Tyranny of the Minority
Everything you need to know for Friday, Oct. 9: What the hell is happening in Michigan? Also, register to vote today!
Bonjour, mes amis. I wanted to thank you all for being with us for the first full week of PRIMER.
Three quick things:
1) This is the FINAL DAY of voter registration in North Carolina—sort of. You can register at the polls during early voting, which begins on Oct. 15. But if you’d rather not early vote in person, today’s the day. Make sure you’re already registered here.
2) Since we’ve made it through a week, I’d love your feedback on what’s working and what isn’t. Does the newsletter show up correctly in your browser? Your tablet? Your smartphone? Am I using too many graphics? Too few? Am I writing too much? (No, of course not, don’t be silly, Jeff.)
3) On that note: If know me, you know that I am a) bad at self-promotion and b) worse at sales. But to justify spending hours and hours putting this thing together every day, I eventually need to monetize it. The first step will be a marketing campaign to let more folks know what we’re doing. That’s coming soon. Right now, I could use your help.
Our goal is to keep PRIMER free to read into perpetuity. But that only works in the long-term if enough of our subscribers become contributing members. So if you have the means, and if you like waking up to this newsletter, please consider upgrading your subscription. Doing it now will help me afford the aforementioned marketing campaign.
Since we want to keep PRIMER free, but I’m also asking you to give us money, I’m curious what extras might make the $5/month worth your while. Additional paid-subscriber-only content? If so, what? Access to merch (if I can ever afford it)? Events and happy hours (if those ever happen again)?
Last thing: As this is not my full-time gig, I may miss a day or two next week. I’m finishing up a feature I’ve been working on for the last month.
Programming note: I didn’t mean for this to happen, but today’s newsletter basically turned into a column. Sorry about that.
Friday, Oct. 9, 2020
25 days until the election
6 days until early voting begins (you can register during early voting, too)
18 days until the deadline for absentee ballot requests
Happy birthday, Mom! (On Sunday, but still.)
Today’s Number: 25,500,000
Number of Americans still collecting some form of unemployment.
RELATED: After Donald Trump, who abruptly shut down stimulus negotiations earlier this week, suggested that talks were moving forward again, Nancy Pelosi said she won’t consider an airline-only bailout.
ABOVE THE FOLD
—> Tyranny of the Minority
As a rule, whenever you encounter someone who confidently (and condescendingly) asserts that AMERICA IS A REPUBLIC, NOT A DEMOCRACY, you’re dealing with either a) a textbook example of the Dunning-Kruger effect or b) a disingenuous pedant.
It’s usually a. But every so often, you find someone like Senator Mike Lee, R-Utah.
There’s also Representative Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, here using the “republic” line in defense of the Electoral College.
So, first of all, presidential candidates campaign almost exclusively in urban areas now—that’s where the airports/people/donors are—but only in about a dozen states. Everywhere else gets ignored. Get rid of the Electoral College, and every vote everywhere will matter exactly the same.
The fact that the Midwestern states that tend to be determinative in presidential contests are older, white, and more conservative than the country writ large warps our political perceptions, convincing us that America is a center-right country. By every available metric—on social and economic issues—it is not. It’s center-left.
I suspect Crenshaw understands that. The second part of the tweet gives it away: Crenshaw says he doesn’t want the 51 percent to “boss around” the 49 percent. He’d rather have the 49 percent do the bossing—so long as he and those who look and think and believe like him are part of it.
The thing is, it’s not 49 percent. It’s more like 45 percent, yet it controls the White House, the Senate, and the federal judiciary.
If confirmed, Amy Coney Barrett will be the third Supreme Court justice appointed by a man who earned 3 million fewer votes than his opponent and confirmed by a Senate majority that represents 15 million fewer Americans than the “minority.” Two additional justices were appointed by a previous president who took office after losing the popular vote—a majority of the Court.
This majority, aided by an army of far-right district and appellate court judges appointed over the last three years, is likely to overturn the Affordable Care Act, roll back abortion and LGBTQ rights, gut environmental protections, and block legislatively enacted progressive reforms for a generation.
Does it even matter that the REPUBLIC, NOT A DEMOCRACY schtick is based on a sophomoric understanding of the Founders’ words? Yes, the Founders distrusted “democracy,” by which they meant Athenian democracy—in other words, a plebiscite—not a democratic government. (Jamelle Boulle effectively dissected this argument in The New York Times last year.)
Just read Federalist No. 10, where James Madison explains this very point:
From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. … A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.
To be sure, the Founders created counter-majoritarian institutions like the Senate, the presidential veto, and, on some level, the Electoral College to check the passions of the great unwashed. But these were meant to safeguard the rights of the minority, not for the will of the people to be subjugated by an entrenched ruling class, not to create a representative democracy that was neither representative nor democratic.
Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 inaugural address drove home this point:
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
When people like Lee and Crenshaw say we’re a REPUBLIC, NOT A DEMOCRACY—a line championed by the Birchers and other right-wing groups throughout American history—they don’t want a “government in which the scheme of representation takes place.” They certainly don’t want “the will of the majority … to prevail.”
They want a TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY.
