist right today is distinct from its European counterparts in two ways: it rejects election outcomes that don’t go its way (even to the extent of trying to stage a coup on January 6) and its has actually ascended to national power.

Another consequence of Minority Rule is the discrediting of “democracy” in the eyes of many US citizens. “Imagine an American born in 1980 who first voted in 1998 or 2000,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write. “The Democrats have won the popular vote in every six-year cycle in the U.S. Senate and all but one presidential election during her adult lifetime. And yet she would have lived most of 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?” (p. 182, emphasis added)

Two particular strengths of The Tyranny of the Minority are its excellent historical and comparative angle and its related reflection on why the United States is an extreme Minority Rule “outlier.” More than this reviewer knew before reading this book, other nations in Western Europe and the Americas developed and then over the course of the 19^th and 20^th centuries abandoned many of the same counter-majoritarian institutions and practices that plague the US today. They: rejected and got rid of powerful upper legislative branches; replaced “first-past-the-post” elections systems with proportional representation; dropped electoral colleges; introduced direct popular presidential elections; undid and rejected legislative malapportionment; killed anti-majoritarian filibusters, and enacted term limits and mandatory retirement ages for supreme court judges.

The United States also undertook political reforms in the last century, Levitsky and Ziblatt show. It granted voting rights to white women in 1920 and to Blacks in the South with the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). It introduced the direct election of US Senators (previously elected by state legislatures) in 1913. It required all US legislative districts to be roughly equal in population, wiping out “artificial rural majorities” in the US House of Representatives in 1962. It reduced the voting age to 18 in 1971 and gave Washington DC residents the right to vote in presidential elections in 1961. But none of this has seriously qualified the deeply embedded and longstanding extreme anti-majoritarian aspects of the US model of modern bourgeois democracy. Gerrymandering has deeply qualified the democratic impact of making legislative districts equal in population size. The anti-majoritarian and racist Supreme Court has in this century significantly weakened the VRA’s protections for Black voters.

What has made the US such an extreme anti-majoritarian “outlier” compared to other “democratic” states? Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that “historical timing” is a key part of the explanation. The US has “the world’s oldest written constitution…an eighteenth-century document, a product of a pre-democratic era.” Its core electoral and governance charter was set in place prior to the existence of “modern democracy, with equal rights and full suffrage” anywhere on the planet.

At the same time, Levitsky and Ziblatt rightly show, the US Constitution, the source of many (though not all) of the nation’s Minority Rule extremism, bears the imprint of Black chattel slavery. The Electoral College, the powerful and malapportioned Senate, and states’ rights (all reflecting the privileging of territories over people in the determination of representation) were required to keep the young republic’s slave states on board with the new government at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Without these protections against the abolition of slavery that southern slaveowners feared would result from the direct election of the president and a Senate that granted membership to each state on the basis of its number of voters, the slave states would have stayed outside the new national government and formed their own alliances with England and other foreign nations.

“The issue of slavery – and protecting slavery – thus powerfully shaped the drafting of America’s constitution,” write Levitsky and Ziblatt. “The word ‘slavery’ didn’t appear in then final document, but its institutional legacies were far-reaching. Never has a silence echoed so loudly” (p. 154).

Indeed.

All this makes The Tyranny of the Minority essential reading. So do the authors’ excellent discussions of key differences between major political parties that do and (like the Republi-fascists) don’t resist the drift towards authoritarianism (pp. 41-44)[1], their discussion of the specific ways that right-wing parties across the “democratic” world play “constitutional hardball” (pp. 51-59)[2] to build autocracies in this century, their chilling discussion of how white supremacists both violently and “constitutionally” killed Reconstruction era experiments in “multiracial democracy” in the US South after the Civil War (pp. 65-91), and their discussion of the social and demographic changes that have turned the contemporary Republi-fascist Party into a militant opponent of “one person, one vote” (pp. 92-132).

Also very much to be recommended in the author’s key advice to US-Americans: “Our institutions will not save our democracy. We will have to save it ourselves” (p. 11).

