Image Tweeted by the John Birch Society in November 2017.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” – Party slogan in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
“If we had to unpack American political philosophy in one word, I think it’s anti-majoritarianism.” – Sen. Ben Sasse (PhD, Yale, History) at Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings
This week, Alabama passed a law that would ban all abortions with no exceptions except the life of the mother. A number of other states have recently passed, or are considering passing, “fetal heartbeat” laws, which are nearly as draconian. Polls suggest such laws are unpopular, even in Alabama.
In a recent piece in Mother Jones, Ari Berman argues that the passage of these laws reflects the spate of voter suppression measures that the Republican Party has implemented in recent years. Measures such as gerrymandering and voter ID laws ”insulate GOP lawmakers from any public backlash over their votes.” Our Republican-dominated Supreme Court assured in Shelby County v. Holder that the Voting Rights Act and the Fifteenth Amendment would be no bar to these efforts.
One of the intellectual foundations of these anti-democratic measures on the part of Republicans has been the willful misreading of history and especially of the founding ideas of this country. Take Ben Sasse’s bizarre claim during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings that the one word that best summed up American political philosophy is “anti-majoritarianism.”
It is certainly true that a number of the authors of the Constitution feared majority tyranny. Madison argues in Federalist 10 that people are prone to form factions and that a Constitution must be designed to control the effects of faction and particularly to prevent a faction that represents a majority from running roughshod over the rest of the community.
But to sum up even Federalist 10, let alone all the rest of American political philosophy, as “anti-majoritarianism” is a bizarre misreading of this text. After all, Madison’s solution to majority tyranny is not “anti-majoritarianism,” but rather creating a system that prevents any faction from representing a majority: “If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote.” Note the language of that sentence: majority rule, in Madison’s view is a republican principle.
According to Madison, majority tyranny is best defeated not by “anti-majoritarianism,” but rather by creating a republic large enough that no faction can control a majority: “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Madison’s goal is not to stifle majority rule, but rather to prevent unjust and interested majorities from forming. In Madison’s view, the advantage of a large republic – that is the stronger, national government proposed in the Constitution – is precisely that it can allow for majority rule without majority tyranny.
Now, there are all kinds of problems with this vision. As became clear soon after 1787, national factions were a lot less difficult to form than Madison hoped in Federalist 10. It is, in fact, unreasonable to expect ideas from over two hundred years ago to guide us unchanged today. Moreover, one cannot “unpack American political philosophy in one word” even if one chooses a different word from Ben Sasse’s; American political philosophy is, and always has been, dynamic and polyvocal.
But claims like Ben Sasse’s have been common on the American right for generations, frequently summed up in the old, Republican saw that “America is a republic, not a democracy.” That those two words happen to be the names of our two major parties kind of gives the game away. The older of our two parties is, in fact, called “Democratic” (and was once frequently referred as “the Democracy”). This ought to clue you in on the fact that many Americans have long thought of their country as a democracy. In fact, we are (or at least strive to be) a democratic republic. Jim Kloppenberg writes extensively in Toward Democracy, his study of political thought in Europe and the U.S. through the nineteenth century, of the many ways in which Americans practiced — and thought they were practicing – democracy even before the Founding. If you’re really interested in the word “democracy” in the eighteenth-century American context, here’s an excellent piece by the historian Seth Cotlar on it. Even a few lonely voices on the right have argued that the “republic not a democracy” mantra is empty rhetoric posing as political analysis.
All of this reinforces how vital good history – and good intellectual history – is to this moment in American life. Building political visions on distorted understandings of the past is an old strategy that can be seen across the ideological spectrum. But such understandings of the past play a particularly vital role in reactionary, and especially fascist, politics. It is no accident that this moment, during which the far right has become larger and more normalized in American life, is also a moment marked by intensified battles over the past, from Confederate monuments to the very history of the modern right itself, including the anti-abortion movement. Casually repeated historical untruths can quickly ossify into powerful myths that have political consequences. It is more important than ever before that such untruths do not go unchallenged.
2 Thoughts on this Post
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I take no issue with your reading of Federalist 10 here, which is spot on. However, there is a strong argument to be made that the Constitution was intended to insulate the young democracy from, well, too much democracy. From the House being the only chamber or branch (half a branch, really) directly elected, to the Senate being intended, among other things, as a check on that democracy (of the House), it is in many ways a reactionary document itself, rooted as it was to a significant degree in reaction to events like Shay’s Rebellion or the rather radical one-house legislature in Pennsylvania.
None of this is to say that conservatives are “right” that the spirit of American political philosophy is anti-majoritarian as a whole. I agree that this is a convenient reading driven by their own reactionary politics. But neither do I buy liberal or left-liberal narratives that its “true” genealogy can be characterized by majoritarian or democratic yearnings — because it isn’t one thing. There are reactionaries, conservatives, traditionalists, liberals, and leftists involved in this thing, and sometimes they simply cannot be considered part of the “same” tradition; they represent different people in different positions in the hierarchy of American life and consequently are at odds. Federalist 10 isn’t the greatest example for the reactionary or anti-majoritarian aspect of it, but Calhoun’s work certainly could be.
I recognize that you’re not laying out an argument here for a unified American political tradition, so I apologize if it seems I’m putting words in your mouth. I just think it is vital, while we do the good work of correcting bad conservative history, to also slough off the whole idea that we are or ought to be beholden to whatever “American political philosophy” could or might be. After all, what if Sasse *was* right? (He’s not, but what if he was.) Would we then actually have less of an argument, less of a right to assert that what he and the Kavananaughs of the world want is legitimate? I don’t think so. Per Sehat, I think any correction of bad history must come coupled with a, “But in any case, fuck the founders.”
Thanks, RM! I largely agree with this. In particular, I think that expecting the Founders to provide us with political answers and expecting the Founding to be an entirely good thing are fundamentally bad ways of approaching politics and history. And I think I suggest as much above. But it’s nonetheless telling that those who claim to base their politics in the values of the Founders have to provide a dishonest account of those values to make their argument. And I guess I’d say that it’s no accident that Ben Sasse wasn’t right. The politics of nearly 250 years ago is fundamentally different from the politics of today. Present day reactionaries always have to distort the pasts they invoke, not because the real past points to a more progressive politics, but because that actual past never provides them with the ammunition that they need for today’s battles.