Democracy (Theory and Philosophy)

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      The Debate Over How Dangerous Trump Rages On

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      “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections,” Adam Przeworski, a political scientist at N.Y.U., wrote in 1991 — a definition that would prove prescient in the wake of the 2020 election.“Outcomes of the democratic process are uncertain, indeterminate ex ante,” Przeworski continued. “There is competition, organized by rules. And there are periodic winners and losers.”Presumably, Donald Trump has no idea who Adam Przeworski is, but Trump refused to accept the Przeworski dictum in the aftermath of his 2020 defeat, claiming victory despite all evidence to the contrary.Trump’s success in persuading a majority of Republicans of the legitimacy of his palpably false claims has revealed the vulnerability of American institutions to a subversion of democratic norms. That much is well known.These questions were gaining salience even before the 2020 election. As Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, explains in her 2018 book, “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity”:The election of Trump is the culmination of a process by which the American electorate has become deeply socially divided along partisan lines. As the parties have grown racially, religiously, and socially distant from one another, a new kind of social discord has been growing. The increasing political divide has allowed political, public, electoral, and national norms to be broken with little to no consequence. The norms of racial, religious, and cultural respect have deteriorated. Partisan battles have helped organize Americans’ distrust for “the other” in politically powerful ways. In this political environment, a candidate who picks up the banner of “us versus them” and “winning versus losing” is almost guaranteed to tap into a current of resentment and anger across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently divided neatly by party.Most recently, these questions have been pushed to the fore by two political scientists at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who published “Tyranny of the Minority” a month ago.Their thesis:By 2016, America was on the brink of a genuinely multiracial democracy — one that could serve as a model for diverse societies across the world. But just as this new democratic experiment was beginning to take root, America experienced an authoritarian backlash so fierce that it shook the foundations of the republic, leaving our allies across the world worried about whether the country had any democratic future at all.This authoritarian backlash, Levitsky and Ziblatt write, “leads us to another unsettling truth. Part of the problem we face today lies in something many of us venerate: our Constitution.”Flaws in the Constitution, they argue,now imperil our democracy. Designed in a pre-democratic era, the U.S. Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them. Institutions that empower partisan minorities can become instruments of minority rule. And they are especially dangerous when they are in the hands of extremist or antidemocratic partisan minorities.The Levitsky and Ziblatt thesis has both strong supporters and strong critics.In an essay published this month, “Vetocracy and the Decline of American Global Power: Minority Rule Is the Order in American Politics Today,” Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, argues:America has become a vetocracy, or rule by veto. Its political system spreads power out very broadly, in ways that give many individual players the power to stop things. By contrast it provides few mechanisms to force collective decisions reflecting the will of the majority.When combined with the extreme degree of polarization in the underlying society, Fukuyama goes on, “this leads to total gridlock where basic functions of government like deliberating on and passing yearly budgets become nearly impossible.”Fukuyama cites the ongoing struggle of House Republicans to elect a speaker — with the far-right faction dead set against a centrist choice — as a case study of vetocracy at work:The ability of a single extremist member of the House to topple the speaker and shut down Congress’ ability to legislate is not the only manifestation of vetocracy on display in 2023. The Senate has a rule that gives any individual senator the right to in effect block any executive branch appointment for any reason.In addition, the Senate requires “a supermajority of 60 votes to call the question, making routine legislating very difficult.”I asked Fukuyama whether America’s current problems stem, to some extent, from the constitutional protection of the interests of minority factions (meant here the way it’s used in Federalist 10).He replied by email: “The large numbers of checks and balances built into our system did not present insuperable obstacles to governance until the deepening of polarization in the mid-1990s.”Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, makes a different argument: “I think that our current problems are directly traceable to deficiencies in the formal structures of the American political system as set out in 1787 and too infrequently amended thereafter.”In his 2008 book, “Our Undemocratic Constitution,” Levinson writes, “I have become ever more despondent about many structural provisions of the Constitution that place almost insurmountable barriers in the way of any acceptable notion of democracy.”In support of his thesis, Levinson asks readers to respond to a series of questions “by way of preparing yourself to scrutinize the adequacy of today’s Constitution”:Do you support giving Wyoming the same number of votes in the Senate as California which has roughly seventy times the population? Are you comfortable with an Electoral College that has regularly placed in the White House candidates who did not get a majority and, in at least two — now three — cases over the past 50 years did not even come in first? Are you concerned that the president might have too much power, whether to spy on Americans without any congressional or judicial authorization or to frustrate the will of the majority of both houses of Congress by vetoing legislation with which he disagrees on political ground?Pessimistic assessments of the capacity of the American political system to withstand extremist challenge are by no means ubiquitous among the nation’s scholars; many point to the strength of the judiciary in rejecting the Trump campaign’s claims of election fraud and to the 2022 defeat of prominent proponents of “the big lie.” In this view, the system of checks and balances is still working.Kurt Weyland, a political scientist at the University of Texas-Austin, is the author of the forthcoming book “Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat.” Weyland contended by email that instead of treating the “United States’ counter-majoritarian institutions as a big problem, firm checks and balances have served as a safeguard against the very real threats posed by Trump’s populism.”Weyland continued:Without independent and powerful courts; without independent state and city governments; without federalism, which precluded central-gov’t interference in the electoral system; and without a bicameral congress, in which even Republicans slowed down Trump by dragging their feet; without all these aspects of US counter-majoritarianism, Trump could have done significantly more damage to U.S. democracy.Polarization, Wayland argued, is a double-edged sword:In a counter-majoritarian system, it brings stalemate and gridlock that allows a populist leader like Trump to claim, “Only I can do it,” namely cut through this Gordian knot, with “highly problematic” miracle cures like “Build the Wall.’ ”But at the same time, Weyland continued,Polarization has one — unexpected — beneficial effect, namely, to severely limit the popular support that Trump could ever win: Very few Democrats would ever support him! Thus, whereas other undemocratic populists like Peru’s Fujimori, Venezuela’s Chavez, or now El Salvador’s Bukele won overwhelming mass support — 70-90 percent approval — and used it to push aside liberal obstacles to their insatiable power hunger, Trump never even reached 50 percent. A populist who’s not very popular simply cannot do that much damage to democracy.Along similar lines, Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, argues in a 2019 paper, “Populism and the American Party System: Opportunities and Constraints,” that compared with most other democracies, “the U.S. system offers much less opportunity for organized populist parties but more opportunity for populist candidacies.”The two major parties, Lee continues, are more “vulnerable to populist insurgency than at other points in U.S. history because of (1) changes in communications technology, (2) the unpopularity of mainstream parties and party leaders and (3) representation gaps created by an increasingly racialized party system.”At the same time, according to Lee, “the U.S. constitutional system impedes authoritarian populism, just as it obstructs party power generally. But the vulnerability of the major parties to populist insurgency poses a threat to liberal democratic norms in the United States, just as it does elsewhere.”American public opinion, in Lee’s view, “cannot be relied on as a bulwark of liberal rights capable of resisting populism’s tendencies toward authoritarianism and anti-pluralism.”While the U.S. electoral system “has long been unfavorable to insurgent or third parties, including populist parties,” Lee writes, the avenue to political power lies in the primary nomination process:The American system of nominations subjects the major parties to radically open internal competition through primary elections. The combined result of these electoral rules is that populists win more favorable outcomes in intraparty competition than in interparty competition.In one area of agreement with Levitsky and Ziblatt, Lee makes the case that the diminishing — that is, veiled — emphasis of previous generations of Republican leaders on divisive issues of race, ethnicity and immigration provided a crucial opening for Trump.“Before 2016, the national leadership of the Republican and Democratic Parties had been trending toward closer convergence on policy issues relating to race and ethnicity, both in terms of party positions and rhetoric,” she writes, adding that “before 2016, the two parties also did not offer clear alternatives on immigration.”This shift to a covert rather than an overt approach to racial issues created an opening for Trump to run as a broadly “anti-elite” candidate representing the views of the white working class.“Willing to violate norms against the use of racialized rhetoric, Trump was able to offer primary voters a product that other Republican elites refused to supply,” Lee writes. “Those appeals strengthened his populist, anti-elite credentials and probably contributed to his success in winning the nomination.”There is a third line of analysis that places a strong emphasis on the economic upheaval produced by the transition from a manufacturing economy to a technologically based knowledge economy.In their June 2023 article “The Revival of U.S. Populism: How 39 Years of Manufacturing Losses and Educational Gains Reshaped the Electoral Map,” Scott Abrahams and Frank Levy, economists at Louisiana State University and M.I.T., make the case that polarization and institutional gridlock have roots dating back more than four decades:The current revival of right-wing populism in the United States reaches back to 1980, a year that marked a broad shift in national production and the demand for labor. In that year, manufacturing employment began a long decline and the wage gap between college and high school graduates began a long expansion.The result, Abrahams and Levy contend:was a growing geographic alignment of income, educational attainment and, increasingly, cultural values. The alignment reinforced urban/rural and coastal/interior distinctions and contributed to both the politicization of a four-year college degree and the perception of educated “elites” or “coastal elites” — central parts of today’s populist rhetoric.Abrahams and Levy conclude: “If our argument is correct, it has taken almost 40 years to reach our current level of polarization. If history is a guide, it won’t quickly disappear.”Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, argued in an email that the strains on the American political system grow out of the interaction between divisive economic and cultural trends and the empowerment of racial and ethnic minorities: “The inevitable emerging socio-economic divisions in the transition to knowledge societies — propelled by capitalist creative destruction — and the sociocultural kinship divisions develop a politically explosive stew due to the nature of U.S. political institutions.”On one side, Kitschelt wrote, “Technological innovation and economic demand patterns have led to a substitution of humans in routine tasks jobs by ‘code’ and machines — whether in manufacturing or services/white collar occupations. These precipitate wage stagnation and decline.”On the other side, “There is a revolution of kinship relations that got underway with the access of women to higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. This has led to a questioning of traditional paternalistic family relations and triggered a reframing of gender conceptions and relations, as well as the nature and significance of procreation and socialization of the next generation.”The interaction, Kitschelt continued, “of socio-economic anxiety-promoting decline amplified by rapid demographic erosion of the share of white Anglo-Saxon ethnics, and cultural stress due to challenges of paternalist kinship relations and advances of secularization have given rise to the toxic amalgam of white Christian nationalism. It has become a backbone and transmission belt of right-wing populism in the U.S.”At the same time, Kitschelt acknowledged, “Levitsky and Ziblatt are absolutely right that it is the circumstances of enslavement at the founding moment of U.S. independence and democracy that created a system of governance that enable a determined minority (the enslavers) to maintain a status quo of domination, exploitation, and dehumanization of a whole tier of members of society which could not be undone within the locked-in web of institutional rules.”To support his argument, Kitschelt cited “the process in which Trump was chosen as U.S. president”:Roughly 10 percent of registered voters nationwide participated in the Republican presidential primaries in 2016. The plurality primary winner, Donald Trump, rallied just 3-5 percent of U.S. registered voters to endorse his candidacy and thereby sail on to the Republican Party nomination. These 3-5 percent of the U.S. registered voters — or 2-4 percent of the U.S. adult residential population — then made it possible for Trump to lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College majority.All of which gets us back to the Przeworski dictum with which I began this column, that “democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.”Przeworski’s claim, Henry Farrell, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, writes in an essay published last month, “inspired a lot of political scientists to use game theory to determine the conditions under which democracy was ‘self-enforcing’: that is, how everyone’s beliefs and actions might line up to make democracy a self-fulfilling prophecy.”At the same time, Farrell continues, “his argument powerfully suggests a theory of democratic fragility, too.” What happens when “some powerful organized force, such as a political party, may look to overturn democratic outcomes” or “such a force may look to ‘drastically reduce the confidence of other actors in democratic institutions’”?At that point, as the two parties react to each other, Farrell suggests, “democracy can become self-unraveling rather than self-enforcing”:If you (as say the leader of the Republican Party) look to overturn an election result through encouraging your supporters to invade the U.S. Capitol, and claim that the election was a con, then I (as a Democratic Party leader) am plausibly going to guess that my chances of ever getting elected again will shrivel into nonexistence if you gain political power again and are able to rig the system. That may lead me to be less willing to play by the rules, leading to further collapse of confidence on your part and so on, in a downward spiral.In other words, with a majority of Republicans aligned with an authoritarian leader, Democrats will be the group to watch if Trump wins re-election in November 2024, especially so if Republicans win control of both the House and Senate.While such a turn of events would replicate the 2016 election results, Democrats now know much more about what an across-the-board Republican victory would mean as Trump and his allies have more or less announced their plans for 2025 if they win in 2024: the empowerment of a party determined to politicize the civil service, a party committed to use the Department of Justice and other agencies to punish Democrats, a party prepared to change the rules of elections to guarantee the retention of its majorities.In a report last month, “24 for ’24: Urgent Recommendations in Law, Media, Politics and Tech for Fair and Legitimate 2024 U.S. Elections,” an ad hoc committee convened by the Safeguarding Democracy Project and U.C.L.A. Law School warned:“The 2020 elections confirmed that confidence in the fairness and legitimacy of the election system in the United States can no longer be taken for granted. Without the losing side accepting the results of a fair election as legitimate, the social fabric that holds democracy together can fray or tear.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Apotheosis of Jim Jordan Is a Sight to Behold

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      No problem in the American system at this moment is as acute and disruptive as the one posed by the Republican Party.Yes, of course, there are any number of structural problems facing American politics.Our system of elections — first-past-the-post voting, the Electoral College, single-member districts and partisan gerrymandering — feeds into and amplifies our partisan and ideological polarization. Our system of federalism and dual sovereignty between state and national government allows for laboratories of autocracy as much as testing grounds for democracy. Our counter-majoritarian institutions and supermajority rules stymie democratic majorities and turn stability into stasis, putting terrible stress on our entire political system.But it’s hard to deal with any of those, or even just live with them, when one of our two major parties is on a downward spiral of dysfunction, with each version of itself more chaotic and deviant than the last.For years, it has been evident that the Republican Party can’t govern. When Donald Trump was in office, it was revealing to see the extent to which Republican majorities in Congress struggled to write and pass any legislation of consequence. To wit, after an unsuccessful herculean lift trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and a successful effort to cut taxes (the lowest hanging fruit on the conservative menu), congressional Republicans essentially stopped legislating until they were dislodged from control of the House in the 2018 midterms.What’s become clear of late, in the midst of the chaos that has left the House without a speaker at a particularly fraught moment in foreign and domestic affairs, is that Republicans are as unable to organize themselves as they are incapable of leading the affairs of state.The worst of the problem of the Republican Party, however, is evident in the rise of Jim Jordan and the ascendance of the insurrection wing of the party, with only modest opposition from supposedly more reasonable Republican lawmakers.Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, for example, has a reputation for being reasonable. He is staunchly conservative, but his feet are mostly planted in reality.Crenshaw has been publicly critical of the most disruptive and intransigent members of the House Republican conference, especially those in the House Freedom Caucus, and even wrote an essay in The Wall Street Journal condemning the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. A small gesture, all things considered, but still more than most of his colleagues could manage.Crenshaw seems like the kind of Republican who would oppose Jordan’s bid to be speaker of the House. Jordan, first elected to the House in 2006, is a far-right ideologue and conspiracy theorist whose most notable accomplishment in office was helping to organize his fellow ideologues and conspiracy theorists into the House Freedom Caucus in 2015. Jordan, who represents the Fourth District of Ohio, was one of Trump’s leading supporters in the months leading up to and following the 2020 presidential election, accusing Democrats, repeatedly, of trying to steal the election.“Jim Jordan was deeply involved in Donald Trump’s antidemocratic efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Thomas Joscelyn, one of the authors of the final report from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, told CNN last week. “Jordan also helped organize congressional opposition to counting Biden’s certified electoral votes. None of Jordan’s efforts were rooted in legitimate objections. He simply sought to keep Donald Trump in power, contrary to the will of the American people.”Crenshaw’s stated contempt for exactly the kind of rhetoric and behavior exemplified by Jordan has not, however, stopped the Texas Republican from backing his colleague from Ohio for speaker of the House. In an interview on Sunday with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Crenshaw claimed that Jordan had “become part of the solution, not part of the problem” with regard to the chaos among House Republicans and dismissed Jordan’s contempt for the law and attempt to overturn the presidential election as non-issues. “If I held that grudge, I wouldn’t have friends in the conference,” Crenshaw said. “I was on an island there.”Crenshaw isn’t the only supposedly reasonable Republican member of Congress willing to look past the fact that the leading candidate for speaker of the House was an active participant in a scheme to subvert the Constitution and install a defeated president in office for a second term.