We live in a democracy.
It seems silly to have to remind each other of this, but I notice a trend on social media and elsewhere of snarky comments targeting those who raise concerns about democratic norms.
It goes something like this:
Commentator: “A President who lost the popular vote nominates a Justice for the Supreme Court most Americans dislike and who is confirmed by Senators representing less than half of the American population. This is a problem.”
Attempt at a witty response: “we live in a republic, not a democracy. Maybe you missed that in civics class.”
It’s an odd and incomplete formulation.
The incorrect assertion that we have a republic and not a democracy suggests that those who crafted the Constitution were unanimous in their view that republican instruments should trump democratic norms.
They were not. And they also changed their minds.
Yes, they created a republic but a democratic republic. Democracy was the foundation even as they attempted to cure its worst excesses. Many of them were indeed worried about where the “will of the people” might lead. Some surmised anarchy, mob rule, and disunion. They created a democracy of a certain type, a representative one. But a democracy nonetheless.
Others among the founders worried about drowning the voices of the people in a sea of elitist dogma. They feared the very system we created to protect democracy could stifle it.
And they struggled with these issues in their own time.
Consider James Madison.
Madison is one of the architects of the Constitution, designed in part to prevent majorities from taking away the rights and liberties of the minority. The interplay of institutional devices designed to thwart majorities is due to Madison.
But he changed his mind during the presidency of George Washington and John Adams in three critical ways: first, he began to focus on the need to rally public opinion against minority factions, which he believed the Hamiltonians to be. During the Constitutional Convention, Madison feared that unfettered majorities would trample on the rights of a minority. Upon further thought, he came to believe that a strong, politically active minority could pursue dangerous ends at the expense of the majority, at the expense of the popular will.
Second, Madison wanted to restrain executive power and strengthen the power of popular institutions to make minority tyranny less likely.
Third, he became a party leader. Madison had once derided parties as evil factions to be avoided, but because what he perceived to be the grave threat a minority posed to the Constitution, Madison became one of the founders of the Democratic-Republican Party.
Madison helped to create the democratic republic. Then he sought to further democratize it. Indeed, greater democratization has been the thrust of our national politics ever since.
- The twelfth amendment was added to the Constitution to acknowledge political parties, themselves an effort to democratize the country.
- The Jacksonian era led to a considerable increase in the number of offices subject to election as well as a dramatic increase in voter participation in response to anti-democratic forces. Jackson, the first outsider to win the White House, used his defense of the people to attack elitists public policies and institutions.
- It was the expansion of democracy in the Jacksonian era that caught the attention of Alexis de Tocqueville. He did not come here to study impediments to democracy. He was fascinated by the stability and strength of democratic life and came to ask why it worked in America;
- The 17th amendment was a result of the failure of the US Senate, that paragon of republicanism. Its relationship to public opinion was to be filtered. State legislatures chose Senators, and while the iconography suggests Webster, Clay, and Calhoun engaged in meaningful deliberation, the reality was, by the twentieth century, a bastion of corruption standing as an obstacle to democracy. The solution? Direct election of Senators.
Again and again, the Constitution has been amended to expand democratic norms and the suffrage and to empower the government to protect both. That language of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, “Congress shall have power to enforce this article” is a constitutional revolution on behalf of democracy.
Sure, the Constitution contains relics of an earlier time: the Electoral College, for one, and states represented as states in the Senate even as the gulf between large and small states has grown by leaps and bounds.
Noting that Los Angeles, California alone has about 4 million residents and the entire state of Wyoming has about 580,000 and, thus, the average citizen of Wyoming has an extraordinarily outsized role in the nation’s affairs via the US Senate is one way to raise the alarm bell about the state of our democracy.
A few years back, the New York Times ran a piece on the discrepancy between large and small states relative to their political power in our system. It noted:
Professor [Robert] Dahl has calculated the difference between the local government unit with the most voting power and that with the least. The smallest ratio, 1.5, was in Austria, while in Belgium, Spain, India, Germany, Australia and Canada the ratio was never higher than 21 to 1.
In this country, the ratio between Wyoming’s representation and California’s is 66 to 1. By that measure, Professor Dahl found, only Brazil, Argentina and Russia had less democratic chambers.
In the founding era, the ratio between the most and least populous states was about 11 to 1. When public policies and confirmations to lifetime positions in our government are products of this type of system, one that skews heavily in favor of the least populous and less representative areas, we should, at a minimum, reevaluate our priorities.
It’d be the Madisonian thing to do.
Sure, we would do well to be aware of the dilemmas that democracies present before casting aside all of our republican features. But the republican characteristics of our democracy are the result of political choices. Ours is a democracy in a republican and federal form. It has other forms: single-member congressional districts, representation in the House capped by law at 435, two Senators, etc, etc. These are choices about how we organize our democracy not ironclad elements of a republic.
There’s much to unpack from the recent saga of confirming Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. What the process suggests about democratic norms cannot be dismissed with a snarky, and less than complete, assertion that “we live in a republic, not a democracy.”