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I was lucky enough to spend this past weekend at the Tucson Festival of Books. Two days to wander around the campus of the University of Arizona with an abundance of author talks and panel discussions to attend.
I managed to get to a half dozen events, including one on the intersection of math and literature, and another on climate change hosted by the Western National Parks Association. The other discussions I attended all dealt in some way with U.S. politics, so I wanted to pass along a few of the more intriguing points I heard.
Just some impromptu food for thought on the state of American politics today.
Tyranny of the Minority
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt teamed up several years ago to write the timely book, How Democracies Die. They then collaborated on a second book, Tyranny of the Minority, which was recently published. Levitsky spoke at the festival about this second book and about how a political minority in the U.S. has in recent years been able to frequently thwart the will of the majority.
Levitsky noted that the United States used to be the model democracy for the world but has been outpaced of late by countries that have more open and more smoothly functioning democracies. The U.S. is an outlier at the moment in the power it gives to the minority party, and a big reason that American democracy seems not to work these days is that the system is being abused and is out of whack with how a democracy should typically function.
In Levitsky’s view, there are four main drivers of this imbalance:
- The Electoral College, which allows a candidate to win a presidential election after losing the popular vote, a quirk that doesn’t exist in any other major democracy.
- The Senate filibuster, which in recent years has created the need for a supermajority to pass almost any legislation.
- Lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices, which in a polarized country has turned the Court into an overly partisan body.
- Small state bias in the Senate, in which every state, no matter the population, has an equal number of Senators. This frequently allows a minority of the population to thwart the majority, notably in conjunction with the filibuster and the Electoral College.
Obviously, the small state bias in the Senate is not changing. The Electoral College could change, as could lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices, but it would take a herculean effort to do so. The only one of these four items that could be changed without immense effort is the Senate filibuster.
In my view, then, if we really want to reform democracy it’s probably better to focus on things like open primaries or gerrymandering reform. This would begin to change the makeup of Congress and, more importantly, start doing away with incentives of officeholders to focus more on party primaries than on the general election.
Still, Levitsky’s points are worth pondering. If we’re tired of the way politics in Washington works these days, and if we want it to be more responsive to voters, we need to consider what institutional obstacles are gumming up American democracy.
Beyond Left and Right
Levitsky also talked about how the traditional political gulf in the country between left and right is no longer the main source of the country’s divisions. Rather, he suggested, the U.S. is now split primarily between ethnonationalists and cosmopolitans.
From this perspective, the ethnonationalists are primarily white, Christian, and small town or rural voters. They are nationalist and isolationist. On the other side, the cosmopolitans are ethnically, racially and religiously diverse, tend to be more urban, are more tolerant of diversity, and have a more internationalist view of the world.
This isn’t breaking news, of course. I wrote this, for instance, in Quest for the Presidency about the realignment in American politics that took off during the Obama and Trump years:
One side represented the values of a more diverse, secular, cosmopolitan, urban America. They tended to be more well-educated and open to the transformations being wrought by globalization, immigration, and shifting societal values. The other half was representative of a white, Christian, rural America. These voters saw themselves as upholding traditional values and were less enthused by the upheavals that had reshaped American culture. They were “two nations-within-a-nation” who became locked in a cold civil war.[i]
The danger for the country was that elections were becoming more of a battle over cultural identities rather than governing philosophies. As the political analyst William Schneider noted: “Both the right and the left draw support from people who feel certain about their own values and resentful that the rest of society does not embrace them.”[ii]
Nonetheless, this is an important reminder of the changes that are rocking national politics these days. And it does help to explain why old arguments about government spending and other such issues are diminishing in intensity, while politics today is being driven to a larger degree by cultural and moral concerns.
Media Fragmentation and Its Impact on Democracy
The polarization of politics in America is no doubt impacted by the fragmentation of the media landscape. Back in the day when there were just a few national news programs, when there was no internet, and when many voters read local or national newspapers, there was some level of consensus about what was happening in the country. You might be pleased or outraged by the news, but you at least accepted it as reality.
That is no longer the case. Americans now get their news from all sorts of sources. The number of voters who rely on the traditional media has plunged and many people rely extensively on outlets that aren’t even attempting to report objective facts.
This is a primary reason, according to Franklin Foer (author of The Last Politician), why many people have no clue about what’s going on in Washington or about the accomplishments that have actually been racked up by the Biden administration.
Once upon a time, voters could agree or disagree with an administration’s actions, but they would at least know, for example, about the infrastructure bill that was passed on a bipartisan basis during the Biden presidency, about the huge investment in climate change, about the manufacturing bill meant to promote American factories and move supply chains out of China, and more. But now, for a large part of the population, it’s as if none of this ever happened. The news simply hasn’t penetrated.
Joshua Green (author of The Rebels and Devil’s Bargain) made a similar point about how little the average voter is aware of, whether because of the media environment or simply because people are busy with work and family and don’t have the time to keep up with the news on a daily basis.
Green told the story of one voter he interviewed at the Iowa caucuses who voted for Biden in 2020 but was switching to Trump in 2024. Why? Because of Roe v. Wade. But not in the way you might think. In fact, this voter is pro-choice and was upset that Roe v. Wade was overturned during the Biden administration. He blamed Biden for it, having no idea that it happened because Trump appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices and not because of anything Biden did or didn’t do about the issue.
Does it make sense? No, of course not. But when facts don’t penetrate, well, this is the result.
[i] Zack Beauchamp, “The midterm elections revealed that America is in a cold civil war,” Vox.com, November 7, 2018.
[ii] Bill Schneider, Bill, Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 27.