“Even some of the Republicans who have vowed, publicly and privately, to fight him at every turn are beginning to get weak knees about supporting him, fearing that collective will is dwindling as their numbers decrease,” Politico reports. Jordan’s allies have also expressed their view that the opposition to his bid for speaker will melt away as the actual vote on the floor comes near.Once again, Republicans are confronted with a deeply transgressive figure with open contempt for the institutions of American democracy, flawed as they may be. Once again, Republicans swear they’ll resist his ascent. Once again, Republicans cave, more fearful of losing a primary — or coming in for criticism from conservative media — than they are of virtually anything else.And each time they cave, these more moderate or mainstream Republicans make the situation a little worse, for themselves and for the country. Kevin McCarthy bowed to expediency and pressure when he voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the House of Representatives. He did the same when he empowered the most gleeful insurrectionists in his attempt to gain the speaker’s gavel. Now he’s out, and Jim Jordan is on the rise.If he wins, Jordan may not last in the position. The kind of speaker who must twist arms and make threats using conservative media to win the job is, in the modern House, not the kind of speaker who survives long beyond the next election cycle, even if his party holds its majority.Who will replace Jim Jordan if and when he falls? It could well be someone worse. And it will probably be someone worse, because there is nothing happening inside the Republican Party right now that can keep it from falling even farther into the abyss.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Biden Has to Look Beyond Trump and His MAGA Millions

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      Last week, President Biden gave a wide-ranging interview to John Harwood of ProPublica that touched on his presidency, the Republican Party and the present state and future status of American democracy.Early in the interview, Harwood asks Biden whether he thinks the threat to democracy is broader than the refusal of Donald Trump and his allies to accept election defeats:As you think about the threat to democracy, do you think about it specifically as the refusal to accept election defeats and peaceful transfer of power? Or does it more broadly encompass some of the longstanding features of democracy, like the Electoral College, the nature of the Senate, the gerrymandering process, that sometimes thwarts the will of the majority?In his answer, Biden more or less confirms that yes, when he speaks of the threat to democracy, he specifically means the threat coming from the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. For Biden, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are the “underpinnings of democracy.” The issue, for him, is that MAGA Republicans would try to overturn elections and “prevent the people’s voice” from being expressed, not to mention heard.Toward the end of the interview, Biden takes care to emphasize the extent to which he separates MAGA Republicans from the rest of the public. “I really do believe the vast majority of the American people are decent, honorable, straightforward,” the president says. The MAGA radicals, he adds, are “a minority of the minority.” Biden goes on to argue that this majority of decent Americans “needs to understand what the danger is if they don’t participate.”This last point is interesting. If the most radicalized and anti-democratic segment of the public is also a small and unrepresentative minority, then there’s no real reason to worry about its influence on electoral politics. Yes, it may elect a few similarly radical members of Congress — who at this moment are giving the Republican speaker of the House a terrible headache — and it may even be strong enough again to choose a major-party nominee. But if these voters are a distinct minority, that nominee will be easily defeated at the ballot box. That is, unless the institutions of our democracy amplify that minority’s influence — which they do.Biden might reject Harwood’s suggestion that the institutions of the American political system constitute a threat to American democracy as dire as the threat posed by Trump, but the only way to square the circle of a radical minority with democracy-destroying potential is to acknowledge the way our institutions work to empower the people who hope to overturn constitutional government altogether.One response is to say that this dynamic represents a distortion of our political institutions: It’s just that they’re not working properly! But that’s not right, is it?Whatever they were, the radical impulses that animated or shaped the most prominent and influential of the American revolutionaries were refracted through an inherited commitment to the received hierarchies of status that shaped their world. What’s more, the framers of the Constitution were pushed toward a mistrust and wariness of popular government as a result of the riots, rebellions and other forms of mass discontent that characterized American politics under the Articles of Confederation.For as much as we have changed and transformed our political institutions — to make them far more inclusive and responsive than they were at their inception — it is also clear that they retain the stamp of their heritage.Our counter-majoritarian institutions, for example, continue to place an incredibly higher barrier to efforts to reduce concentrations of wealth and promote greater economic equality. There is a real chance, for example, that the Supreme Court will deem a wealth tax constitutionally impermissible in its next term. And the United States Senate is a graveyard of attempts to expand federal aid and social insurance, the most recent of which was a child allowance that, while it was in effect, slashed child poverty by nearly half in 2021.But more immediate to Biden’s concerns about democracy is the fact, as I have discussed before, that the Trump crisis may never have materialized if not for specific institutions, like the Electoral College, that gave Trump the White House despite his defeat at the hands of most voters. And even with the Electoral College, Trump might not have won if our Supreme Court had not, in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidated the most aggressive and effective rule for the federal protection of voting rights since Reconstruction.Trump aside, various efforts to invalidate elections and create durable systems of minority rule in the states are possible only because of a constitutional structure that gives a considerable amount of power and sovereignty to sub-national units of political authority.Naturally, a U.S. president cannot publicly say that the system he presides over has serious flaws that undermine its integrity. But it does. And there is a good chance that if Trump becomes president a second time, it will be less because the voting public wants him and more because our institutions have essentially privileged his supporters with greater electoral power. If anyone is aware of this, it has to be Biden, who won the national popular vote by six million in 2020, but would have lost the election if not for a few tens of thousands of votes across a handful of so-called swing states.All of this is to say that assuming we meet the immediate challenge and keep Trump from winning next year, it will be worth it for Americans to start to think — out loud, in a collective and deliberate manner — about the kinds of structural reforms we might pursue to make our democracy more resilient or even to realize it more fully in the first place.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      What if the Framers Got Something Critical Wrong?

