How to Save Democracy

And Why Democracy is Teetering

Note: I am making a documentary film this year entitled “How to Save Democracy,” and have launched a crowdfunding campaign to help fund the making of it. You can learn more about the campaign and contribute here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/how-to-save-democracy/x/1658357#/

All around the world right now, we see democracy teetering. Many European countries, long bastions of social democracy, have either elected far-right governments or seen far right parties gain a stronghold in their Parliaments.

The biggest threat to democracy though is in the U.S., the longest continuous democracy in the world.

There is the autocratic threat of Donald Trump, running for another term in office, who has articulated language usually expressed by dictators.

But Trump is not the only threat to democracy in the U.S.—the majority of the Republican Party have given up on democracy. This attitude is best summed up by Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, who has said “the U.S. is not a democracy,” and that the Founders set up America as a constitutional republic “because they followed a biblical admonition.”

Johnson is not a lone wolf with his opinion, as you find it expressed all over the place in right-wing circles, from politicians to pundits, right wing media, the twitterati, think tanks, donor networks, and other places.

The constant refrain is that the U.S. is not a democracy but instead a republic; this admonition is often paired with the belief that the U.S., as Mike Johnson and others of his ilk have stated, is a “Christian nation.”

Why these folks differentiate that the U.S. is not a democracy but instead a republic is that they believe democracy, based on majority rule, leads to mob rule, while a republic, in which a minority can hold sway over laws, allows for what they believe is the wisest of the wise to lead the way.

A recent example of this was the 2022 Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade. By a 6-3 vote, the right to an abortion was overturned. Even though 70% of Americans support abortion, six unelected Justices were able to push through against the will of the majority.

This is just one of a number of Supreme Court rulings that go against the will of the majority. But this is no random occurrence—it is a legacy of the backlash against democracy, a movement that predates Trump and finds its roots in the founding of the U.S. and the writing of the Constitution.

America has the world’s oldest written constitution; when the framers wrote it, they didn’t have much context on how a democracy should function, because there weren’t any in the world.

The U.S. Constitution is a brilliant work, yet at the same time it was written in a pre-democratic era. The framers wanted to create a document that allowed a country to be governed by the rule of law, as opposed to the rule of a monarch.

They also wanted to craft something that protected the fledgling nation from mob rule, what they felt could be the tyranny of a majority, whereby a majority could push their way on the minority. But in doing so, they created counter-majoritarian institutions that today allow partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and also govern them.

What we are seeing nowadays are partisan minorities usurping power and governing by minority rule. It becomes especially dangerous when minority rule is empowered by extremist or anti-democratic partisan minorities, as we see with the current Republican Party, who as I pointed out above, believe the U.S. is not a democracy but instead a Christian nation.

In 2020, the organization V-Dem concluded that the Republican Party was now “more similar to autocratic ruling parties, such as the Turkish AKP and Fedez in Hungary, than typical center-right governing parties.”

Fedez in Hungary is the party of Viktor Orban, the autocratic president of Hungary. His is the model for building a constitutional autocracy, what Orban calls an illiberal democracy, and it’s one that many Republicans admire and want to emulate.

What Orban, along with his fellow autocrat Vladimir Putin, define as an illiberal democracy is a nation that follows Christian values, and is guided by the pure of race. In America, this feeds the feelings of white Christians who believe they are in danger of becoming a persecuted national minority.

Over time, the Republican Party has been captured by this mindset. And when Donald Trump arrived on the scene, he understood that the path to becoming the leader of the Republican Party was to dominate the market for the white people who felt they were a persecuted minority. The journalist Ezra Klein summed it up best when he said, “Trump didn’t hijack the Republican Party. He understood it.”

While Trump was president, the Republican Party became deeply immersed in white resentment politics: a 2021 survey found that 84% of Trump voters said they “worry that discrimination against whites will increase significantly in the next few years.”

This led many Trump supporters to embrace the idea of a “great replacement theory,” which claimed that Democrats were using immigration to replace America’s white population.

