Majority Rule Is a Bit of a Constitutional Myth in America

By JIM SMITH

Among the many things we have come to know about American history, thanks to Donald Trump and his allies, is that the United States of America was not created as a democracy or even as a democratic republic. The anti-democratic provisions of the U.S. Constitution have been exploited by the right to assure that minority rule remains our country’s ongoing reality.

The origins of minority rule can be found in the compromises agreed to at the founding constitutional convention, which was called to replace the original “Articles of Confederation,” which were tilted even more toward minority rule. Those articles gave each of the 13 original states one vote and required unanimous agreement to amend them.

The U.S. Senate, which gives equal power — two votes — to every state regardless of population, preserved that undemocratic principle. Thus we have a situation where Wyoming has the same number of votes in the Senate as California, even though the latter has 65 times the population of the former.

With the less populated states having vastly different values and politics than the most populated states, the result is what we have today, where Senators representing 40 percent of the population outnumber Senators representing 60 percent of the population.

This will never change, because the process of amending the Constitution also has at its endpoint a situation in which all states carry the same weight in ratifying any amendment.

The most offensive violation of voting equality is found in the District of Columbia, where 705,000 Americans — more than live in Wyoming or Vermont — have no voting representation in either the House or Senate.

Then, of course, we have the Electoral College created in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which is anti-democratic in the number of electors assigned to each state. And it gives discretion to each state as to how it appoints its electors. All but two states have adopted a winner-take-all rule for appointing electors, which is about as anti-democratic as it can get.

But wait, there’s more!  The Constitution allows any state, through its legislature, to ignore the presidential vote of its population and send whoever it wants to the Electoral College. Thanks to gerrymandering, most legislatures could go completely against the will of its citizens if it so chooses.

As if the Constitution doesn’t do enough damage to the principle of one person/one vote, the Senate’s filibuster rule makes it impossible to pass critical legislation approved by up to 59 of its 100 members. And that’s a rule which the Senate imposes upon itself. Since no law goes to the President for his signature without a vote of both houses of Congress, the U.S. Senate routinely kills legislation approved by the majority of Representatives in the House and even by the majority of its members.

So here we are. America has a form of government that is less democratic than most countries in the “free world.” And now, as we are learning from the Select Committee on the January 6 Assault on the Capitol, the Republican Party is taking maximum advantage of the Constitution’s anti-democratic provisions to cement minority rule in the United States.

What I haven’t mentioned above is the origin and reasons for the anti-democratic provisions of the Constitution. It was all about white supremacy. The creation of a Senate which gave the southern slave states the same number of votes as the more populous northern states, was all about preserving slavery as a southern institution.

In my July 28, 2022, column (which you can find at www.TalkingTurkey.online)  I describe how the Constitution was written to protect and preserve slavery. There was in fact slavery in all 13 colonies, and the majority of “founder fathers” were slaveholders. The Declaration of Independence expressed some nice sentiments and railed against King George for “making slaves” of colonists, but when it came to forming a government, the colonists chose to protect their own institution of slavery.

We are aware by now that racism is the “original sin” of the United States, and that systemic racism has been and continues to be a factor in our political life. And since any change to our Constitution must follow the rules of that document, we are in fact shackled by it into a future of minority rule.

While right-wing extremists like to brandish their AR-15s (as they did in the Michigan statehouse) and talk of civil war, they could probably relax, because our Constitution and our courts are on their side.

 

Let’s Look at the New Civil War and How It Is Evolving

 You have probably noticed, as I have, the increasing talk about whether the intractable divisions within America are going to lead to a new civil war. However, war isn’t limited to armed conflict, and it’s time to recognize that we are already in a civil war and to consider how it might evolve over the coming months and years.

As I write this, Russian troops are encircling Ukraine. Cyber attacks have been launched and disinformation is a potent weapon of choice. The parallels with America seem obvious. American democracy is in the not-so-early stages of an “incursion” by anti-democratic forces that is a prelude to a complete takeover. We saw an early skirmish on Jan. 6, 2021, but there will likely be more violence as time progresses. Violence against others shows the rest of us what could happen if we resist non-violent attacks — that’s how terrorism works.

The new civil war is being waged on several levels. Politically, non-compliant Republicans are threatened with primary challenges by Trump-endorsed candidates. Members of his “base” reinforce the demands for compliance with death threats against them and their families.

