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Post by the Scribe on Mar 7, 2024 18:12:14 GMT
Home//Radio//Here & Now
Steven Levitsky's 'Tyranny of the Minority' warns Americans about threats to democracy www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/03/07/tyranny-of-the-minority-levitsky March 07, 2024
Listen: traffic.megaphone.fm/BUR2393577646.mp3
Activists rally for voting rights and DC statehood as they block traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue SE on December 7, 2021 in Washington, DC. ShutDownDC and other activist groups staged a multi-site blockade around the US Capitol to demand congressional action on climate, immigration, racial justice, healthcare and childcare, voting rights and statehood for DC, and more. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Professor Steven Levitsky's new book "Tyranny of the Minority" is a warning to Americans who don't take threats to democracy as seriously as they should. He joins us. www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Minority-American-Democracy-Breaking/dp/0593443071?tag=hereandnowbooks-20
Book excerpt: 'Tyranny of the Minority' By Steven Levitsky
Introduction
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In January 5, 2021, an extraordinary event took place in Georgia. In a state where politics had long been stained by white supremacy, voters turned out in record numbers to elect their first African American senator, the Reverend Raphael Warnock, and their first Jewish American senator. Warnock was only the second Black senator to be elected in the South since Reconstruction, joining the Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina. That night, he introduced supporters to his mother, a former sharecropper, noting that “the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton picked her youngest son to be a United States senator.” For many, the election presaged a brighter, more democratic future. “There’s a new South rising,” declared LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter. “It’s younger, it’s more diverse . . . and it’s more inclusive.” This was the democratic future that generations of civil rights activists had been working to build.
The next day, January 6, Americans witnessed something that seemed unimaginable: a violent insurrection, incited by the president of the United States. Four years of democratic decline had culminated in an attempted coup. The fear, confusion, and indignation that many Americans felt as they watched these events unfold echo the way people in other countries have described feeling as their own democracies unraveled. What we had just lived through—a surge in politically motivated violence; threats against election workers; e"orts to make it harder for people to vote; a campaign by the president to overturn the results of an election— was democratic backsliding. The republic did not collapse between 2016 and 2021, but it became undeniably less democratic.
In a span of twenty-four hours on January 5 and January 6, 2021, the full promise and peril of American democracy were on vivid display: a glimpse of a possible multiracial democratic future, followed by an almost unthinkable assault on our constitutional system.
Multiracial democracy is hard to achieve. Few societies have ever done it. A multiracial democracy is a political system with regular, free, and fair elections in which adult citizens of all ethnic groups possess the right to vote and basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and association. It is not enough for these rights to exist on paper: individuals of all ethnic backgrounds must enjoy equal protection of democratic and civil rights under the law. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act finally established a legal foundation for multiracial democracy in America. But even today, we have not fully achieved it.
Access to the ballot remains unequal, for example. A 2018 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that African American and Latino citizens were three times as likely as whites to be told they lacked the proper identification to vote and twice as likely to be told—incorrectly—that their names were not listed on voter rolls. Laws barring convicted felons from voting disproportionately a"ect African Americans. And nonwhite citizens still do not receive equal protection under the law. Black men are more than twice as likely to be killed by police during their lifetime as are white men (even though Black victims of police killing are about half as likely to be armed); they are more likely than white men to be stopped and searched by police; and they are more likely to be arrested and convicted—with longer sentences—for similar crimes. If you have any doubt that Black citizens do not enjoy the same rights under the law as white citizens, apply the Kyle Rittenhouse test: Could a young Black man cross state lines with a semiautomatic rifle, walk unmolested by police into a protest, fire into a crowd, kill two people, and go free?
But if America is not yet a truly multiracial democracy, it is becoming one. In the half century between the passage of the Voting Rights Act and Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency, American society changed in fundamental ways. A massive wave of immigration transformed what had been a predominantly white Christian society into a diverse and multiethnic one. And at the same time, the growing political, economic, legal, and cultural power of nonwhite Americans challenged—and began to level— long-entrenched racial hierarchies. Public opinion research shows that for the first time in U.S. history a majority of Americans now embrace ethnic diversity and racial equality—the two key pillars of multiracial democracy. By 2016, then, America was on the brink of a genuinely multiracial democracy—one that could serve as a model for diverse societies across the world.
