[Conventional wisdom says that the rule of the majority is in
unavoidable tension with the rights of the minority.]
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THE EXPANSION OF DEMOCRACY IS WHAT REPUBLICAN ELITES FEAR MOST  
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Jamelle Bouie
June 3, 2022
New York Times
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_ Conventional wisdom says that the rule of the majority is in
unavoidable tension with the rights of the minority. _

, Bettman

 

Conventional wisdom says that the rule of the majority is in
unavoidable tension with the rights of the minority.

The great genius of the American system, seen in this light, is that
it tempers, restrains and moderates the majority for the sake of
minority rights. To that end, our system makes it extremely difficult
for a majority to control simultaneously all of the institutions it
needs to carry out its preferences.

There has even been an argument, made throughout our history, that
this is still inadequate and that our system could and, in fact,
should do more to restrain majorities. The South Carolina slaveholder,
politician and theorist John C. Calhoun, who might be the most
infamous proponent of this view, wanted to give a “concurrent voice
in making or executing the laws or a veto on their execution” to
every “division or interest” in the country. It was only then, he
thought, that the nation would restrain the menace of majority rule
once and for all.

More moderate was the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, who
spoke for many Americans — past, present and future — when he
wrote that what he disliked most about democratic government “as it
had been organized in the United States” was its “irresistible
force.” What was most “repugnant” to him, he continued, was not
“the extreme freedom that reigns there” but the “lack of
guarantee against tyranny” of the majority.

But what if this wisdom is wrong? What if the supposed tension between
majority rule and minority rights is overstated? What if it doesn’t
really exist?

It’s not as if the idea of this tension isn’t sound. In theory,
the very notion of majority rule puts minority rights on dangerous
ground, since a right ceases to be one when subject to the shifting
winds of political majorities. “On an abstract level,” the
historian James MacGregor Burns writes in his 1990 book,
“Cobblestone Leadership
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Majority Rule, Minority Power, “concomitant expansions of individual
liberties and majoritarian democracy seem logically precluded.”
Fortunately, he added, “we do not inhabit an abstract world.”

Democratization in the United States has obviously been uneven. With
every advance, there has been a setback. And at points, such as during
the age of Jacksonian democracy, democratic expansion for some
demanded democratic retrenchment for others. Universal suffrage for
white men often meant the end of voting rights
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ones.

But if we look at the 157 years after the Civil War, which is to say
if we look at most of our experience as a nation under the
Constitution, it’s not obvious that democratization and majority
rule actually threaten minority rights. You might even say it is the
reverse.

Far from the tyranny of an unrestrained majority, the period of
Reconstruction saw the first real attempt at equality under the law in
the South, as well as efforts to build a more egalitarian society,
with respect for the social and political rights of ordinary people.
The former slaves and their white allies built schools, established
hospitals and pursued a host of public improvements, among them roads,
bridges and charitable institutions.

The death knell for minority rights in the postwar South wasn’t
democracy or majority rule or political equality but a
counterrevolution of property and hierarchy, led by the remnants of
the planter elite. It took decades of violence and fraud — including
assassinations, massacres and rigged elections — for the reactionary
opposition to Reconstruction to succeed.

The United States saw a burst of democratization at the start of the
20th century, particularly with the adoption of the 19th Amendment in
1920, which gave women (meaning those who could exercise it) the right
to vote. And the broad public gained even more influence through
reforms like recall elections, initiatives and referendums
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The immediate threat to minority rights, however, came from opponents
of a more open and democratic society. And rather than protect those
minorities, the much-vaunted countermajoritarian institutions of the
American system either stymied efforts to protect them (as was the
case with anti-lynching laws
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or helped politicians to exclude them (as was the case with the
Immigration Act of 1924).

It would not be until the next great burst of democratization in the
1950s and 1960s, with the civil rights movement, that the American
system would move to extend any serious protection to the rights of
minorities and other excluded or marginalized groups. And it took the
expansion of political rights and the triumph of majority rule over
our countermajoritarian institutions — and the Senate, in particular
— to do so.

The enduring belief that majority rule and democratization threaten
the rights of minorities runs headfirst into the simple reality that,
in the United States at least, the fundamental liberties of all
Americans grew stronger and more secure as political rights spread
from a narrow minority to an outright majority and as our institutions
have grown more responsive to that majority.

The typical American’s ability to exercise his or her rights is
greater now than it was a century ago, and it was greater a century
ago than it was a century before. Against the conventional wisdom, the
United States has become more free as it has become more democratic.
And on the flip side, the liberties of all Americans have been at
their most vulnerable when democracy and majority rule were at their
weakest.

With all of this said, there are minorities whose interests are harmed
by democracy, majority rule and political equality. But they are not
minorities as we tend to think of them; they are elites. The holders
of wealth, the owners of capital and the servants of hierarchy are a
minority of sorts. And their “rights” — to dominate and to
control — are threatened whenever the majority can act on its
preferences.

Many of the framers said as much during the making of the
Constitution, and the fact that it took a catastrophically destructive
war to end the legal protection of human property lends credence to
the view that these are the “minority rights” at stake when
majority rule is on the table.

If that is true — if these are the rights our system is designed to
defend — then the conventional wisdom is correct. Democracy and
majority rule _are_ threats to minority rights.

In which case, we need much more of both.

_JAMELLE BOUIE became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019.
Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate
magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and
Washington. @jbouie [[link removed]]_

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* U.S. history
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* democracy
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* minority rights
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* U.S. Constitution
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