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      Here are three instances in American history, out of many, when the rules of our system preserved a failed or suboptimal status quo against the views — and the votes — of a majority of Americans and their representatives.In 2021, 232 members of the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in summoning and provoking the mob that attacked and ransacked the United States Capitol building on Jan. 6. Not long after, 57 members of the Senate voted to convict Trump. But because the Constitution demands a two-thirds supermajority for conviction in an impeachment trial, the considered decision of a substantial majority of Congress — backed by a substantial majority of the public — was thwarted by the veto of a self-interested, partisan minority.A couple of generations earlier, between 1971 and 1972, the vast majority of lawmakers in Congress — 354 members of the House and 84 members of the Senate — voted to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and send it to the states. Most Americans, according to surveys at the time, wanted to make the E.R.A. the 27th amendment to the Constitution. And within five years of passage in Washington, legislatures in 35 states — which constituted a majority of the nation’s legislators — had voted for ratification. But 35 states was three short of the three-fourths needed for the amendment to succeed. By the time the deadline for ratifying the E.R.A. came in 1982, the amendment was essentially dead in the water.Decades before that, in 1922, the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill passed the House, 230 to 119. It was supported by President Warren G. Harding, a Republican, as well as the large Republican majority in the Senate. But that majority was not large enough to overcome a Democratic filibuster — spearheaded by Jim Crow lawmakers from the South — and the bill died before it could come to a vote. It would take a full century after the death of the Dyer bill for Congress to pass, and the president to sign, an anti-lynching bill into law.The American political system — with its federalism, bicameralism and separation of powers — consists of overlapping majoritarian and counter-majoritarian institutions designed to promote stability and continuity at the expense of popular government. Not content to build structural impediments to change, the framers of the Constitution also insisted on supermajority thresholds for a number of key actions: executive and judicial impeachment, ratification of foreign treaties and the passage and ratification of constitutional amendments. The Constitution also allows for the legislature to make its own rules regarding its conduct and both chambers of Congress have, at different points in their histories, adopted de facto supermajority rules for passing legislation.Americans are so accustomed and acculturated to these supermajority rules that they often treat their value as self-evident — a natural and necessary part of American constitutionalism. No, we don’t want to subject our every political decision to simple majority rule. Yes, we want to raise the highest possible barrier to removing a president or changing the rules of the game.Defenses of supermajority rules tend to rest on claims related to what appears to be common sense. The argument goes like this: Supermajority rules stabilize our political institutions, encourage deliberation, secure consensus for change and protect minorities from the tyranny of overbearing majorities. But as the political theorist Melissa Schwartzberg argues in her 2014 book, “Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule,” the story isn’t so simple, and the actual value of supermajority rules isn’t clear at all.It is certainly true that supermajority rules promote stability of institutions and the norms that are supposed to govern them. There is a reason, after all, that the United States Constitution has only been amended 27 times in 235 years. But, Schwartzberg asks, “How can we determine which norms are worth stabilizing” since “for any given political community, different institutional arrangements could ensure security of expectations and make ordinary political life possible — even the set of rights and their scope could vary.”Do we defer to the wisdom of the framers? What if, in our estimation, they got something critical wrong? And even if they didn’t, should the dead hand of the past so strongly outweigh the considerations of the present? Do we defer to wisdom and tradition under the assumption that stability is de facto evidence of consent?But here’s where we come to the Catch-22, because the stability of our system rests on supermajority rules so strong that they stymie all but the broadest attempts to change that system. And who is to say that stability is such a paramount goal? In a dynamic society, which is to say in a human society, promoting stability with little institutional recourse for reform might ultimately be more disruptive because it creates friction, and thus energy, that will be released one way or another.What of the claim that supermajority rules — like the filibuster or the ones that structure the constitutional amendment process — promote consensus? Here again, Schwartzberg says, we have to think carefully about what we mean. If by consensus we mean the aggregate opinions of the community, then there might be a basis for supporting supermajority rules, although that raises another question: What is the threshold for success? The two-thirds demand for impeachment in the Senate, for example, is essentially arbitrary. So is the three-fourths of states threshold for ratifying a constitutional amendment. There is no rational standard to use here, only a feeling that “most” people want something.In which case, if what you want is some general sense that a specific outcome is what the community or legislative body generally wants, then it’s not clear that supermajority rules are the optimal solution. Consider what Schwartzberg calls an “acclamatory” conception of consensus. In this version, what the community believes is true or prudent is what it is “willing to let a belief stand as the group’s view,” even if there is a significant minority that disagrees.Not every American may believe, to use Schwartzberg’s example, that “freedom of the press ought to be unlimited,” but they are “willing to accept that the view of the United States is that Congress should not restrict the ability of newspapers to publish as they see fit.” As citizens, Schwartzberg writes, “they recognize they are implicated in this view, even if as private individuals they may disagree with it.”If what we want out of a decision to remove a president or pass an amendment is an acclamatory consensus of this sort, then rather than set a supermajority rule — which would permit a minority to preserve a status quo that no longer commands the acclamatory support of the group — what we might use instead, Schwartzberg suggests, is a system that privileges serious and long-term deliberation, so that the minority on a particular question feels satisfied enough to consent to the view of a simple majority, even if it still disagrees.As for the question of minority protection from majority tyranny, one of the quirks of nearly all supermajority rules is that they make no distinction between different kinds of minorities. This means that they are as likely to protect and strengthen privileged and powerful minorities as they are to empower and defend weak ones. Looking at the American experience, we see much more of the former than we do of the latter, from the arc of the “slave power” in antebellum America to the specific case of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill to recent efforts to protect the civil rights of more vulnerable Americans.This gets to the most powerful point Schwartzberg makes about the impact of supermajority