In their 2012 book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” published before anyone imagined a Trump presidency, the political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann incisively identified the root of Washington’s dysfunction. Radicalized by talk radio and amplified by social media, congressional Republicans had begun behaving like a parliamentary party: “ideologically polarized, internally unified, vehemently oppositional, and politically strategic,” they wrote. In a constitutional system with separation of powers, that “makes it extremely difficult for majorities to work their will.”
In parliamentary systems, majority parties can affect their agenda almost unchecked. On the other hand, constitutional systems operate on norms, good faith, and compromise, which affords opposition parties enormous leverage to obstruct the majority. Once Republicans began employing maximalist tactics against the Obama administration—and found them effective in achieving their political goals—the democratic machine started to break down.
Ornstein and Mann were animated by the unprecedented hostage-taking of the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis, in which House Republicans threatened to default on the country’s credit if President Obama and the Democratic Senate didn’t accede to their demands for draconian discretionary spending cuts. This was accompanied by an unprecedented use of the filibuster to block Obama’s policies. Later came Mitch McConnell’s unprecedented blockade of judicial nominees during Obama’s last two years, after Republicans won a Senate majority in 2014, including his unprecedented refusal to even allow hearings, much less a vote, on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
It wasn’t just the Supreme Court, either. In 2015–16, the Senate confirmed just two federal appellate judges and 18 district court judges. (For comparison, in George W. Bush’s final two years, the Democratic Senate approved 10 appellate judges and 58 district judges.) As a result, Donald Trump took office with more than 100 judicial vacancies. McConnell then changed the rules to approve Trump’s nominees more quickly, allowing the president to reshape the federal district and appellate courts for a generation—other than the 210,000 dead bodies, perhaps his only lasting achievement.
Of course, Trump is also reshaping the Supreme Court: Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed to fill the seat that should have been Garland’s; Justice Brett Kavanaugh, confirmed in 2018 despite allegations of sexual misconduct; now, Amy Coney Barrett, selected to fill the seat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg a month before an election the president and Senate Republicans seem likely to lose.
If Barrett is confirmed, three of the Court’s nine members will have been appointed by a president who earned 3 million fewer votes than his opponent and confirmed by a Senate majority that represents 15 million fewer Americans than the “minority.” They will join two other justices appointed by a Republican president who lost the popular vote to form a far-right majority that can overturn the Affordable Care Act, roll back abortion and LGBTQ rights, gut environmental and labor protections, enable conservative state legislatures to through up barriers to the ballot, and block legislatively enacted progressive reforms for decades to come.
Since 1992, Republicans have won the presidential popular vote just once, yet, on account of the Electoral College, they’ve held the White House for 12 of 28 years. In the U.S. Senate, the fact that Wyoming gets the same number of seats as California, a state with 70 times its population, redounds to conservatives’ benefit. In recent U.S. House elections, Republicans have won more seats than their share of the national vote.
The disparities created by these counter-majoritarian institutions have convinced the national media—and much of the navel-gazing Democratic Party—that the country is center-right. By any objective metric, it is not. But since that reality isn’t reflected in swing states or the composition of Congress, our perceptions of the country’s ideology get warped in a way that benefits white conservatives.
There’s something else at work, a sentiment Ornstein and Mann pointed out nearly a decade ago that has only intensified since. As the GOP became more and more like what one former Republican congressional staffer described as an “apocalyptic cult”—ignoring scientists, engaging in conspiracy theories, catering to extremists—it also grew “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition,” Ornstein and Mann wrote.
In other words, even if Democrats won more votes, they aren’t entitled to govern. Their voters don’t reflect the “real” America. Their policies infringe on liberty and must be resisted. In Manichean politics, popular sovereignty should be defied when the masses are wrong.
This sort of delegitimization emboldens the fringes, as we saw in Michigan last week, when the FBI arrested right-wing militia types for plotting a coup against the governor over her “treasonous” COVID-19 response. No less important, when you deem your opponents inherently illegitimate, you have no obligation to compromise. When politics becomes a zero-sum game, you use power as a means to its own end.
Witness the tenacity with which Republican legislatures in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and other states sought to suppress Black votes through aggressive gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and other initiatives over the last decade. Witness, too, the Trump campaign’s all-out war against voting by mail this year.
This is how the tyranny of the minority works.
It’s important to acknowledge here that, at least for now, this radicalization goes one way: The country is asymmetrically polarized. Republicans are far-right insurgents, so much so that they were incapable of governing even with unified control. Democrats, while they’ve become more liberal (as has the country), are still a center-left party.
Yet as the GOP has lurched rightward, it has become entirely dependent on a shrinking demographic of older white conservatives, usually men, usually without college degrees, usually evangelicals. But the more that cohort shrinks, the more tightly the party clings to power through any means necessary—finding increasingly strained rationales to justify itself.
