This commentary is by Philip Finkelstein of Charlotte, a technical writer and business analyst who earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at the University of British Columbia. He has been a blog contributor for Citizens’ Climate Lobby and is working on publication of his first novel, a dystopian thriller about American culture.
On July 4, America celebrated its 246th birthday. The Founding Fathers foresaw a lot, but a glimpse this far into the future would’ve caused them much alarm.
Certainly, John Adams and James Madison would be shocked to see what’s happened to their country — it was these two Framers who initially recognized the danger of majority tyranny in a democracy. If not for their foresight, perhaps our government would’ve been established without a system of checks and balances: three branches of government (legislative, executive and judicial) designed to counter each other’s power so as to prevent any one branch or faction from becoming tyrannical.
A beautiful construct indeed — the essence of individual liberty and American freedom. Hence, our commitment as a nation to the separation of powers over the past centuries.
However, another Framer, Alexander Hamilton, foresaw a different danger, warning in the Federalist Papers against minority protections that grant smaller states “equal weight in the scale of power” to that of larger states and asserting the criticality of “complete independence of the courts of justice.” Presumably, he’d be less shocked to see the current state of American democracy, though no less disappointed, his gravest concerns having become reality.
In our Madisonian devotion to reining in mob rule, an insidious enemy has slipped through the cracks. A shrewd and depraved minority, Hamilton’s fears incarnate, has co-opted the system for their unabashed benefit.
This minority is the modern-day Republican Party, which, despite representing less than half of America’s populace, has managed to compromise the democratic integrity of all three branches of government. Blinded by our commitment to minority protections, America has allowed a super-minority to seize control of nearly every lever of power.
The snowballing effect to ensue from such a travesty may very well be democracy’s undoing.
The legislative and executive branches have a long history of democratic shortcomings. With an Electoral College, winner-take-all elections, and the Senate prioritizing rural and state power over the popular vote, political representation is stacked in the favor of Republicans, who disproportionately hold more power relative to the votes they receive. Most critically, this proved itself true when Donald Trump became president in 2016 via the Electoral College, despite receiving 2.9 million fewer overall votes than Hillary Clinton.
Adding to the democratic decadence, state legislatures are responsible for redistricting, which as of July 1, 2022, lean heavily in the direction of Republicans, who control 54.27% of all state legislative seats versus the Democrats’ 44.41%. This amounts to Republicans holding a majority in 62 chambers while Democrats hold a majority in only 36.
This then leads to the malpractice of gerrymandering, which only accentuates the dissonance between power and votes. Take, for example, the 2016 House elections, where Republican candidates won 48.2% of the votes while gaining 55.4% of the seats.
To make matters worse, there’s the filibuster — a practice that the Framers hadn’t accounted for, which exacerbates minority rule within the Senate, an institution already overly inflated with minority power (21 states with a cumulative population less than California’s have 42 of the 100 seats in the Senate).
As is the case with the gerrymandering of districts, power begets power: President Trump, with some help from Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, went on to change the course of American so-called democracy forever. Not only did Trump take command of the executive branch, but he, backed by the Christian Right faction of his constituency, drastically rearranged the composition of the Supreme Court.
As a result of Sen. McConnell’s unprecedented yearlong delay in filling an empty Supreme Court seat at the end of President Obama’s tenure, the subsequently elected Trump was afforded the opportunity to appoint three conservative justices to the Supreme Court over his sole term (33% of the bench).
He also appointed 30% of U.S. appellate court judges, all of whom serve for life, thus formalizing the capture of the judiciary (five of the nine sitting justices were appointed by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote). It’s because of this that unpopular decisions like the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade can be made.
When President Trump was finally ousted after losing the Electoral College to Joe Biden in 2020, he turned his rabid minority of supporters toward the Capitol, instigating the Jan. 6 riots — one of the sadder displays of anti-democratic action in American history.
Although President Biden currently places the executive branch under Democratic rule, fast-approaching midterm elections and 2024 presidential campaigns run the strong risk of both legislative and executive branches falling again into the control of the minority.
With radical agendas and extreme polarization fueling the partisan divide by the day, anarchy — even civil war — is not so far-fetched. As rights like abortion get stripped away by an undemocratically manufactured judiciary working in coordination with misrepresentative legislative and executive bodies, the stage is set for democracy’s downfall.
It was John Adams himself who said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
But there’s hope yet, if Democratic leaders push moderate agendas to turn out and garner voters like never before — for a tyrannical minority masquerading as the majority need only meet the defrauded majority to understand the true balance of power.