Six Problems

I have for years been writing in the actually radical Left (I say “actually” because Trumpist Fatherland forces now regularly refer to anything left of Liz Cheney as “radical Left”) wilderness about how the extreme minoritarian US political order enables fascism by violating the elementary Western bourgeois-democratic principle of majority rule. But I have been doing so from a revolutionary Marxist perspective that finds six key problems with The Tyranny of the Majority.

First, Levitsky and Ziblatt never properly identify the contemporary American anti-majoritarian “extremism,” “authoritarianism,” and “radicalism” they rightly bemoan as fascism. There’s an impressive scholarship and journalism on the fascist nature of Trumpism and Trump-captive Republican Party – a literature to which I have contributed along with other scholars, writers, and activists including Henry Giroux, Anthony DiMaggio, Jason Stanley, Federico Finchelstein, Bob Avakian, Samantha Goldman, Coco Das and many others.

Second, Levitsky and Ziblatt have a big blind spot on class and the underlying system of capitalism-imperialism. Even without the anti-majoritarian characteristics that the authors so effectively and expertly diagnose, the American electoral and governance order would be plagued by a different underlying form of minority rule: the de facto class dictatorship of capital, which is evident in nations that have gone much further down the majoritarian path than the US. Here Levitsky and Ziblatt would do well to read the fifth chapter, titled “How They Rule” of my 2014 book They Rule: the 1% v. Democracy. That chapter details “the many modes of moneyed class power” that are rooted ultimately in the capitalist mode of production, which brooks no substantive challenge to bourgeois power in its political and ideological superstructure, and which must be radically replaced by a socialist system for real popular sovereignty to have any chance of existing. Those modes of class-rule are much deeper and wider than just the nation’s plutocratic campaign finance system – a topic a topic on which Levitsky and Ziblatt are shockingly silent.

Here it should be added that that the United States’ remains “stuck” with an 18^th Century slaveowners’ constitution because the US Constitution has been well matched the nation’s imperialist system – a topic that deserves elaboration in a future commentary.

Third, Levitsky and Ziblatt further demonstrate excessive and unbecoming ignorance of Marxist analysis and radical Left history with some rather strange comments:

* A reference to the thoroughly corporatized capitalist-imperialist and neoliberal US Democratic Party as “a left of center party” (p. 171) – seriously?

* “In the 1870s, the provisional government of Adolphe Thiers faced dauting challenges. France has just lost a war to Prussia, and the new Republican government had to contend with the revolutionary Paris Commune on the left and forces seeking to restore the monarchy on the right. The new government needed to show it could govern effectively.” Yikes! “Contend with the Paris commune”? Hello? Are Levitsky and Ziblatt really unaware that the Thiers government provided an open model of the iron-fisted ruling class “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” that lurks behind the outer shell of constitutional rule of law when it literally drowned the Paris Commune in blood? As they could learn with a simple Wiki search: “The national French Army [under Thiers] suppressed the Commune at the end of May during La semaine sanglante (‘The Bloody Week’) beginning on 21 May 1871. The national forces still loyal to the government either killed in battle or executed an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Communards, though one unconfirmed estimate from 1876 put the toll as high as 20,000.”

* A quote from 1911 Joe Hill song (p. 237) used by the authors to buttress their case for mild constitutional reform when in fact Hill was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, which was dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist employer class.

Fourth, Levitsky and Ziblatt leave out a critical part of the American outlier story: massive gun ownership and gun violence, with many millions of military style assault weapons out on the loose and disproportionately owned by the right. Here is that Levitsky and Ziblatt could have consulted historian Carol Anderson’s important historical study  The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). Anderson shows how a deadly American racial double standard on firearms, self-defense, and use of force dates to the nation’s colonial, revolutionary, and constitutional origins. Africans brought to and born in British colonial North America were denied the right to carry guns thanks to white fears that an armed Black population would be able to retaliate with potent force against their slaveowners and the slave system (imagine). Colonial governments banned Blacks from their militias out of the same fear. The early state government of South Carolina was willing to sacrifice national independence out of its dread of what could happen if its Black subjects were enlisted as soldiers in the Continental Army.

