by Wornie Reed
The right-wing minority dominating the country in the 21st century is in a strong position to maintain itself and its rule. Several anti-democratic processes seem to operate in a feedback-type loop to sustain the power of this minority. First, a minority of the people vote for a President who wins and a Senate that enacts processes to make reelection easier.
In the Atlantic magazine, Adam Jentleson calls this feedback loop the Minority-Rule Doom Loop. It starts at the ballot box, where voter suppression and gerrymandering make it easier for white right-wingers–or imprecise but more politely, white conservatives–to win.
This process is aided substantially by the anti-democratic nature of the Electoral College. As with many significant issues in American history, race was a factor in developments affecting two anti-democratic evils—the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster rule.
The Electoral College system, based on its slave-is-three-fifths-of a-person-rule and its overvaluing of small states, has always been problematic for democracy; however, this harmful potential was dormant throughout the 20th century.
Until 2000 every president who won the White House won both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Since 2000, both Republican presidents who won the White House won the Electoral College but not the popular vote.
This advantage to Republicans resulted from two things, one acknowledged and the other not so much. First, observers readily accept that after Obama, white voters in large midwestern states switched their votes from Democrats to Trump. But the data also show that these same white voters joined southern racists in what analysts politely called racial resentment at the time but are now beginning to understand it as replacement theory.
The effect is that a Democratic presidential candidate now must run at least 3.5 percentage points ahead of their Republican opponent in the popular vote to win the White House. Hillary Clinton won almost three million votes more than Trump but lost the election.
This same anti-democratic representation works in the Senate. In the 21st century, every time Republicans have controlled the Senate, they have represented a minority of the population.
Like the Electoral College, the anti-democratic nature of the Senate has always existed. Still, it did not systematically favor one party over the other until recently.
Democrats and Republicans used to win Senate seats in big and small states at comparable rates because both parties were competitive with white working-class voters. But the shift of these voters toward the GOP has turned the Senate’s overrepresentation of rural areas into a clear Republican advantage.
Also, the Senate functioned as a majority-rule institution for the first 200 years. The only exception was civil rights—in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Senator John C Calhoun of South Carolina led the minority rule effort. Fearing that majority rule would lead to the steady elimination of slavery, he and others pushed the idea of protecting the minority, slaveholders. So, they developed the talking filibuster.
Until the mid-twentieth century civil rights era, filibusters were routinely limited. However, to thwart the majority desire for civil rights in the 1950s and the 1960s, white-supremacist senators from the South manipulated an old rule to extend filibusters indefinitely, thus killing civil rights bills.
On issues other than civil rights, southern senators routinely voted to end debate. But during the latter part of the century, senators used the filibuster increasingly against other issues.
As Jentleson shows, as white conservatives shrink into a minority bloc, the doom loop provides them a pathway to gain power anyway. And once in power, they use it to perpetuate the loop.
The net effect of this doom loop is a growing divergence between the government’s agenda and the will of the governed, an untenable dynamic in any democracy.
Jentleson offers three logical but tough reforms: (1) halt the suppression of the vote with the passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, (2) reform the right-wing courts, and (3) fix the representational imbalances in the Senate. However, I am skeptical that this will happen because to accomplish any of this, national Democrats must develop a backbone, something that has not been very evident in recent times.
Meanwhile, the minority-rule doom loop continues.
