The Spirit of Democracy

Think back to the time of 6th century BCE Athens. The city controlled an empire of dozens of separate Greek states. It was the world center of philosophy, science, and art. And it was the world’s first society to govern itself by democracy.

Of course we must qualify that statement by noting that only landed Athenian males 21 years of age and older were allowed to participate in the forms and offices of government. But within those limitations it was a true participatory democracy. Every eligible citizen was a member of the primary governing body– the Assembly. That would have been about 40,000 men at the height of the Empire. A quorum of the Assembly was 6,000 citizens.

We call it the age of Pericles, but he was neither king nor president. He was one of ten elected generals, each of whom served a one year term. He was elected to that position multiple times, so clearly he must have had both charisma and leadership skills. But it was the Assembly that made all key decisions. And all decisions were made by simple majority vote. In that respect the Athenian democracy was a true democracy, unlike our representative federation. Decisions of state in our system are not made by we the people, but by those we elect to represent us.

The delegates of what we now call the Federal Convention did not invent democracy, and they did not invent the key features of our federal system: separation of powers, a bicameral legislature, a hierarchical court system, and the guarantee of rights for all citizens. All of those elements were incorporated into the constitutions of various of the states after they declared independence.

The Constitution was a remarkable document for its time, but it retains many anti-democratic elements. The Senate represents states, not the people. Nine U.S. states contain more than half of total U.S. population, and yet those states only have 18% representation in the Senate. That is extremely unfair to the residents of the most populous states.

In 1929 Congress passed the Permanent Apportionment Act, which capped the total number of Representatives in the House at 435. That constraint, coupled with the Constitution’s requirement that every state must have at least one Representative, has resulted in the over-representation of low population states. The House now has 114 fewer members than it should on the basis of population alone.

Neither the House nor the Senate truly represent the national character. The Senate represents the separate states and the House represents state defined localities. The president is the only nationally elected official who represents the nation as a whole. That is the primary reason why the president and Congress are so often at odds.

And since the Electoral College is based on the number of members of the House and Senate, it amplifies the misrepresentations of those two bodies.

There is work to do if we wish our government to be more democratic and more fairly representative. But we should ask: is democracy necessarily a good thing? Can the public really be expected to make sound decisions in a world of every greater complexity? Perhaps we should allow those who have the greatest understanding of government, economics, and society to make the nation’s most important decisions. Maybe we would be wise to establish a class of professionals who are specially trained to lead the country, as imperial China did.

Alexander Hamilton touched on this question in his defense of the Electoral College:

It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.

It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief.

(The Federalist #68, Alexander Hamilton, 1788)

The chief question Hamilton did not answer in his musings is just how, exactly, we are to recognize the persons who possess the requisite “information and discernment”? We have seen many examples recently of people who loudly proclaim their credentials and their wisdom who in fact know little or nothing about their areas of alleged expertise.

Should we expect the average citizen to be an expert on all matters relevant to the health and safety of the nation? No, absolutely not. But that doesn’t mean that the average citizen has no stake in national or international affairs. On the contrary, national issues have national impacts. The entire nation will almost certainly be adversely affected by foolish national policies.

The greatest risk to the nation is when our leaders lose touch with the people. The examples of the Vietnam and Iraq wars show that it makes no sense to engage in foreign wars if you do not have the full support of the people.

The divine right of kings was firmly entrenched in ancient Egypt by no later than 3000 BCE. The king, later called “Pharaoh,” was declared to be the son of Ra– literally the son of God. And yet the trappings of divinity could never disguise the fact that kings of the centuries since have had frailties and foibles, or that we all are subject to the indignities of our mortality.

There is no single class of people who are most qualified to lead. That simple truth is the central glory of democracy. Great leaders do not always have the greatest pedigrees. Trust the people.

Is economics complicated? Yes, as is immigration policy, trade policy, cybersecurity, and many other aspects of modern society. But those who seek our votes should be able to state their positions on the issues of the day in such a way that the average citizen can understand them. Those who sneeringly assume that the average citizen is too uninformed to make sound decisions do not deserve our votes.