Also on the political level is the “precinct strategy” of Steve Bannon, the former president’s close political adviser whom Trump pardoned of federal fraud charges. On his “War Room” podcast the night before the Jan. 6th insurrection, Bannon rallied his millions of listeners, saying, “We’re on the point of attack. All hell will break loose tomorrow.” As reported by Pro-Publica on Sept. 2, 2021, while the insurrection was happening, Bannon said, “It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?”

After that uprising failed to keep Trump in office, Bannon’s strategy evolved, producing results we can all see. To quote the ProPublica article, 

The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”

It’s called “asymmetrical warfare,” a term coined by Andrew J.R. Mack in a 1975 article, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars.” Disinformation, supercharged now by social media, was rendered mainstream if not invented by the Soviet KGB, which created a “special disinformation office” in 1923. Disinformation, such as "the big lie" and “critical race theory,” is a primary tool of the forces within the Republican Party which want to supplant our liberal democratic heritage with an autocracy rooted in racism and white supremacy. 

There are enough Americans with expressed and unexpressed racial animus to provide a boots-on-the-ground army to intimidate and, if necessary, attack opponents in a guerrilla war against the rest of us. The anti-racism movement has only empowered and inflamed those elements of our society.

Democracy worked fine for those forces when they were in the majority, but as America diversifies and they find themselves unable to win free and fair elections, stronger measures are needed, starting with voter suppression.

Of course, ultimately a war requires arms, and the rightwing forces are well armed, as the rest of us are keenly aware. The majority of weapons, especially assault rifles, are in the hands of the right wing and its militias, making verbal threats a highly effective weapon.  Brandishing arms often suffices. Although we could see assassinations and other violence, this may be a war which the right wing wins without much armed conflict.

Death threats and threats against their families have been highly effective at getting non-compliant school board members, election workers and elected officials to cut and run, surrendering our schools, election boards, city councils, state legislatures and the U.S. Congress to the forces of autocracy.

Effective manipulation of voting laws provides an air of legitimacy to the new autocrats. Thanks to the lifetime appointment of like-minded judges to our courts, especially the Supreme Court, repressive and anti-democratic laws have been upheld by the Supreme Court in the past (think Plessy v. Ferguson et al.), and we could see that again.

It’s sad and disheartening to see the disinformation spouted on rightwing media repeated by ordinary citizens. I see it in my inbox regularly.  If these forces prevail in 2022 and 2024, I fear that the “American Experiment” will have failed.

My thanks to the readers who support this column through my GoFundMe campaign at www.FundTalkingTurkey.com.

 

A Must-Read Article From The Guardian: "The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it"

Here's the link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/next-us-civil-war-already-here-we-refuse-to-see-it

Here are some excerpts: 

The right has recognized that the system is in collapse, and it has a plan: violence and solidarity with treasonous far-right factions....

The legal system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government at all levels is in freefall, or, like Congress, with approval ratings hovering around 20%, cannot fall any lower. Right now, elected sheriffs openly promote resistance to federal authority. Right now, militias train and arm themselves in preparation for the fall of the Republic. Right now, doctrines of a radical, unachievable, messianic freedom spread across the internet, on talk radio, on cable television, in the malls....

Under such conditions, party politics have become mostly a distraction. The parties and the people in the parties no longer matter much, one way or the other. Blaming one side or the other offers a perverse species of hope. “If only more moderate Republicans were in office, if only bipartisanship could be restored to what it was.” Such hopes are not only reckless but irresponsible. The problem is not who is in power, but the structures of power....

An incipient illegitimacy crisis is under way, whoever is elected in 2022, or in 2024. According to a University of Virginia analysis of census projections, by 2040, 30% of the population will control 68% of the Senate. Eight states will contain half the population. The Senate malapportionment gives advantages overwhelmingly to white, non– college educated voters. In the near future, a Democratic candidate could win the popular vote by many millions of votes and still lose. Do the math: the federal system no longer represents the will of the American people.

The right is preparing for a breakdown of law and order, but they are also overtaking the forces of law and order. Hard right organization have now infiltrated so many police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism....

Just consider: in 2019, 36% of active duty soldiers claimed to have witnessed “white supremacist and racist ideologies in the military”, according to the Military Times....

The right has recognized what the left has not: that the system is in collapse. The right has a plan: it involves violence and solidarity. They have not abjured even the Oath Keepers. The left, meanwhile, has chosen infighting as their sport....

It would be entirely possible for the United States to implement a modern electoral system, to restore the legitimacy of the courts, to reform its police forces, to root out domestic terrorism, to alter its tax code to address inequality, to prepare its cities and its agriculture for the effects of climate change, to regulate and to control the mechanisms of violence. All of these futures are possible. There is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times. It won’t.