The Anti-Majoritarians

Jonathan Chait in TNR:

In February 2006, the conservative journal Policy Review published an essay that was shockingly heretical, though perhaps unintentionally so. In it, Carles Boix of the University of Chicago argued that there is a link between democracy and economic equality:

In an unequal society, the majority resents its diminished status. It harbors the expectation of employing elections to drastically overturn its condition. In turn, the wealthy minority fears the outcome that may follow from free elections and the assertion of majority rule. As a result, it resorts to authoritarian institutions to guarantee its social and economic advantage.

Of the many taboos that prevail among conservatives, the one forbidding any serious discussion of inequality is perhaps the strictest. Any forthright examination of this topic will lead one quickly to the realization that American society has been spreading apart rapidly for three decades and that Republican economic policies have without a doubt contributed mightily to this gulf. So conservatives usually ignore the subject of inequality, except perhaps to minimize its scale or importance.

Why, then, did Policy Review, which is published by the staunchly conservative Hoover Institution, open its pages to such apostasy? Well, it didn't intend to. Boix's essay (which was brilliant and widely discussed) concerned the inculcation of democracy abroad and did not deal directly with the United States. And the circumstances Boix envisioned--mainly, developing countries attempting a transition to democracy--are different from those in an advanced democracy. Americans, fortunately, do not have to worry about kleptocrats, political violence, and massive vote fraud.

But, while Boix's theory may be less applicable to the United States than it is to the Third World, it is still somewhat true. Indeed, this theory offers an uncannily precise description of what has happened in American politics over the last 30 years. The business lobbyists have turned the Republican Party into a kind of machine dedicated unwaveringly to protecting and expanding the wealth of the very rich. As it has pursued this goal ever more single-mindedly, the right has by necessity grown ever more hostile to majoritarian decision-making for the obvious reason that it's hard to enlist the public behind an agenda designed to benefit a tiny minority. The old ways of conducting politics have broken down in the face of this onslaught. The mores of the old Washington establishment--the assumption of some basic intellectual goodwill on both sides, the focus on character over substance, the belief in compromise--all developed during an era when there were few ideological differences between the parties. The old ways may have done a decent job of safeguarding the national interest when the great moderate consensus prevailed, but they have proven unequal to the challenge of a more ideological time.

All this has happened at the same time as a massive increase in income inequality, which is exactly what Boix's theory would predict. In the same essay, Boix marvels at the fortunes amassed by autocratic ruling elites throughout history:

Rulers such as the Bourbons, the Tudors, or the Sauds seize an important part of their subjects' assets. For example, at the death of Augustus (14 a.d.), the top 1/10,000 of the Roman Empire's households received 1 percent of all income. In Mughal India around 1600 a.d., the top 1/10,000th received 5 percent of all income.

Presumably, readers looking at these numbers are supposed to gape in astonishment at the sheer inequity of those autocratic regimes. But the numbers are less astonishing when you compare them to those in the contemporary United States, which Boix does not. As of 2004, the top one-ten-thousandth of Americans earned over 3 percent of the national income--a somewhat smaller share than that earned by the Mughal elite but several times higher than that enjoyed by the wealthiest Romans. (h/t Balloon Juice.  Read more here .)

This is common sense, but common sense that is rarely spoken about in the main stream. This is the way the world works.  Elite majorities use their power to protect their privileges and wealth. America was supposed to be different, but we've become too fat and lazy to care.  So long as most middle Americans haven't felt too much pain, they aren't going to think too hard about how or whether they have been hoodwinked. But it would appear all that is going to change because in the next couple of years the pain is going to wake people from their stupor, and they are going to get grumpy about what they finally come to understand about what has happened over the last thirty years.

Comments

[Thomas Daulton]

Another insightful post.

(Sorry I never responded to that discourse about the Liturgy, but I was basically out of Internet range for two weeks. This week I'm afraid I'm too busy to look back at the past, I shouldn't be wasting time reading current blogs either but here I am.)

Just to play Devil's Advocate for a minute, the slightly more intelligent Republicans frequently and gleefully counter-argue that they are protecting fairness by standing up against tyranny of the majority. Doesn't matter if 51% of the populace vote to make it legal to lynch CEOs, that doesn't make lynching morally correct, and Republicans have appointed themselves as arbiters of what's "really" moral. (That argument, by the way, relies on viewing Republicans as guardians of Tradition -- for no other reason than Republican opponents are "progressive" -- an argument you may be interested in dissecting.) If it's not fair for elites to rob poor scrabbling peasants of their meager earnings, then it is also not fair for a mob of peasants to take away their justly earned riches.

That Devil's counter-argument actually gains some traction among rank-and-file Republicans, who have some expectation that, if they help protect the property of the rich, the rich won't rob from them in return. Naïve perhaps, but at least it displays consistency.

(My own counter-counter-argument would be that the Republicans are erroneously invoking a broad principle of justice to defend specific policies which are unjust and counterproductive. "Under the law, the rich and poor alike are prohibited from sleeping under bridges," or however that quote goes. Also that Republican rank-and-file voters more often fit the description of "the mob" who is trampling minority rights, than the victims of said mob.)

[Jack Whelan]

Sure, the tyranny of the majority and mob rule, the sans-culottes carting off the nobility to the guillotine, etc--it can be a problem. As we saw in 2004, the majority was wrong about who was the better man for the white house.

But here's the thing. Since at least the 1830s we Americans have opted for trusting that the majority provides a stable kind of wisdom, slow as it might be on the uptake, and that trusting the majority's will is a safer bet for the health of the commonwealth than trusting the will of an oligarchical elite. And as frustrated as I am with the sleepiness of the American electorate, I don't know of any other group into whose hands I'd rather put the future of the country.

The point Chait is making is that due to lack of vigilance on the part of the American middle, we have allowed for the development of an oligarchical elite, and when you put that fact next to the kinds of authoritarian infrastructure laid by the Bush administration with its signing statements, warrantless spying, attempts to legitimize torture, and suspension of habeas corpus for anybody it choses to call a terrorist, whether citizen or not, they look to be behaving like the power elite of any time and any place.

The power elite have gradually been obtaining the tools to suppress the will of the majority if they choose. And if they choose to do that, they will in their own minds do it only for the most high minded of motives. They'll appeal to Plato, Toqueville, Strauss, and Locke and anybody who will give them something to hang their hat on. But the point is that regardless of the window dressing justifications they promote, they are only doing what elite minorities have done throughout history, which is to do everything they can to consolidate power and protect their own interests. And the more their interests diverge from the interests of the broad population, the more paranoid they become, and the more they seek to rig the system in their favor.