Tyranny of the Minority

 Revolutionary notables such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison sought to resolve a crisis of major proportions in the evident flaws within the first U.S. Constitutional government, the short-lived Articles of Confederation.

 The major weakness was the incapacity of the Articles to provide an effective structure for governance. Specifically, the Articles did not contain an independent executive or judicial branch of government. It lacked the very rudiments of a sufficiently complex, three-branch structure upon which the states were based, which served as a working model for the second Constitutional founders when a notable group of 55 gathered in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 for a second reinvention of the government of the recently formed Republic.

Of concern also was the fear of a spreading, demagogic impulse which threatened the governing order of the new nation. James Madison referred to a “tyranny of the majority” based on what he perceived as unruly politicians in state legislatures and charismatic leaders of populist revolts, such as the Shays and Whiskey rebellions.

 As an antidote, more conservative leaders of the fledging Republic sought to balance popular sentiment with more aristocratic rules of governance. The 1787 Constitutional founders equated political virtue with a “disinterested rule” of the better classes.

 This was reflected in the various compromises that gave shape to the structure of our Constitution. Those features included having US House members elected by popular vote while the members of the US Senate - representing the “better” class (of men) - would be more of a “disinterested” elite. And we would have an “electoral college” based on the number of US Senators and House members in each state. It would be up to this select group to cast ballots for President and Vice President, thereby giving equal weight to smaller population states. Remember there were only 13 states in toto until 1791.

 Fast forward to 2023. Today Wyoming has more than a four-to-one edge over California in the Electoral College. Oops, Mr. Franklin et al - we have a problem.

 In the set-up the founders ratified in 1788, minority rule was built into the new government. But it was based on the supposition that “the better classes” would come to the rescue of the nation, if and when they were needed. They were our insurance policy that the ungovernable immigrant nation would not devolve into chaos - the same sort of chaos which was unending the government in France at the time. No doubt an elected aristocracy presented itself as the more preferred, and more democratic, option.

 Beyond the inherent bias of the supposition that this class of men were less motivated by self-interest than others, what the founders did not count on was the emergence of the political party system, as early as the 1790s, which confounded their operating assumptions of an essentially consensual form of governance. This was reflected in the radical polarization between the Republican and Federalist partisans over the size of the government, the extent to which the economy should be rooted in an agricultural or industrial basis, the constitutionality of a national bank, and support for either France or England in response to various conflicts stemming from the French Revolution. The political climate became so fierce that in 1798 President John Adams enacted the Alien and Sedition Act aimed directly at his Republican opponents.

 Skipping over the secessionist crisis, which tore this nation apart over the irrepressible conflict of slavery and the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, we shift the focus to more current times. The rise of conservatism, capsulated in the presidency of Ronald Reagan in 1980, was followed by increasing acrimony and radicalization of the political right with the rise of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House in 1994. The flourishing “Tea Party” movement in 2010 encapsulated outrage over passage of the Affordable Health Care Act under President Barack Obama. Then came the election of Donald Trump in 2016 as President which further shifted the center of the Republican Party from a traditional Reagan conservative philosophy to a hard-right combat posture. This was characterized by a grievance-based, “us vs. them” polarity which Trump ruthlessly manipulated, claiming to represent “their” voice. Supporters demonized even hard-core conservative Republicans who took issue with Trump for any reason as poised against their world view, not budging in their faith in their sole political savior, who professed to lead them in a quixotic battle cry to “Make America Great Again.”

 Trump in the White House stood Madison’s fear of the “tyranny of the majority” on its head. In Trump, the demagogic danger became transmuted through the manipulation of the presidency into a powerful source of minority tyranny through the antithetical aping of the noble figure of George Washington, in whom character, integrity, and honor were the only viable basis for forging presidential leadership in the new Republic.

 Noteworthy also is the example of minority governance stemming from the presidential elections of 2000 and 2016 in which the Democratic candidate won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College.

 A central feature of this gap in democratic governance was the later ascendency of five Supreme Court justices and the radical rightward shift of this august body over such critical matters as sensible gun regulation, finance campaign reform, longstanding federal regulation of key administrative agencies, abortion, civil rights, and criminal justice reform.

 In its ideological adherence to the conservative political agenda, and its large monied interests, the Roberts-led Supreme Court has been anything but “disinterested” based on Alexander Hamilton’s vison of the federal court system as enacting the “steady, upright, and impartial administration of the law” (Federalist Papers #78). To the contrary, an abundance of evidence points to an elite power structure at the center of the governing body of the Republican Party and its attendant social and political networks. In this, the justices are anything but enlightened in the manner envisioned by Washington, Madison, and Franklin - notwithstanding their embrace of the Constitutional iconography of the Federalist Society.