rules on democratic life. Democracy, she writes, “entails a commitment to the presumption of epistemic equality among its citizens.” Put another way, democracy assumes an equal capacity to judge one’s interests — or at least what an individual believes is her interest. This epistemic equality is “manifested institutionally in formally equal voting power.” In a democracy, our political institutions should affirm the fact that we are equal.In the United States, ours do not. The rules of the game here tend to elevate the views and judgments of some citizens over others, to the point where under certain circumstances small, factional minorities can rule with no regard for the views of the majority in their communities. Whether it is the supermajority rules of the Senate or the counter-majoritarianism of the Electoral College and the Supreme Court, our system makes it clear that some voices are more equal than others.One might say, even so, that the wisdom of the framers and of past generations holds true. But as Americans struggle against their own counter-majoritarian institutions and supermajoritarian rules to stop the ascendance of a wannabe authoritarian, I am not so sure that wisdom holds true.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Biden to Create Library Honoring His Friend and Rival John McCain

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      In a stop in Arizona, a key battleground state in next year’s election, the president plans to embrace the longtime Republican senator and vocal Trump critic.President Biden plans to announce on Thursday that he will devote federal money to create a new library and museum dedicated to his old friend and adversary, Senator John McCain, seeking to embrace a Republican who stood against former President Donald J. Trump.After stops in Michigan and California this week, Mr. Biden arrived in Phoenix on Wednesday night in advance of a speech at the Tempe Center for the Arts on Thursday morning, when he intends to honor the legacy of Mr. McCain, who represented Arizona in the House and Senate for 35 years before dying of brain cancer in 2018.The McCain project was compared by people familiar with the plan to a presidential-style library and museum for a man who tried twice to reach the White House but never did. In affiliation with Arizona State University, the new institution would house Mr. McCain’s papers as well as offer exhibits about his life, including possibly a reproduction of the so-called Hanoi Hilton, where he was held in North Vietnam as a prisoner of war for five and a half years.The announcement will be included in a speech that is meant to focus on what the president characterizes as a battle for American democracy as he faces the prospect of a rematch next year against Mr. Trump, who has been charged by both federal and Georgia state prosecutors with trying to subvert the 2020 election to hold on to power. In a summary that it distributed, the White House said defending democracy “continues to be the central cause of Joe Biden’s presidency.”The speech, according to the White House, will focus on the importance of American institutions in preserving democracy and the value of following the Constitution. It comes after three addresses Mr. Biden gave last year about the state of the country’s democracy and will brand Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement a radical threat.“There is something dangerous happening in America,” Mr. Biden plans to say, according to advance excerpts released by the White House. “There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy: the MAGA movement.”“Not every Republican — not even the majority of Republicans — adhere to the extremist MAGA ideology,” he plans to add. “I know because I’ve been able to work with Republicans my whole career. But there is no question that today’s Republican Party is driven and intimidated by MAGA extremists. Their extreme agenda, if carried out, would fundamentally alter the institutions of American democracy as we know it.”The renewed focus on Mr. Trump comes as Mr. Biden is being pressed to draw a sharper contrast with his once-and-possibly-future rival to remind Democrats and independents disenchanted with his own presidency of the stakes in next year’s election.Months of trying to claim credit for “Bidenomics,” as he calls his economic program, have not moved his approval numbers, as many voters, including most Democrats, tell pollsters that they worry about the 80-year-old president’s age. Democratic strategists argue that whatever Mr. Biden’s weaknesses, swing voters will come back to him once they focus on Mr. Trump as the alternative.In paying tribute to Mr. McCain, Mr. Biden hopes to reach out to anti-Trump Republicans and appeal to voters more generally in one of the battleground states that many analysts believe will determine the outcome next year. Mr. Biden and Mr. McCain served in the Senate together for many years and were friendly despite being from opposite parties. Even after running on opposing tickets in 2008, when Mr. McCain was the Republican presidential nominee and Mr. Biden was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, they maintained a respectful relationship.Mr. McCain was one of the most vocal Republican critics of Mr. Trump, and Cindy McCain, the senator’s widow, endorsed Mr. Biden against the incumbent president of her party in 2020. In return, he appointed her to be his ambassador to United Nations agencies for food and agriculture in Rome. Earlier this year, she was appointed executive director of the United Nations World Food Program.Mrs. McCain will join Mr. Biden on Thursday morning along with other relatives of the senator, Gov. Katie Hobbs and members of Arizona’s congressional delegation. The president plans to use leftover money from the American Rescue Plan, the pandemic relief spending package approved shortly after he took office, to finance the new library.The library, described as a facility to provide education, work and health monitoring programs to underserved communities, will be formed in partnership with Arizona State and the McCain Institute, a public policy organization devoted to advancing issues like democracy, human rights, national security and human trafficking. More

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      The Republican Party Has Devolved Into a Racket

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      This is the Republican Party today. In the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, trying to corral a fractious majority, has ordered an impeachment inquiry into President Biden over his son’s financial entanglements, even as elements in his caucus push to shut down the government unless there are drastic cuts in spending. In the Senate, Mitt Romney announced his plan to retire, having declared to his biographer that “a very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”In Wisconsin and North Carolina, G.O.P. legislators push the envelope of hardball tactics to remove or disempower Democrats in other branches of government. And in the presidential campaign, Republican contenders struggle to make the case for a non-Trump candidacy without antagonizing Donald Trump’s many supporters, and often avoid major spheres of public policy.Together these depict a party that is preoccupied with antics that crash into the guardrails of American political life and conspicuously lacks a coherent, forward-looking vision for governing. A modern political party has devolved into a racket.The country needs a right-of-center party. But today, as the G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless, the line separating party politics from political conspiracy has frayed. Mr. Trump, in this way, is the product more than the author of that collective party failure.The Georgia election case against Mr. Trump and 18 others makes for a particularly powerful X-ray