The central principle of democracy, whether representative or participatory, is fairness. The idea that every citizen should have the right to vote and to expect that vote to count forces everyone to respect others. Other governmental systems do not necessitate such behavior. In fact many– especially autocracies– thrive on intolerance. That is why the spirit of democracy is the highest and the most basic– something every religion should call its own. Without tolerance people can easily fall into vindictiveness and aggression. Without respect for others they can become aloof and indifferent to human suffering. Democracy is the only governing principle that is predicated on tolerance for all.

Book Review: Tyranny of the Minority

Earlier I reviewed How Democracies Die, published in 2018 by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Tyranny of the Minority was published in 2023 by the same two authors, both of them professors of Government at Harvard University.

This book isn’t a sequel to their earlier book. How Democracies Die is a sweeping study of democracies around the world. Tyranny is focused chiefly on the United States, though it burgeons with the lessons of democracies around the world.

Much of the book is a history lesson of how the United States evolved from being at the very forefront of the global experiment in democracy as a method of government to lagging far behind other democracies. Certainly the US Constitution is a marvel of political innovation. The three branches of government, each serving to check and balance the others; the bicameral legislature; a president elected (indirectly) by the people; the Bill of Rights; the power to amend the Constitution itself through a regular process– each of these was a major innovation. The US Constitution served as a model for the constitutions of many other countries, many of which are strong, healthy democracies today.

But most of the other countries that adopted some form of the US Constitution as their original template have radically revised their own constitutions to make them more suitable to contemporary social purposes and needs. The authors explain that many countries had some form of indirect voting for their legislatures or for their presidents, as was originally implemented in the US Constitution. (Article I Section 3 says that the members of the Senate would be elected by the state legislatures; the 17th Amendment changed that to support direct election by the people of each state. And the people elect electors to the Electoral College, which in turn elects the president.) But most of them got rid of it. Here’s what the authors have to say about it:

By the late nineteenth century, France and the Netherlands had eliminated the powerful local councils that had previously selected members of parliament; Norway, Prussia, and Sweden did the same in the early twentieth century. France experimented with an electoral college for a single presidential election in the late 1950s but then dropped it. Electoral colleges gradually disappeared across Latin America. Columbia eliminated its electoral college in 1964 under military rule but replaced it with direct presidential elections in 1988. Argentina, the last country in Latin America with indirect presidential elections, dropped its electoral college in 1994.
Tyranny of the Minority, pg. 205

Here in the US, there have been many proposals to eliminate the Electoral College– and they have all failed, usually in the Senate.

The US Constitution is encumbered with many counter-majoritarian components, several of which prevent the majority of the American people from getting what they want from their government. The counter-majoritarian elements are enumerated in Tyranny as follows:

The Bill of Rights
A Supreme Court with lifetime appointments and the power to declare legislation passed by Congress incompatible with the Constitution
Federalism, which grants many powers to the states
A bicameral legislature, requiring majorities in two different houses for the passage of any legislation
A radically skewed representation in the Senate
The filibuster, which requires a 60% majority in the Senate to end debate (and which can now be enacted with nothing more than an email)
The Electoral College
Radically restrictive rules for implementing constitutional change: 2/3 vote of each house in Congress and 3/4 ratification by the states

(Tyranny of the Minority, pg. 147 – 148)

The Bill of Rights grants many privileges to citizens that we certainly want to protect and defend, so that component is actually protective of democracy. Similarly we want the courts to ensure that our laws are consistent with our principles– so granting the Supreme Court the power of judicial review is reasonable, and potentially protective of democracy. But lifetime tenure on the court can serve as an obstruction to change and for that reason it is more likely to contribute to stagnation.

(I would have added the Apportionment Act of 1929 to the above list, as that legislation capped the number of members of the House at 435. That, coupled with the constraint that each state must get at least one representative, has resulted in a massive over-representation of low population states. For example, the state of California has about 26% less representation in the House than it should have on the basis of population alone.)

