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Something has gone wrong in American democracy. Though our diagnoses differ, the entire political spectrum chafes at the widespread dysfunction. Our traditional modes for understanding democratic decline—tyranny of the majority, corruption, erosion of trust, polarization—all of these shed some light onto our current circumstances, but they fail to explain how policies with broad public support don’t materialize.
While reporting on the democratic terrain in state and local government, I’ve become preoccupied with how easily minority interests are able to hijack broadly beneficial policy goals—often through mechanisms we view as democratically legitimate. Tools developed to push against a potential “tyranny of the majority” have allowed majorities to be subjugated to the will of minority interests time and again. Whether it’s by professional associations, police unions, homeowner associations, or wealthy individuals, majority rule has repeatedly been hijacked.
Steve Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has a similar diagnosis. In a new essay titled “Minoritarianism Is Everywhere,” he argues that America’s democratic deficits require a serious rethinking of liberal governance and values.
On today’s episode of Good on Paper, we discuss the causes and consequences of minoritarianism and debate potential solutions.
“Faced with the fact that actually lots of people don’t want things that liberals want, the way that liberals have responded is finding sneaky, complicated, roundabout ways to get around” that fact, Teles argues. “And instead of trying to find other ways to persuade them or compensate them or other things, we’ve tried to find these complicated, expert-delegation kinds of ways around that. And sometimes that works. But one thing I think it does is it also raises questions about the legitimacy of the larger system.”
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Jerusalem Demsas: We’re used to thinking about the tyranny of the majority. We don’t have to imagine what happens when majority voices vote to trample on individual rights.
That fear so animated the Founding Fathers that they designed a system to restrain it: a bicameral legislature with one chamber—the Senate—insulated from electoral pressure by staggered six-year terms, and lifetime appointments for judges to shield them from the shifting tides of public opinion.
They spent far less time thinking about the opposite problem: tyranny of the minority.
[Music]
Demsas: Yet today, much of my own work is thinking through the ways that well-organized interest groups and strategically placed individuals have managed to take hold of the systems of power throughout government and enact their minoritarian preferences.
From land use, permitting, and zoning abuses by homeowners associations to police unions, gun-lobbying groups, and environmental groups fighting against popular opinion in favor of a niche ideological perspective—once you start looking for undue power wielded by a minority, it’s all you can see.
This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is Steve Teles, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. He has a new article out called “Minoritarianism Is Everywhere” that I think is the single most important piece you can read about this trend in American democracy.
Steve, welcome to the show
Steven Teles: Thanks for having me.
Demsas: In the early days of the United States of America, thinkers like Madison and Tocqueville were primarily afraid of tyranny of the majority. Why was that the dominant mode through which they feared democratic collapse?
Teles: So the Founders had a lot of experience from their own experience of the colonial period and going back to their reading of the Greeks and Romans about how republics fell apart, and they thought that republics fell apart, in part, because they had too much of an expectation of homogeneity. And so one of the most important things to understand about the Founders is they actually did believe that diversity, as the yard signs say, is our strength and that the way to actually make a republic work was not to actually try and get homogeneity but actually to get conflict, to get diversity so that no part of the community would be able to actually tyrannize the rest.
We know the famous line from Madison that when you extend the sphere, you take a greater variety of interests. And so part of their theory was to create a republic that was big enough that no single interest could dominate and, within that, to break apart whatever level of government in order to ensure that there would be deliberation. I think deliberation was really the underestimated part of the Founders’ constitutional idea. It was not just that they wanted to ensure that a majority couldn’t tyrannize over a minority, but that people would actually have to argue—they would have to provide reasons—and that was the one of the motivations for having separation of powers, as well as having what they call the “extended sphere.”
Demsas: What’s the extended sphere?
Teles: So the extended sphere was the idea that you would have a large republic. Every other republic in history had been small. They’d been city-states. The anti-Federalists, who were the opponents of the Federalists, had some of that same idea—
Demsas: Including Madison.
Teles: —that the only way republics could work is if they didn’t have disagreement, because otherwise, one group would tyrannize over the other.
And the experiment of the Founders was to have an extended sphere, to have one over, originally, 13 colonies but eventually a kind of continental republic. And a continental republic is something that nobody had ever attempted. People only thought you could have that level in an empire. And so that was really the experiment that the Founders were trying—was to have something large that had only been imperial in the past, but make it a republic.
Demsas: So you’ve recently written an essay warning us about the tyranny of the minority. Do you think that the Founders were wrong about their assessment, or do you think that something has changed?
Teles: So there’s kind of two stories you can tell about this. One is: The government just does a lot more than it used to. A lot of our system was designed to keep government from doing very much. It was designed to slow the government on the way up.
And one thing I often tell my conservative friends is that separation of powers has, and a lot of the other devices that the framers created, a kind of perverse effect on the way down. Once you’ve already built a large government up, all of those systems are also a brake on trying to reverse it. So it may be that having separation of powers means you have to have a much larger majority in order to create new government programs. But all those same separation-of-power systems also are an obstacle to cutting them later on, which is one of the reasons, for example, that DOGE is having to do all these things that are of, I’ll say, marginal constitutionality—
Demsas: Questionable legality? Yeah.
Teles: —because they can’t actually pass things through the separation-of-power system that the Founders created. So they’re trying to do it through a sort of soft authoritarianism. So that’s one thing, right? One thing is that the Founders didn’t anticipate that we’d have a government as big and as sort of into everybody’s business ...
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