Democracy for the minority, by the minority

Tyranny of the Minority: How to Reverse an Authoritarian Turn and Forge a Democracy for All

Authors: Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 388

Price: Rs 799

In 2018, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote a despairing book titled How Democracies Die, a study of the rise of authoritarian democracy with reference to the US and Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Among other things, they wrote of the failure of the political class to observe the “soft guardrails of democracy” — unwritten rules of mutual toleration to allow for healthy political debate — as a key reason for the demise of multi-partisan politics.

Since then, the world’s most powerful democracy suffered a crisis associated with banana republics. In 2020, a sitting president refused to accept his rejection by voters, and instigated an attack on the Capitol, seat of the legislative branch of the federal government. Two years later, his Brazilian acolyte Jair Bolsonaro chose to emulate this example after his defeat to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, until good sense prevailed in his party.  In The Tyranny of the Minority, Professors Levitsky and Ziblatt offer succinct history and civics lessons to show why the US suffers from democratic dysfunction.

This is partly a function of the fact that America has evolved into a diverse, multi-racial democracy, just like its European counterparts. This demographic transition plus serial economic crises have generated xenophobic responses from a minority of white, mostly less educated voters outside urban centres. Though far right movements are vibrant in Europe, they exist, with exceptions, in Opposition or rule in coalition governments. Only in the US “did such extremists actually win control of the national government and assault democratic institutions”. How these and other minority anomalies came about is the focus of the book.

Like its predecessor, this book is US-oriented, although the authors deploy a wider lens in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Shocked by the Capitol attack, their first chapter underlines the fact that the foundation of healthy democracy is to concede an electoral defeat. They point to the manner in which the once popular Peronist party in Argentina sustained a shock loss to a human rights oriented opponent in 1983. After some soul-searching the losing candidate appeared at a joint press conference with the winner and congratulated him.

More interesting is the revelation that the US nearly came close to a Trump-like insurgency as early as 1801, the first time the republic experienced an electoral transfer of power from one party to another. The incumbent President John Adams of America’s founding Federalist Party was defeated by Thomas Jefferson of the Democratic-Republican Party. Initially, the Federalists explored ways of subverting the process, until some Federalists, fearing constitutional breakdown or civil war, backed down.

The authors contend that counter-majoritarianism is hard-baked into the Constitution, partly because, as the first written constitution, the founders had no template to work from. The authors erroneously claim that the concept of representative democracy had “not been invented”; it had, in a strictly limited sense, in the United Kingdom in the early 18th century  — but probably not in the form the founders contemplated.  
 

The concept of representation, therefore, was racially oriented. It enabled the whites of the sparsely populated rural south to count a vast slave majority (with no rights) as three-fifths of a person, giving these regions power disproportionate to their population and racial make-up over the diverse, industrialised north. 

Although the law became moot after the civil war, it left a legacy of imbalance in that, irrespective of population, each state has two representatives in the Senate.
 

The south managed to halt post-Civil War Reconstruction with raw terrorism against blacks and the help of state legislatures to impose Jim Crow laws. In the late 20th and 21st centuries the consequences of the conservative region’s disproportionate representation in the House and Senate can be seen, for instance, in the inability of Congress to pass gun control laws despite widespread popular demand.  

This disparity spills over to the Electoral College (EC) and first-past-the-post system that can skew the election of a president. This has been the case in the 21st century where two of the four presidents so far —  George W Bush and Donald Trump  — came to power without winning the popular vote. Most healthy democracies do not permit the loser of the popular vote to win an election.  

As the authors show, the EC had its origins in the system of Electors among European monarchies for the Holy Roman Emperors, not some deep democratic principle. Life terms for Supreme Court judges is another anachronism. The founding fathers did not impose term limits simply because life expectancy in the 18th century was short. Since then, the terms of judges have trebled. Such longevity means judges are often out of touch with younger, diverse demographics  —  the overturning of abortion laws against popular demand is a recent example.  

With gerrymandering, the filibuster and the states’ powers to fix in electoral rules to discourage Black and Hispanic voters, the authors are at pains to show that counter-majoritarian institutions and conventions make the US an “outlier” among major democracies. It is instructive to know that the US met the minimal standard for universal suffrage only with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, more than a decade after India. But there are fewer clues to the problems of majoritarian democracies; that should be the subject of another book.  

It is a pity that Professors Levitsky and Ziblatt did not examine the role of big businesses and election funding laws. With Donald Trump likely to storm back to power on their dime, their contribution to powering the cause of far-right minorities is no less disturbing.