They want a system in which their votes, their beliefs, their values, their religion, their wealth, and their “rights” are worth more than those of everyone else. Make no mistake: This is about power—more precisely, clinging to a disproportionate degree of power—nothing more, nothing less.
As Lee put it, “rank democracy” just gets in the way.
Lee’s “not a democracy” tweet came during the vice-presidential debate, right after Mike Pence dismissively made the offhand reference, “Joe Biden says democracy’s on the ballot,” which he juxtaposed with the apparently more important notion that the economic comeback was, in fact, on the ballot.
But like Trump, Pence refused to promise a peaceful transition of power. Nor did Pence denounce the obscenely undemocratic machinations in which his party is engaging ahead of the vote.
In Wisconsin, the Republican lawmakers successfully sued to prevent absentee ballots from being accepted after Election Day, even though they knew that would disenfranchise tens of thousands of people through no fault of their own. In Texas and Ohio, Republican officials have sought to make it more difficult to cast an absentee ballot. In Florida, they subverted the obvious will of an overwhelming majority of voters to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of ex-felons, while the Republican governor pushes legislation that will make it a felony to participate in protests and make it legal to run over protesters in a car.
In case it’s not obvious, all of these lawsuits—and similar ones across the country—are designed to make it more difficult to vote. If people vote, they lose.
President Trump, meanwhile, used his first post-COVID-infection interview to whine about his FBI director not indulging his absentee ballot conspiracy theories and his attorney general not arresting his political rivals.
These acts are fruits of the same tree—as is the GOP’s conniption over the suggestion of adding Supreme Court justices, granting Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., statehood, ending the filibuster, expanding voting rights, or facilitating other means of effecting majoritarian outcomes. They stem from a sense of moral and cultural superiority and, thus, entitlement to privilege and power. If you’re better than everyone else, why should it matter if they outnumber you?
When cultural changes or shifting demographics challenge that privilege, however, authoritarianism gains an allure. In no small part, this is why Trump steamrolled the 2016 Republican field; he was exactly the kind of strongman the party craved. “Make America Great Again” was an unsubtle dog-whistle to white conservatives who felt left behind by an evolving, diversifying country.
Authoritarianism, in turn, allows for illiberalism; it excuses anti-democratic actions. In a Manichean struggle, the ends always justify the means.
That’s what REPUBLIC, NOT A DEMOCRACY is all about: putting a faux-intellectual gloss on the hogswallop idea that some people are more deserving of power than others, even if their ideas are unpopular.
IN OTHER NEWS
—> The Plot Against Michigan
In Michigan yesterday, federal officials charged 13 domestic terrorists with planning to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer ahead of the election and start a civil war.
The men spied on Ms. Whitmer’s vacation home in August and September, even looking under a highway bridge for places they could place and detonate a bomb to distract the authorities, the F.B.I. said. They indicated that they wanted to take Ms. Whitmer hostage before the election in November, and one man said they should take her to a “secure location” in Wisconsin for a “trial,” Richard J. Trask II, an F.B.I. special agent, said in the criminal complaint. …
The [additional] seven men [who were charged with providing material support for terrorist activities] were said to be affiliated with an extremist group known as the Wolverine Watchmen, and the state’s attorney general accused them of collecting addresses of police officers in order to target them, threatening to start a civil war “leading to societal collapse” and planning to kidnap the governor and other government officials.
They believed Whitmer was a “tyrant”—an apparent reference to her efforts to control the state’s COVID-19 outbreak. Back in April, as thousands of COVID deniers protested at the state Capitol, Donald Trump tweeted, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”
Whitmer, having learned she was the target of a kidnapping plot, criticized Trump for his failure to condemn “white supremacists and hate groups like these two Michigan militia groups.” Extremists “heard the president’s words not as a rebuke but as a rallying cry—as a call to action.”
Trump lashed out on Twitter, saying Whitmer had done a “terrible job” and should thank him, but instead “she calls me a White Supremacist—while Biden and Democrats refuse to condemn Antifa, Anarchists, Looters and Mobs that burn down Democrat run cities.”
—> The Roundup (of Everything)
Here’s some other stuff I planned to write about today before Mike Lee pissed me off.
Trump, a current COVID patient, refused to participate in next week’s debate after the Commission on Presidential Debates announced it would be virtual.
Because cruelty is always the point, the Trump administration imposed additional sanctions against Iran that our European allies say will lead to humanitarian devastation.
Facebook will temporarily halt political ads … after the election.
Fakebook banned a marketing firm that was running a troll farm for Trump youth.
Trump blames Gold Star families for giving him COVID—wait, what?
Trump made doctors at Walter Reed sign NDAs during his surprise (but totally routine!) visit there last year.
The Kushner family got a sweet, sweet deal on a government-backed loan. The Trump administration says politics played no role.
Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who publicly says COVID is overhyped, has only flown in a private plane during the pandemic for “safety and logistical reasons,” his office says.
North Carolina congressman Greg Murphy tweeted that Kamala Harris was only selected as the Democratic VP nominee “for her color and her race.”
Joe Biden is backing the Lumbee tribe’s push for national recognition.
UNC will start its spring semester late and eliminate spring break. Relatedly, App State’s attempt at an in-person fall semester has not gone well.
Have a good weekend, everyone.