Anderson argues that southern states would have walked away from the US Constitution and from the United States itself without a constitutional amendment (“the Second”) negotiated and crafted to ensure that southern state militias would (a) not fall under the command of a national government that included officeholders opposed to slavery; (b) include only members sanctioned by southern state officials; (c) continue to perform their longstanding role of suppressing real and potential slave rebellions.

Fifth, Levitsky and Ziblatt offer essentially nothing much in the way of solutions to the nation’s white patriarchal Minority Rule problem but a series of standard reforms – including proportional representation, easy and automatic voter registration, the prohibition of gerrymandering, the restoration of recently lost voting rights, expanded early and mail-in voting, a national Election Day holiday, term limits for Supreme Cour justices, making it easier to amend the Constitution – for “empowering majorities” and “democratizing our democracy” (what democracy?). How public financing of elections didn’t make their list is a complete mystery to me.

Levitsky and Ziblatt worry that many readers will consider their reform agenda too “radical.” In reality, their proposals are conservative and rather off since much of what they advocate requires constitutional amendments via a constitutional amendment process they show as designed to prevent serious change minus revolutionary upheavals on the scale of the US Civil War and Radical Reconstruction in the 1860s.

Did I just say “revolutionary upheavals”? That my dear readers and friends is precisely what is required today: a revolutionary socialist movement, one that will not merely change the faces and outward sentiments of people in the political superstructure but that will reach down into the real radical meat of the matter: how we organize our material lives and interact with nature and the whole world around us. Constitutional tinkering cannot begin to properly address the ecological death sentence and related imperial death march that American and global capitalism is imposing on humanity today. Enough with the depressing “dugout poison” (to use a baseball analogy) that revolution is impossible, “contrary to human nature,” a “door to dystopia” (what on earth could be more dystopian than contemporary US -led capitalism-imperialism?!) and all the rest of the nauseating blather that keeps on fixed on our couches while imperialists cancel all prospects for a decent human future.

Sixth, saving prospects for a decent human future is actually NOT firstly or foremostly about “saving our democracy.” The US “democracy” that is supposedly “ours” really belongs to the bourgeoisie, the ruling class under capitalism. Our critical historical task is to get to revolutionary socialism, which will inevitably combine authoritarian aspects with democratic characteristics since class inequality and class struggle do not magically disappear just because a revolution has occurred. The goal of democracy should never be abstracted from and understood as above and beyond the real historical material context within which it is situated. A revolutionary socialist state, certain to be embattled within and without, will hardly be a pure or ideal democracy but it will push much further down the egalitarian path of popular sovereignty than bourgeois democracy. Getting how and why this is so means drilling deeper into revolutionary Marxist, socialist, and communist thought than esteemed Ivy League political scientists typically dare to venture. It would be nice if that could begin to change. Some recommendations in that regard: Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; Karl Marx, The Civil War in France; Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution; Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society; Ellen Meiksens-Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism; Bob Avakian, Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?

Endnotes

1. Major capitalist parties that resist the drift to authoritarianism/fascism: (1) “expel antidemocratic forces from their ranks;” (2) “sever all ties — public and private — with allied groups that engage in antidemocratic behavior”; (3) “unambiguously condemn political violence and other antidemocratic behavior;” (4) “join forces with rival pro-democratic parties to isolate and defeat antidemocratic extremists.” As Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, the Trump era Republican Party has done none of these things. The authors’ role models here are Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, the Lincoln Project, etc. – Republican who have rejected white nationalist authoritarianism, what I call Amerikaner neofascism.

2. “Exploiting gaps” in existing constitutional rules, as when the Republican led US Senate refused to let then US president Barack Obama appoint fill a Supreme Court vacancy in 2016 + “excessive or undue use of the law,” like when Trump as president pardoned his allies Dinesh D’ Souza, Steve Bannon, various war criminals and others + “selective enforcement,” repeatedly threatened by Trump against his political enemies + “lawfare,” the making of new laws to target political opponents – a specialty of the Hungarian president/dictator Victor Orban, a key Republi-fascist role model and ally who visits Trump in Mar a Lago.

Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).