The authors show that the many counter-majoritarian elements of the US Constitution have produced the result that the US is a true laggard among modern democracies. Here is how the authors express it:

America is the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College, rather than directly by voters. Only in America can a president be “elected against the majority expressed at the polls.”

America is one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber that is severely malapportioned due to the “equal representation of unequal states” (only Argentina and Brazil are worse). Most important, it is the world’s only democracy with both a strong, malapportioned Senate and a legislative minority veto (the filibuster). In no other democracy do legislative minorities routinely and permanently thwart legislative majorities.

America is one of the few established democracies (along with Canada, India, Jamaica, and the U.K.) with first-past-the-post electoral rules that permit electoral pluralities to be manufactured into legislative majorities and, in some cases, allow parties that win fewer votes to win legislative majorities.

America is the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. All other established democracies have either term limits, a mandatory retirement age, or both.

Among democracies, the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change, for it requires supermajorities in two legislative chambers plus the approval of three-quarters of the states.
Tyranny of the Minority, pg. 217

Americans tend to think of the US Constitution as an ideal of completed perfection. It is not; and in fact the very extensive evidence the authors present shows that the US Constitution is greatly in need of reform. The US has become stagnant, relative to other democracies throughout the world, and it is time that the American people were alerted to that fact.

This book and its predecessor are absolutely essential to anyone who wants to understand the place of democracy in the world and in our country. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how best to preserve and extend our democracy.

Book Review: How Democracies Die

How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, was published in 2018. It’s a broad overview of how democracies have died in countries around the world. The authors are professors of government at Harvard University.

The purpose of the book is to answer the question of whether the United States is in danger of losing its democracy. To that end, in Chapter One the authors list four indicators of authoritarian behavior. These are:

Rejection of democratic rules of the game
Denial of the legitimacy of one’s political opponents
Toleration of, or encouragement of, violence
Readiness to curtail the political liberties of opponents and of the media

They provide many specific examples of these behaviors from the historical record of democracies that died in Europe and in South America, including those of Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Poland, and Russia.

Some democracies have died in a palace coup, but over the last several decades the chief method of destroying a democracy has been to weaken in from within, as Hitler did. First, win power through normal democratic means: get elected to office. Then, weaken democratic institutions by:

Capturing referees: Buy off, threaten, or exile judges, internal investigators, monitors– anyone in a position to follow behind-the-scenes machinations, expose them to the public, or bring them to an end.

Sidelining key players: Bring anyone with economic power or political capital to heel, through any means available. Allow business interests to thrive– so long as they don’t interfere with politics. Demand loyalty from popular cultural figures and punish those who fail to comply. Pack the courts and government positions with loyalists to ensure that no one contradicts the goals of leadership.

Changing the rules: If the law limits a leader’s term of office, change the law. If appointments to cabinet positions require the consent of Congress, dissolve Congress. If the Constitution limits the power of the Executive, suspend the Constitution.

These stratagems have succeeded in many countries around the world. They together constitute a standard playbook for wannabe dictators the world over. Be patient and follow these simple rules over the course of several years and your victory is assured.

Is America under threat of losing its democracy? The authors show by example from the public record that Donald Trump exhibited all four of the autocratic behaviors they listed in Chapter One while he was running for office in 2016! The warning signs were available then, and they are even more evident now. If Trump were to return to office he has said that he will be a dictator on Day One– but only on Day One. Sorry, but that’s just not how true dictators roll. Toward the end of his first term of office he entertained Michael Flynn’s idea of declaring Martial Law and of seizing voting machines from around the country. He said that he wanted the US military to shoot protesters, and he wanted the Custom Border Patrol to shoot anyone who approaches the southern border. He even talked openly of suspending the Constitution. And of course ever since November 2020 he has yelled that the election was stolen from him. Trump very definitely exhibits all of the characteristics of a dictator. So YES, America could lose its democracy.

