Far from being perfect, as many Americans have long thought, our institutions are critically imperfect. And they are supported by a constitution that is also imperfect, as Justice Thurgood Marshall proclaimed 34 years ago as he argued for recognition of the need to improve it.
The U.S. Constitution, so highly revered in American society, is not the product of “founding fathers” who were perfect men. Rather, they were men with varying views, many of which had to be accommodated in compromises to create this nation. For instance, giving each state two Senators, thus creating a bias toward small states.
Yes, the U.S. Democracy is the world’s oldest written government framework today and has stood as a beacon for other countries. Significantly, however, as Levitsky and Ziblatt illustrate, other countries have recognized some of the faults in their democracies and have changed their constitutions to address some of these issues.
Inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment and the promise of self-government, Norway’s founders saw the American experience as the model to follow. Consequently, Norway’s constitution, established in 1814, like America’s constitution established in 1789, included undemocratic features. However, Norway is an excellent example of a country that changed the anti-democratic aspects of its constitution.
Parliaments across Europe and South America established systems that had anti-majority features. These features tended to protect minority interests. Like the United States, they featured biases toward rural states and indirect voting, which most eventually abandoned.
Later reforms in Norway included human and social rights protections, such that now Norway is one of only three countries with a perfect 100 score on the Global Freedom Index. You may recall the United States scored an 83, signaling our problem.
During the twentieth century, most countries now considered established democracies changed their anti-majority institutions and moved toward empowering majorities.
In the nineteenth century, they reformed their electoral systems. France and the Netherlands eliminated their systems of having local councils select members of parliament. Norway, Prussia, and Sweden did the same in the early twentieth century.
The popular form of indirect voting, electoral colleges, was eliminated across Latin America in the twentieth century–in Columbia, Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina.
By World War II, nearly all European democracies had implemented some proportional representation in their voting systems. I remember when Republican lawmakers pushed a cowardly President Clinton to withdraw the nomination of his friend, African American Lani Guinier, to be Attorney General because they disagreed so vehemently with her advocacy for proportional voting.
European countries reformed the undemocratic upper chambers in their parliaments early in the twentieth century, starting with Britain’s House of Lords and then later New Zealand, Denmark, and Sweden. Germany and Austria reformed the undemocratic upper chambers of their legislatures by making them more representative. Most twentieth-century democracies also took steps to limit minority obstruction within legislatures, establishing cloture procedures to enable majority votes to limit filibusters.
The United States, once a democratic pioneer and model for other nations, has now become a democratic laggard.
America is the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College rather than directly by the voters.
America is one of the few established democracies with electoral rules that permit electoral pluralities to be collected into legislative majorities and, in some cases, allow parties that win fewer votes to win legislative majorities.
America is the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court Justices.
Among democracies, the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change.
If America is to survive—as a democracy—these anti-democratic features of our government must be changed. Currently, we are at a point where we can use our problematic electoral system to move in that direction, or we will slide—with eyes wide open – into totalitarianism.