It’s this theory that is insinuated when Republicans and right-wing media constantly harp on immigrants coming into this country from Mexico.

Trump is no longer president, but the ideas continue and are what fuel his candidacy for another term in office.

Regardless of what 2024’s presidential election brings, there is still the problem of the counter-majoritarian nature of the U.S. Constitution, and the havoc it has wrought in present-day America. Many of America’s venerated political institutions are not very democratic and were not made for democracy.

This is because we are at a place where a partisan minority wields more power than the majority—this is what is known as the tyranny of the minority. And a political system that doesn’t grant majorities considerable say can’t be called a democracy.

If the U.S. was a true democracy, Donald Trump never would have become president, since he lost the popular vote in 2016. For that matter, George W. Bush would never have been elected president in 2000, either.

And if the U.S. allowed for majority rule, there would be no electoral college, no Senate filibuster, the Senate makeup would be much more proportional to the U.S. population—California would not have an equal amount of senators as Wyoming—gerrymandering would be outlawed, and there would be no ability for certain states to create voter suppression laws.

Ultimately, counter-majoritarian rules advance the interests of specific special interests—and in the U.S. those special interests are those of the wealthiest individuals, the largest corporations and Wall Street.

This is why there is no meaningful legislation or rules to address things like wealth and income inequality, climate change, gun control, legalized abortion, the high cost of healthcare, and more, all of which a great majority of Americans want to see addressed in a beneficial manner.

And with no meaningful legislation passing, the American public grows increasingly cynical and comes to believe that all politics and politicians are corrupt. Which makes them susceptible to a demagogue such as Trump who promises he can fix the system by doing things like “draining the swamp.”

With partisan minorities able to consolidate power, it essentially allows losers to win and thwarts and ignores majority opinion. This is how policies became out of sync with majority views.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution didn’t intend to create a system of partisan minority rule; they didn’t even anticipate the rise of political parties. Instead, they imagined a world where local elites without party affiliation would serve as responsible statesmen in pursuit of the public good.

Boy were they wrong. The finished document that became the U.S. Constitution was a compromise between small states and large states, and between slave states and non-slave states. And it was written, as I said above, in a pre-democratic era.

But this is not how it has to be. The U.S. was the first nation to have a written constitution, and other democracies over time have followed suit. The difference is that over the decades and centuries, other democracies have evolved their laws and their constitutions in order to adapt to their populations and fix flaws in their constitutions. The result is that European countries are now much more democratic than the U.S.

What has allowed European democracies to become more democratic than the U.S. are two things: they created proportional representation, and they eliminated counter-majoritarianism. They did this by such things as eliminating the filibuster and putting in a retirement age or term limits for high court judges, thereby limiting the problem of long tenured judges who would bind future generations with antiquated rulings.

It’s time for the U.S. to roll back its counter-majoritarian approach; to do so entails changing the Constitution. The problem is that the U.S. Constitution, as currently written, is virtually impossible to change. The U.S. stands at the top of the index of difficulty in changing its constitution; other democracies have become more democratic than the U.S. because their constitutions are easier to change.

The U.S. has the lowest rate of constitutional change in the world: there have been 11,848 attempts to amend the U.S. Constitution, but only 27—the number of amendments to the Constitution—have been successful; the most recent amendment took place in 1992.

Without an ability to change the Constitution, the U.S. will continue its descent from democracy. The people of the U.S. need to understand that the Constitution was written in a pre-democratic era, and is no longer fully relevant for the current era.

America is at a crossroads: it has the possibility of becoming the world’s first multiracial and multicultural democracy; yet the backlash against this possibility could lead to America no longer being a democracy whatsoever.

Jane Addams, the American activist and reformer, and the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (in 1931), once said “the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.”

That ultimately is the answer, and the path to saving democracy: democracy must be allowed to flourish so that it can work for all, as opposed to working for a select few, which is the present story.