But just as this new democratic experiment was beginning to take root, America experienced an authoritarian backlash so fierce that it shook the foundations of the republic, leaving our allies across the world worried about whether the country had any democratic future at all. Meaningful steps toward democratic inclusion often trigger intense—even authoritarian—reactions. But the assault on American democracy was worse than anything we anticipated in 2017, when we were writing our first book, How Democracies Die. We have studied violent insurrections and efforts to overturn elections all over the world, from France and Spain to Ukraine and Russia to the Philippines, Peru, and Venezuela. But we never imagined we’d see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the twenty-first century.
The scale of America’s democratic retreat was sobering. Organizations that track the health of democracies around the world captured it in numerical terms. Freedom House’s Global Freedom Index gives countries a score between 0 and 100 each year, with 100 being the most democratic. In 2015, the United States received a score of 90, which was roughly in line with countries like Canada, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, and the U.K. But after that, America’s score declined steadily, reaching 83 in 2021. Not only was that score lower than every established democracy in western Europe, but it was lower than new or historically troubled democracies like Argentina, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Taiwan.
This was an extraordinary turn of events. According to nearly every major social scientific account of what makes democracies thrive, America should have been immune to backsliding. Scholars have discovered two virtually law-like patterns regarding modern political systems: rich democracies never die, and old democracies never die. In a well-known study, the political scientists Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi found that no democracy richer than Argentina in 1976—its per capita GDP, in today’s dollars, was about $16,000—had ever broken down. Democracy subsequently eroded in Hungary, which had a per capita GDP of about $18,000 (in today’s dollars). The United States’ per capita GDP was about $63,000 in 2020—nearly four times that of the richest country ever to su"er a democratic breakdown. Likewise, no democracy over fifty years old has ever died. Even if we take the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as the moment of America’s democratization (that is, after all, when the country achieved full adult su"rage), our democracy was still over fifty when Trump ascended to the presidency. So both history and decades of social science research tell us that American democracy should have been safe. And yet it wasn’t
This segment aired on March 7, 2024. Audio will be available soon. traffic.megaphone.fm/BUR2393577646.mp3
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2024 2:31:04 GMT
How the Founding Fathers' concept of 'Minority Rule' is alive and well today
APRIL 22, 20241:26 PM ET HEARD ON FRESH AIR Fresh Air
Terry Gross square 2017 Terry Gross
44-Minute Listen ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2024/04/20240422_fa_7ae934b2-4106-4f1b-99a0-1020a1706a07.mp3?d=2640&size=42245687&e=1246297603&t=progseg&seg=1&p=13&sc=siteplayer&aw_0_1st.playerid=siteplayer Download
Transcript
A voter leaves a voting booth in Concord, N.H., the during primary election on Jan. 23, 2024. Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images
It's a fundamental tension in a democracy: How do you have majority rule in a way that also protects minority rights? Journalist Ari Berman says the Founding Fathers struggled with that question back in 1787 — except, for them, white male landowners were the minority in need of protection.
"Most of the founders were skeptical of the public's ability to elect the president directly," Berman says. "So they created this very complicated situation in which electors would elect the president instead of the people electing the president directly."
In his new book, Minority Rule, Berman connects the debates and compromises of the country's founders to contemporary politics. He says the founding fathers created a system that concentrated power in the hands of the elite and that today, institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate — designed as a check against the power of the majority — are having much the same effect.
Berman notes that in the country's first presidential election, in 1789, only a small fraction of the population was eligible to vote — and in certain states, voters were only allowed to vote for electors, not the candidates themselves.
Though the right to vote has since been expanded, Berman says the democratic process remains deeply flawed. He points out that in 2000 and again in 2016, the presidential candidate who won the popular vote did not win the electoral vote. Additionally, he says, because the Constitution stipulates that each state gets two senators, regardless of its population, "smaller, whiter, more conservative states have far more power and representation in the Senate then larger, more diverse, more urban states."
"What we see right now is the same kind of thing, in which a privileged, conservative, white minority is trying to suppress the power of a much more diverse multiracial governing majority," Berman says. "And that's a very dangerous situation for American democracy."
Interview highlights
Minority Rule, by Ari Berman Farrar, Straus and Giroux On the Constitution as a flawed document
We venerate the Constitution as a civic religion. I think we would be much greater served to look at the Constitution as a whole document and say, there are some remarkable parts of this document, but there's also some really flawed parts of this document that we still haven't corrected. Because the really remarkable thing is that even as America has democratized in the centuries since — and nobody would argue that America isn't more democratic now than it was back then — some features of the Constitution have become more undemocratic.
