Eight months before the election, while many are worried about the survival of American democracy and we fear an erosion of the balance of powers, a work published in 2023 came to mind.
In the second joint effort[1] Tytanny of the minority (the tyranny of the minority), academics Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (both from Harvard) explain that if the United States is approaching the breaking point, it is because the American Constitution has “outlived its time.”
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The Constitution like the Bible
For a long time, I have taught that at the birth of the country, the United States adopted an original constitution, a brilliant exercise in balance of powers and compromise.
This text, without equivalent at the time, also reflects the fears of the founding fathers regarding democracy. The electoral college is a reminder of this fear, our neighbors not directly electing their president.
Among the compromises necessary to obtain the support of all the States for the new constitution, there is that which concerns representation. The less populous states, mainly those in the South, feared being disadvantaged.
This is why there are two houses in Congress, the House of Representatives (representation proportional to population), and the Senate (equal representation).
To reassure southerners, we even integrated the infamous 3/5 rule. 3/5 of the slaves were added to the white population (a black was therefore worth 3/5 of a white).
Although the rule was removed after the Civil War, the over-representation of the South and small states remained. Part of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s thesis is based on this inability to make the document evolve according to the evolution of the country, a bit like the religious fundamentalists with the Bible.
[1] The first book by these two authors is How democracies die. New York, Broadway Books, 2018. 302 pages.
It is mainly thanks to this distortion that the Republicans can hope for presidential victories, that the last two elected presidents of this party lost the popular vote and that the Supreme Court (whose appointments are approved by the Senate) is dominated by six curators.
Remember that in 2020, Joe Biden was ahead of his rival by more than seven million votes. The majority of Americans do not want the current situation.
The minority shakes the country
In chapter 4 of their book, Levitsky and Ziblatt point an accusing finger at the Republican Party. The party sacrificed all its great principles on the victory hall, focusing on an essentially white electorate.
Forget Donald Trump, it’s just an accelerant, the unease is deeper. Current Republican elected officials are content to simulate a democratic game while we allow groups that attacked the Capitol to operate on the sly, while we attempt to overturn a legitimate electoral result or while conservatives welcome Viktor Orban with open arms.