of the party. The sheer array and specific identities of those indicted in the case highlights how easily a conspiracist approach to political life, unconstrained by a party now incapable of policing boundaries or channeling passions into a larger purpose beyond raw hardball, can justify and compel illicit machinations.The defendants in the Georgia case represent every major component of what scholars term a modern “party network”: formal party organizations at the state and local level (like the former Georgia party chairman David Shafer), informal activist and interest groups (like John Eastman of the Claremont Institute) and candidate-centered operations (like Harrison Floyd of Black Voices for Trump).Beyond those indicted, the broader party work of evasion and deflection contributes to the conspiracy. The posture’s stock-in-trade is an “anti-anti” discourse, which focuses on excoriating foes rather than making explicit defenses of behavior or positive arguments about plans for the country. As Senator Romney described the dynamic among his colleagues, “These guys have got to justify their silence, at least to themselves.” A conservative media ecosystem, including Fox News, helps enable a politics of performative antics and profits handsomely from it.The Trump-focused personalism that has defined Republican politics since 2015 is more a symptom than the cause of the party’s pathology. Indeed, the combined conspiracy of insider electoral malfeasance and outsider “anti-anti” attacks says less about how spellbound the party is by Mr. Trump than about how aimless it has become beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.Conspiracism has a long provenance on the American right, reaching back to McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. So does a ruthlessly mercenary view of political parties. A speaker at the second Conservative Political Action Conference in 1975 deemed parties “no more than instruments, temporary and disposable.” Such activists soon occupied the party’s commanding heights.Along with that activism came the constriction of the party’s vision for the public good. Starting in the 1970s, Republicans won elections by marrying a regressive economic agenda with us-versus-them populist appeals. At moments like the “Reagan revolution,” Jack Kemp’s work to broaden conservatism’s appeal to more working-class voters or George W. Bush and Karl Rove’s ambition to build an enduring Republican majority around an “opportunity society,” the party’s collective effort could take on a confident and expansive cast.But the programmatic side of the party, under the leadership of figures like Paul Ryan (a Kemp protégé), came eventually to alienate even the party’s own base with an unpopular agenda more and more tailored to the affluent.By 2016, as a demagogue unleashed a hostile takeover of a hollowed and delegitimized party, the conspiracism and the transactional view of political institutions had fully joined. Conspiracism brought about active conspiracy.But conspiracy and party have an even longer history, one that stretches back to the frenzied and unbounded politics of the early Republic. In the 1790s, the emergent parties of Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans fell into personalized strife, but possessed neither the legitimacy nor the machinery to channel and stabilize the conflict. The organizers of new party activity on both sides were, to a one, avowedly antiparty politicians, and so they conceived of their efforts as a temporary expediency — emergency measures necessary to combat the nefarious conspiracies threatening to undermine the Constitution.In an era in which personal reputation was still inextricable from conflict over public matters, politicians refused to accept their opponents as legitimate, let alone as constituting a loyal opposition.For example, the vitriol and paranoia that attended the election of 1800, pitting the incumbent John Adams against Thomas Jefferson, underscored the danger that a politics unfettered by strong parties poses to the Republic. The election featured not merely epic bouts of mudslinging but credible threats of collective violence and secession from both sides.The construction of mass political parties in subsequent generations — organizations with huge electoral bases and institutions like nominating conventions for party decision-making — channeled individual ambition into collective public purposes. At times, to be sure, as when Democratic pioneers of the mass party of the 19th century aimed for a cross-sectional politics that would sideline the divisive slavery question, the stability achieved through party politics actually suppressed conflict necessary to providing genuine political alternatives.But with mass parties came a shared understanding that the erosion of collective party principle could threaten a reversion to the 18th century’s politics-as-cabal. As the early political scientist Francis Lieber put it in 1839, “all parties are exposed to the danger of passing over into factions, which, if carried still farther, may become conspiracies.”The Republican Party of the 21st century has succumbed to that danger, and so revived something of the brittle and unstable quality of politics in the Republic’s early years. This leaves the Republic itself, now as then, vulnerable.Parties organize political conflict — what the political theorists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum term “the discipline of regulated rivalry” — but they also offer projects with visions, however blinkered and partial, for how societies should handle their challenges and build their futures.Without that commitment to solve problems, the tendencies to conspiracism and ultimately conspiracy prove harder to resist. Barring the sort of fundamental course correction that typically comes only from the defeats of many political actors in multiple elections, those tendencies inside the Republican Party will endure long after, and regardless of how, Mr. Trump departs from the scene.This is not to impugn every Republican. As confirmed by both the federal and Georgia election-related indictments, many Republican officials, like the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, resisted intense pressure to interfere with the election and did their duty. And for all their defenses of Mr. Trump against his several indictments, his Republican presidential rivals have generally shied away from taking the critical step of saying they would have acted differently from Mike Pence when the Electoral College votes were counted at the Capitol on Jan. 6.But these responsible individual actions simply cannot substitute for a conspicuously missing party project.Might that project emerge from Republican governors? Lacking the option of substituting antics for governance, they have forged viable approaches in power. Indeed, many of the country’s most popular governors are Republicans.But our polarized political system is also a nationalized one, where state-level success as a problem solver too often obstructs rather than clears a path to national influence within the Republican Party. And we have no illusions that behavior dangerous to democracy will lead to long-lasting punishment at the polls.To see the personalism around Mr. Trump in the context of the entire party is to see past the breathless statements about his magnetic appeal and to observe a party more bent on destroying its enemies than on the tough work of solving hard problems.As long as that remains so, the impulse to conspiracy will remain, and democracy will depend on keeping it in check.Sam Rosenfeld, an associate professor of political science at Colgate, and Daniel Schlozman, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, are the authors of the forthcoming “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Republicans Don’t Mind the Constitution. It’s Democracy They Don’t Like.