So it is with the rushed nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, for whom the McConnell Rule of 2016 does not apply.
And so it was that, about 30 minutes into last week’s vice presidential debate, Utah Senator Mike Lee—a likely candidate for president in 2024—tweeted: “We are not a democracy.”
We’re not a democracy.
— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) October 8, 2020
Part 2
As a rule, whenever you hear someone confidently (and usually condescendingly) assert that America is “a republic, not a democracy,” know that you’re dealing with either a textbook example of the Dunning-Kruger effect or a disingenuous pedant.
Utah Senator Mike Lee’s Twitter comment, midway through the October 7 vice-presidential debate, that “We’re not a democracy,” likely falls into the latter camp. His attempt at cleanup early the next morning probably sounded better in the original German: “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”
Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.
— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) October 8, 2020
Lee is said to be a 2024 presidential aspirant. He’s also said to be one of the sharper minds in the GOP Senate. I’m disinclined to assume that he’s firing off freshman-level Deep Thoughts based on a Wikipedia skim or a Dinesh D’Souza documentary. This isn’t ignorance. It’s more perverse than that.
To be clear, I don’t think Lee is suggesting we start practicing goose steps. In his mind, this isn’t about fascism versus democracy. This is about freedom versus democracy, which he thinks are irreconcilable. Lee and a not-insignificant proportion of the Republican Party believe that too much voting—or the wrong kind of voting—infringes on their inalienable right to impose their worldview on the rest of us. Phrased less generously, democracy threatens a comfortable, privileged status quo.
OK, I’ll put it bluntly: They matter more than you. Their votes should matter more than yours.
Since we’re here, let’s dispense with it: The “republic, not a democracy” trope is rooted in a superficial understanding of America’s founding. Yes, the framers distrusted “democracy,” by which they meant Athenian democracy—a plebiscite—not a democratic government.
Just read James Madison’s Federalist No. 10: “From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. … A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.”
Counter-majoritarian institutions such as the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the presidential veto existed not to overrule the majority but to protect minorities from oppression. See Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 inaugural address: “All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.”
Yet, as we discussed above, ours is a system in which the majority’s will does not prevail. Quite the opposite. A strategic, oppositional, and radicalized GOP has turned the constitutional system against itself, shattering norms and using maximalist tactics to cling to power despite its diminishing popularity and looming demographic apocalypse.
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will, on a party-line vote, sent the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the floor, where Senate Republicans will rush it to the finish line ahead of the Nov. 3 election, ensuring a far-right 6–3 Supreme Court majority for a generation. Never mind that five of those justices were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. Never mind that the last three will have been confirmed by a Republican Senate majority that represents a mere 45% of the population.
A week or so later, the Republican president will probably try to cheat his way to reelection. That’s not hyperbole. All over the country—North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Wisconsin—the Trump campaign and its sycophants are waging legal battles to prevent absentee ballots from being counted amid a pandemic, while the president makes reckless, baseless, wild-ass accusations of widespread fraud on the daily.
The stated goal—as in, they’ve said this out loud—is for President Trump to insist that the millions of ballots counted after Election Day are fraudulent, sue, and have the courts declare him the victor.
That’s not an election strategy. That’s a coup.
In Trump’s best-case (and most legitimate) scenario, he again cobbles together a bare electoral majority while losing the popular vote by three or four points, hardly a show of strength.
Meanwhile, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast, Republicans have a 27% chance of maintaining control of the Senate—a majority that would continue representing millions fewer Americans than the “minority.” They have almost no chance of reclaiming the House, but the GOP wants to game that system, too. The administration prematurely pulled the plug on the decennial census, meaning areas with immigrants and poor people—i.e., Democrats—will have less congressional and legislative representation.
Let’s acknowledge this for what it is. This isn’t about a principled (if esoteric) stand for republican liberty in the face of democratic oppression. This is about power in its rawest, purest form. This is about people accustomed to status and privilege using every lever at their disposal—some legal, others illegal only if the judges they appoint say so—to maintain that status and privilege in perpetuity.
But ruthlessness cuts both ways. Mitch McConnell is putting Coney Barrett on the Court because he can, just like kept Merrick Garland off the Court because he could. He has power, and he’s using it.
If come January 20, Democrats control Washington, D.C., they’d be fools not to do the same: eliminate the filibuster, make D.C. and Puerto Rico states, add seats to the Supreme Court, and expand and protect voting rights. Make our democracy more democratic—then pass a sweeping agenda and have voters judge you on the results. There’s nothing stopping them.
Nothing, that is, except nostalgia for an era that is never coming back.
UPDATED: 10/16/20 1 p.m. Updated to include part 2.
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This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2020.
