“None of this justified minority rule”

Back in early November, The Atlantic Monthly published an essay by Claremont McKenna College professor George Thomas titled “‘America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy’ Is a Dangerous—And Wrong—Argument.”

Thomas wrote:

When founding thinkers such as James Madison spoke of democracy, they were usually referring to direct democracy, what Madison frequently labeled “pure” democracy. Madison made the distinction between a republic and a direct democracy exquisitely clear in “Federalist No. 14”: “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.” Both a democracy and a republic were popular forms of government: Each drew its legitimacy from the people and depended on rule by the people. The crucial difference was that a republic relied on representation, while in a “pure” democracy, the people represented themselves.

At the time of the founding, a narrow vision of the people prevailed. Black people were largely excluded from the terms of citizenship, and slavery was a reality, even when frowned upon, that existed alongside an insistence on self-government. What this generation considered either a democracy or a republic is troublesome to us insofar as it largely granted only white men the full rights of citizens, albeit with some exceptions. America could not be considered a truly popular government until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which commanded equal citizenship for Black Americans. Yet this triumph was rooted in the founding generation’s insistence on what we would come to call democracy.

The history of democracy as grasped by the Founders, drawn largely from the ancient world, revealed that overbearing majorities could all too easily lend themselves to mob rule, dominating minorities and trampling individual rights. Democracy was also susceptible to demagogues—men of “factious tempers” and “sinister designs,” as Madison put it in “Federalist No. 10”—who relied on “vicious arts” to betray the interests of the people. Madison nevertheless sought to defend popular government—the rule of the many—rather than retreat to the rule of the few.

American constitutional design can best be understood as an effort to establish a sober form of democracy. It did so by embracing representation, the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the protection of individual rights—all concepts that were unknown in the ancient world where democracy had earned its poor reputation. . . .

while dependent on the people, the Constitution did not embrace simple majoritarian democracy. . . . But none of this justified minority rule, which was at odds with the “republican principle.” . . . The American experiment, as advanced by [Alexander] Hamilton and Madison, sought to redeem the cause of popular government against its checkered history. Given the success of the experiment by the standards of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, we would come to use the term democracy as a stand-in for representative democracy, as distinct from direct democracy.

Since 2000, some have claimed that forms of minority rule are justified because the American system is “republican,” not “democratic.” Those people never seem to be able to define the difference between those Latin- and Greek-based synonyms in a convincing way, and they always seem to come from the minority enjoying undemocratic power.

The most obvious, least defensible undemocratic aspect of the U.S. Constitution is the Electoral College. I’ve been writing against its problems on this blog since 2006. The institution never worked the way the Framers at the Constitutional Convention hoped, and it was the first part of the Constitution to be rewritten.

Without the Electoral College, Donald Trump would never have slipped into the Presidency. Without the Electoral College, his campaign last year would never have been competitive. Without the Electoral College, the Trump administration wouldn’t have dared to downplay the early Covid-19 pandemic in “blue states.” That constitutional mechanism’s unplanned opening for minority rule, for giving power to a candidate manifestly not the first choice of the American people, probably cost the U.S. of A. hundreds of thousands of shortened lives in the last year.