In fact there are many powerful interest groups that have openly declared their opposition to democracy. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is an agenda which they and their alliance of more than 80 conservative organizations expect that the next Republican president will enact. Chief among its objectives is the replacement of the “Deep State” with party loyalists. That is the very essence of the authoritarian principle of “Sidelining key players” described above.

The authors of How Democracies Die have released a book titled Tyranny of the Minority in September of 2023. When I’ve had a chance to read it I’ll post a separate review here.

U.S. Government is NOT democratic

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…” Famous and stirring words. But words that leave unanswered an important question: Union of what?

The structure of the sentence is such that you would think that it is the people who are intended to be the chief beneficiaries of that more perfect union. But a careful reading of the document shows that it was really intended to form a union of states.

Article I of the Constitution vests the legislative powers of the government in two bodies– the House of Representatives and the Senate. Senators are apportioned two per state, so they clearly represent states, not the people. (Originally Senators were elected by state legislatures, but the 17th Amendment replaced that method with direct election by the people of each state.)

Members of the House of Representatives are elected directly by the people of each state, so it would seem to be the more democratic of the two institutions. But there are two additional conditions that skew the House toward small states. The first is the requirement, stated in Article I, that each state must have at least one representative. The second concerns The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the size of the House at 435 members. Thanks to these two rules the House of Representatives provides smaller states with disproportionate representation. California has a population that is almost 80 times larger than that of the smallest state, Wyoming, but it only has 53 representatives in the House. So a voter in Wyoming has greater representation in both the House and the Senate than does a voter in California.

The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 was intended to keep the House of Representatives fixed at a “reasonable” size. It was felt that if the numbers of representatives were to increase as the population increased it would eventually result in a body too large to achieve any meaningful result.

Our Constitution was chiefly intended to protect the rights and powers of the states, not the people. (The Bill of Rights was added after the Constitution was ratified to protect the rights of citizens.) Because the makeup of the U.S. legislature favors small states over large states it does not represent the citizens of the United States in proportion to their numbers and therefore our government cannot be called a democracy– or even a representative democracy.

Should we regard this as a problem? Or should we just shrug our shoulders and surrender to the weight of history and accept the current order as sufficient for the purposes of government?

The chief problem with the current order is that the people of this country are not getting what they want from their government. Large majorities of the American people favor more gun controls, not less. Large majorities want abortion to be legal, and they want it to be available to those least able to pay for it. Large majorities want more to be done about climate change and about our crumbling civil engineering infrastructure.

But measures to make progress on these issues have repeatedly stalled in the U.S. Senate. And why? Because the people of states with smaller populations often perceive such issues as being inimical to their local culture. There are 9 states that have more than half of total U.S. population. That gives those states only 18 percent representation in the U.S. Senate. That’s just wrong– and it has resulted in a stagnant government that is stuck in the past.

There is only one way that this stranglehold can be broken. And that is by breaking the association between states and the way that senators and representatives are elected. As currently configured the federal government only has one elected person who represents the nation as a whole– and that is the President. All other elected officials represent localities. As a result the President alone represents the will of the people of the nation; all others represent the will of states, or of regions within the states.

I fully accept the principle that if either the Senate or the House were to grow without bound as the population increases they will reach a point where it will be impossible for the two bodies working jointly to govern. That is, there must be an upper bound on the sizes of each of the two bodies. These maximal sizes should be governed by the psychology of group dynamics, rather than by the numbers or geographical dimensions of the several states.

I propose a bicameral system of legislature with a Senate and a House, as we have today– but with the pronounced difference that the Senate would represent the people of the nation as a whole, while the House would represent local regions within the nation. States would continue to have the general protections guaranteed under the Constitution, particularly in Article IV. But the people would directly elect their representatives in the federal government irrespective of state boundaries.