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      “A very large portion of my party,” Senator Mitt Romney of Utah tells McKay Coppins of The Atlantic, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”Romney doesn’t elaborate further in the article, and Coppins, who spoke to him in depth and at length, beginning in 2021, for a forthcoming biography, does not speculate on what exactly Romney meant with this assessment of his co-partisans.If Romney was using “the Constitution” as a rhetorical stand-in for “American democracy,” then he’s obviously right. Faced with a conflict between partisan loyalty and ideological ambition on one hand and basic principles of self-government and political equality on the other, much of the Republican Party has jettisoned any commitment to America’s democratic values in favor of narrow self-interest.The most glaring instance of this, of course, is Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which was backed by prominent figures in the Republican Party, humored by much of the Republican establishment and affirmed, in the wake of an insurrectionary attack on the Capitol by supporters of the former president, by a large number of House and Senate Republican lawmakers who voted to question the results.Other examples of the Republican Party’s contempt for democratic principles include the efforts of Republican-led state legislatures to write political majorities out of legislative representation with extreme partisan gerrymanders; the efforts of those same legislatures to raise new barriers to voting in order to disadvantage their political opponents; and the embrace of exotic legal claims, like the “independent state legislature theory,” meant to justify outright power grabs.In just the past few months, we’ve seen Tennessee Republicans expel rival lawmakers from the State Legislature for violating decorum by showing their support for an anti-gun protest on the chamber floor, Florida Republicans suspend a duly elected official from office because of a policy disagreement, Ohio Republicans try to limit the ability of Ohio voters to amend the State Constitution by majority vote, Wisconsin Republicans float the possibility that they might try to nullify the election of a State Supreme Court justice who disagrees with their agenda and Alabama Republicans fight for their wholly imaginary right to discriminate against Black voters in the state by denying them the opportunity to elect another representative to Congress.It is very clear that given the power and the opportunity, a large portion of Republican lawmakers would turn the state against their political opponents: to disenfranchise them, to diminish their electoral influence, to limit or even neuter the ability of their representatives to exercise their political authority.So again, to the extent that “the Constitution” stands in for “American democracy,” Romney is right to say that much of his party just doesn’t believe in it. But if Romney means the literal Constitution itself — the actual words on the page — then his assessment of his fellow Republicans isn’t as straightforward as it seems.At times, Republicans seem fixated on the Constitution. When pushed to defend America’s democratic institutions, they respond that the Constitution established “a republic, not a democracy.” When pushed to defend the claim that state legislatures have plenary authority over the structure of federal congressional elections and the selection of presidential electors, Republicans jump to a literal reading of the relevant parts of Article I and Article II to try to disarm critics. When asked to consider gun regulation, Republicans home in on specific words in the Second Amendment — “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” — to dismiss calls for reform.Trump tried to subvert American democracy, yes, but his attempt rested on the mechanisms of the Electoral College, which is to say, relied on a fairly literal reading of the Constitution. Both he and his allies took seriously the fact that our Constitution doesn’t require anything like a majority of the people to choose a president. Attacks on representation and personal freedom — the hyper-gerrymandering of legislatures to preserve and perpetuate minority rule and the attempts to limit or restrict the bodily autonomy of women and other Americans — have operated within the lines drawn by the Constitution, unimpeded or even facilitated by its rules for structuring our political system.Republicans, in other words, do seem to believe in the Constitution, but only insofar as it can be wielded as a weapon against American democracy — that is, the larger set of ideas, intuitions, expectations and values that shape and define political life in the United States as much as particular rules and institutions.Because it splits sovereignty between national and subnational units, because it guarantees some political rights and not others, because it was designed in a moment of some reaction against burgeoning democratic forces, the Constitution is a surprisingly malleable document, when it comes to the shaping of American political life. At different points in time, political systems of various levels of participation and popular legitimacy (or lack thereof) have existed, comfortably, under its roof.Part of the long fight to expand the scope of American democracy has been an ideological struggle to align the Constitution with values that the constitutional system doesn’t necessarily need to function. To give one example among many, when a Black American like George T. Downing insisted to President Andrew Johnson that “the fathers of the Revolution intended freedom for every American, that they should be protected in their rights as citizens, and be equal before the law,” he was engaged in this struggle.Americans like to imagine that the story of the United States is the story of ever greater alignment between our Constitution and our democratic values — the “more perfect union” of the Constitution’s preamble. But the unfortunate truth, as we’re beginning to see with the authoritarian turn in the Republican Party, is that our constitutional system doesn’t necessarily need democracy, as we understand it, to actually work.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Biden Plans Democracy-Focused Speech After Next Republican Primary Debate

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      One location under consideration for the remarks is the democracy-focused McCain Institute in Arizona.President Biden is planning to deliver a major speech on the ongoing threats to democracy in Arizona later this month, with the address scheduled the day after the next Republican presidential primary debate. One location for the speech that has been under discussion is the McCain Institute, according to a person familiar with the planning. The institute, which is devoted to “fighting for democracy,” is named for Senator John McCain, a Republican who served for more than 20 years in the Senate with Mr. Biden and who sparred repeatedly with former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican Party’s front-runner in 2024.Mr. Biden has made the perils facing American democracy a central theme of his 2020 campaign and also his 2024 re-election bid. He also made the case ahead of the 2022 midterms that Mr. Trump and his allies posed a threat to the “soul of the nation.”Anita Dunn, a top White House adviser, told Democratic donors about the upcoming speech on Wednesday in Chicago, the site of the party’s 2024 convention, according to people familiar with her remarks.The White House and Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee invited major contributors to a preview of the party’s convention this week in Chicago. The Biden Victory Fund, which includes the Biden campaign, the national party and all state parties, can collect contributions as large as $929,600 from big donors.Mr. Biden was close to Mr. McCain, who died in 2018, and during his recent trip to Hanoi in Vietnam he visited a memorial there for the late senator, who was held captive as a prisoner of war. “I miss him, I miss him,” Mr. Biden said.The speech would underscore previous efforts by Mr. Biden to focus attention on the cause of democracy. He delivered speech in Philadelphia last September that attempted to frame the midterm elections as a “battle for the soul of this nation,” an echo of his 2020 campaign slogan and another speech in Washington days before the midterm elections.Mr. Biden also briefly pushed for a package of federal voting rights laws last January before dropping the issue after it became clear there was not support among Senate Democrats to change the chamber’s rules to advance the legislation. More