On the creation of the Electoral College to uphold minority rule
Most of the founders were skeptical of the public's ability to elect the president directly. They felt like the public would be uninformed, or it would be chosen by the largest states, or would be chosen by free states in a way that would hurt the South. So it's interesting, one of the themes that runs through the book and runs through the founding is that these smaller minorities wanted protection. And when I may say smaller minorities, I don't mean minority groups. I mean the small states wanted protection, the slave states wanted protection, and they felt like they would get that protection in the Electoral College. So they created this very complicated situation in which electors would elect the president instead of the people electing the president directly.
On how representatives from Delaware scuffled the initial plan to have Senate representation being based on population
James Madison and other prominent framers wanted the Senate to be based on proportional representation, so they wanted it to be based on population. So larger states like Virginia would have more representation than smaller states like Delaware. But the smaller states rebelled. And there's this amazing moment at the Constitutional Convention where the attorney general of Delaware gets up and he tells the likes of James Madison, if you don't give us the same representation, we're going to find a foreign ally who we're going to join with instead, and we're going to leave the United States of America. And that was a stunning demand. The idea that they would go rejoin England or they would join France instead, if they didn't have the same level of representation, meant that the larger states had no choice but to give in to the demand of the smaller
But what Madison worried about is that it would allow what he called a more objectionable minority than ever to control the U.S. Senate, because if the smaller states had the same level of representation as the larger states, that was inevitably going to lead to minority rule. And Madison worried that would get worse as more states join the union. And, of course, that's what's happened today, where the gap between large and small states is dramatically larger than it was back in 1787.
On how the two Senator per state representation affects minority rule
Just to give you one really stunning stat, by 2040, 70% of the population is going to live in 15 states with 30 senators. That means that 30% of the country, which is going to be whiter, more rural, more conservative, is going to elect 70% of the U.S. Senate. So the trend in the U.S. Senate is becoming more imbalanced and more undemocratic. And what's really interesting to me is a lot of conservatives want to go back and they want to quote the framers, but they ignore that a lot of the framers, including James Madison, the architect of the Constitution, had grave concerns about some of the institutions they were creating, particularly the structure of the U.S. Senate.
Lauren Krenzel and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2024 2:41:19 GMT
Minority Rule Is Threatening American Democracy Like Never Before Mother Jones
How the GOP Entrenched Minority Rule in America | NowThis NowThis Impact 14,739 views Nov 16, 2020 #NowThis #GOP #News ‘It’s just going to get harder and harder for the Democrats to take majority control of the Senate, unless the system is unrigged’ — Here’s how the GOP entrenched minority rule in America.
Tyranny of the Minority' writers say Constitution not strong enough to protect democracy PBS NewsHour 26,945 views Sep 14, 2023 America’s democracy is in an uncharted and fragile place, according to two Harvard government professors. In their new book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt say politicians are welcoming anti-democratic extremists into their party ranks and part of the problem lies in the Constitution. Laura Barrón-López spoke with the writers about how the country got to this point.
Unrigging the GOP’s Minority Rule | Robert Reich Robert Reich
40,004 views Feb 22, 2021 #gop #gerrymandering #votersuppression Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich breaks down the GOP's plan to entrench themselves in minority rule — and how we can stop it.
Through the Electoral College, the distorted Senate, the filibuster, and their power to pass voting restrictions and gerrymandering at the state level, Republicans are gearing up to keep themselves in power for at least the next decade. They can still be stopped, but Democrats must act quickly.
Watch More: The Secret GOP Plan to Keep Power ►►
• The Secret GOP Plan to Keep Power |
#votersuppression #gop #gerrymandering
How to salvage U.S. democracy from the 'tyranny of the minority' MSNBC
160,967 views Sep 12, 2023 #msnbc #trump #voters Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, authors of "Tyranny of the Minority," talk with Alex Wagner about how a failure to change and adapt American democratic institutions has allowed minority rule to overcome the popular will of American voters, and how to make the U.S. government more representative of democratic preferences.
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 23, 2024 2:46:00 GMT
Packing the Courts: How Republicans Spent Decades Installing Judges to Cement Minority Rule Democracy Now!
24,047 views Oct 13, 2020 #DemocracyNow Amid Senate confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, we look at how conservatives have used dark money to push to seat her on the Supreme Court before the November 3 election, following a decades-long project by conservatives to install right-wing judges across the federal judiciary. “There’s no doubt that what we’re facing is increasingly rule by a minority,” says former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research. “When people say that the court needs to be packed, it really needs to be unpacked.”
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