Let us say, for point of argument, that we agree on an optimal number of X Senators and of Y Representatives. For the Senate, I propose that the entire voting population of the United States be divided into X units, call them “Senatorial Blocs.” Each voting citizen would be randomly assigned to one such Bloc, and each Bloc would vote to elect one Senator. This approach accomplishes the following objectives:

It limits the total number of Senators to X, regardless of the numbers of States in the Union, or the number of people in the voting public
It ensures that each Senator is elected by the same number of registered voters
It guarantees that the Senators would represent a national perspective, rather than a local perspective

For the House of Representatives I propose that the entire voting population would be divided into Y geographical groupings, call them “Representative Districts.” Each District would represent a geographical region of the country that contains the same number of registered voters– but these regions would be drawn irrespective of state boundaries. The voters of each District would elect one Representative to the House. The Districts should be configured as contiguous, rather than disjoint, to ensure that each District represents a locality with a distinct identity. However this principle will need to be flexible enough to accommodate special cases like Alaska and Hawaii which are not contiguous with any other geographical parts of the United States.

To see how this would work in practice, let’s suppose that the total number of registered voters in the United States is about 200 million, and that we have decided that there should only be 500 members of the House. Then each Representative District should contain a total of 400,000 voters. For some especially dense urban areas several Representative Districts would be packed in close together, while in more rural areas a region might have to span one or more state boundaries to fully encompass its allotment of 400,000 voters. The New York City metropolitan area with its more than 8 million residents might need 40 or more such districts, whereas the voters of the state of Wyoming would probably need to be grouped with those of another bordering state to form one complete district representing 400,000 voters.

This method of electing Representatives would have the following advantages:

It would limit the total number of Representatives to Y, regardless of the total number of registered voters or the total number of states
It ensures that every voter is represented by exactly one Representative
Each Representative would reflect the views of a geographic region of the country with a corresponding regional identity
Each Representative would be elected by the same number of registered voters

The conditions set forth above ensure that the two resulting legislative bodies would never grow in size beyond X for the Senate and Y for the House. And they further guarantee that the Senate would represent the perspectives of the nation as a whole, while the House would represent geographical regions with local identities. These two perspectives on the nation’s governance will, I believe, add immeasurable benefits to the long term health of the nation.

But most importantly these policies will change our mode of government to that of a truly representative democracy, since each elected Senator or Representative would be represented by the same number of registered voters as for all other Senators or Representatives, respectively.

Policies such as those outlined above could not have been implemented in 1789, as it would have required a national registry of all voters in the nation. And of course such a registry would have to be updated as voters move from one state to another, or change their names, or die, or become convicted of a crime and therefore lose the right to vote. With the technology available in 1789 it would simply have been impossible to build and properly maintain such a registry. But in today’s world of massively parallel computing systems building a registry of every voter in the country would be a relatively straightforward task. In fact, such a system would solve a number of problems that have been plaguing voting systems throughout the country. How and when to purge voters from the voting rolls? How to prevent voters from voting more than once by registering in two or more states? A national registry of all voters is by far the safest, easiest, and best way to resolve these and other security issues.

The Constitution of the United States is a marvelous construct. It represents a bold and daring break from the monarchical past. It enshrined the principle of the rule of law as an antidote to the arbitrary rule of a king. It has served as an inspiration to other nations that sought a democratic future. And in the principle of self-amendment specified in Article V it showed itself to be adaptable to the challenges and needs of the future.

But the Constitution was a product of its time. It didn’t just allow slavery to persist– it was designed to preserve slavery. It didn’t grant women the right to vote. And it was conceived as a protector of the rights of states. Only after it was ratified were the first ten amendments added as a Bill of Rights, almost as an afterthought, to protect the rights of citizens.

The Constitution followed the general pattern of the Articles of Confederation in that it was designed around States. There is certainly no need or reason to dissolve the States, as they are perfectly viable political entities that are well adapted to serving local needs. But the Legislature of the U.S. Government should represent the needs of the people of the nation as a whole, not the states in particular. And for that reason the current method of electing Senators and Representatives must change.

Written 2020-10-26