Roe v. Wade and the Tyranny of the Minority
How did we arrive at this point?
Friday, June 24, 2022 was a dark day for democracy in America. It was the day the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade.
Six Supreme Court justices made the decision. One of those six, Clarence Thomas, wrote in his majority opinion that the next step for the Supreme Court should be overturning the use of contraceptives, and overturning the legality of gay relationships and gay marriage.
Somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of Americans are pro-choice. Six Supreme Court justices, representing .000000002 of the American population, are not.
The day before the Roe v. Wade decision was announced, the Supreme Court, by the same 6-3 margin, made another decision that flew in the face of the desires of the majority. They rescinded gun carrying restrictions in various states. This decision comes on the heels of a series of mass shootings.
Their decision took place just as the Senate was passing its first gun control legislation in decades.
There’s another decision that should be coming out of the Supreme Court soon. This case has to do with the government’s ability to delegate authority to government agencies. If in the case of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court rules that Congress doesn’t have the right to delegate authority, the government’s ability to regulate business would be nonexistent.
Based on this Supreme Court’s agenda and the way they view the law, there’s a very good chance they will rule in favor of business and strike down the government’s regulatory authority.
Further adding insult to injury, five of the six justices who are part of these majority decisions were appointed by two presidents—George W. Bush and Donald Trump—who didn’t win the popular vote.
So we have two presidents elected by a minority of Americans nominating justices who have made decisions only a minority of Americans support.
Clearly, the minority is winning. But in reality, this is how it’s always been.
Political scientists and historians refer to this as the tyranny of the minority— when a minority can usurp power and suppress the will of the majority.
Unfortunately, this is the way America has been structured since its inception. This framework gives credence and power to the tyranny of the minority—and is the fundamental flaw of the way democracy functions in the U.S.
If you don’t mind, allow me to trace this fundamental flaw and explain to you its origins.
I’ll begin by telling you about the five men whose ideas were instrumental to the founding of America: Aristotle, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and James Madison.
Aristotle’s contribution is rooted in his extensive writings on the idea of human flourishing. He emphasized in his writings that for people to flourish, inequality had to be tamped down. Aristotle understood that human flourishing had to be egalitarian, so that all people were given the opportunity to flourish.
His ideas were major influences on John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and James Madison—except Madison, as I’ll explain in a moment, misread Aristotle.
John Locke, a physician and Enlightenment philosopher, was heavily influenced by Aristotle’s concept of human flourishing. Locke’s idea was that the pursuit of happiness was the foundation for liberty and human flourishing.
Locke’s ideas on the pursuit of happiness weren’t aimed at self-gratification or fulfilling sensual pleasure; instead they were oriented at a life of the mind, the cultivation of the soul, and the ability to discern imaginary happiness from “true and solid” happiness.
Thomas Jefferson, as a student of both Locke and Aristotle, had the two in mind when he wrote these immoral words in the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Granted, Jefferson, being a wealthy slaveowner, had major blind spots—his “all men are created equal” phrase didn’t take into account the status of slaves and women; both were seen as unequal under the law.
Yet, at the same time, to state the ideal that people (meaning at the time white men) were free to choose their destiny, exclusive of a king or monarch, was radical. But Jefferson’s words weren’t derived from thin air. He had, as I mentioned above, John Locke and Aristotle foremost in his mind.
James Madison was a protege of Thomas Jefferson, and a student of Aristotle and Locke, but he and Jefferson had differing political philosophies.
Jefferson was friends with and influenced by Thomas Paine, the English-born American political activist, whose 1775 pamphlet Common Sense fully captured the revolutionary spirit of the time.
Common Sense, a 47-page publication, advocated independence from England and mobilized citizens of the aspiring new nation to fight for egalitarian rights and government. To this day, Common Sense is one of the best-selling titles in American publishing history.
Paine’s writings inspired Jefferson’s thinking during the Revolutionary Era, leading Jefferson to declare such things as “Banks were more dangerous than standing armies;” “the natural divide between political factions fell between aristocrats and democrats;” and people shouldn’t be intimidated by “the croaking of wealth against the ascendancy of the people.”
James Madison is considered the father of the U.S. Constitution, for his instrumental role in writing it. But even though he was Jefferson’s protege, Madison wasn’t of the same mind as Jefferson, nor did he possess the same revolutionary fervor.
Born into substantial wealth as the child of a prominent plantation family, Madison had a bit of an aristocratic scorn against the Common Sense drive for egalitarian rights—he felt it important to protect the rights of landowners.
Madison prided himself on his scholarly immersion in the writings of Aristotle, and saw both Aristotle and himself as dutiful students of democracy. Yet they differed on what they saw as the rights of property owners in relation to human flourishing.
Both understood that giving votes to everyone could limit the rights of property owners. Madison’s solution was to restrict democracy, while Aristotle’s was to restrict inequality and the rights of property owners.
To Madison, all men might have been created equal, as the Declaration of Independence asserted, but some were more unalienably equal than others. It was the elites, the property owners, who were the ones deserving of human flourishing to the highest degree, while for the masses, human flourishing was available on a case by case basis, depending upon if they merited it.
Madison subscribed to the idea of the “tyranny of the majority,” that if the majority had power, they could subvert the rights of the minority.
Who was this majority?
The ordinary people, who at that time constituted farmers, the poor, slaves, women, artisans, and tradesmen. Madison was deluding himself with his belief in a tyranny of the majority, because the majority had no say; it was the minority—the elite landowners, bankers, slaveowners, and a few others—who ruled the land, and this created a tyranny of the minority.
The majority was looked down on as an unruly, unkempt hot mess; it was the refined elite, through their benevolence and good grace that, by their own self-professed superiority, were saving the majority from doing themselves in.
To protect against the tyranny of the majority, Madison created the representational and republican form of government that the U.S. has, one that grants people the right to elect representatives, but then disenfranchises them to the greatest extent possible.
As two examples of this, until the 17th Amendment became law in 1913, the general public wasn’t able to directly elect U.S. senators—and even though senators are now elected directly, the Senate has never been proportionally representative of the population.
Secondly, with the presidential election, the citizenry doesn’t directly elect the president but instead votes for an electoral college—which, as witness from the elections of 2000 and 2016, the winner of the popular vote total doesn’t necessarily become president.
There are many other ways the tyranny of the minority continues their legacy: the Senate filibuster, which allows a minority of senators to block any legislation; the gerrymandering of congressional districts; the obscene amounts of dark money, funneled by billionaire oligarchs and corporations, that corrupt the political process; the inability to have sane gun control laws; the expansion of voter suppression laws in many states; and as we saw with the Supreme Court’s decision with Roe v. Wade, the ability for the judicial branch to be hijacked by a small minority of religious fanatics and corporatists.
Obviously, this is no way to cultivate and continue the legacy of Aristotle, Locke, Jefferson, and Paine, in terms of allowing for the potential of human flourishing for all.
Instead, due to James Madison’s handiwork, the populace has always been behind the eight ball, far removed from the ideal.
In a tyranny of the minority, there is no relief for the weary masses, because that’s not part of the bargain.
It becomes a catch- 22 for them, in that they are born with severe disadvantages to achieving the ideal of human flourishing, and as they mature, there are further societal impediments to achieving that ideal—underfunded public schools, expensive colleges, massive student debt, systemic racism, weak labor unions, precarious work, unaffordable health care, and now, no access to legal abortions.
Consequently, the elite can look at the majority and say, we can’t let these people have power, they are rowdy, undisciplined, unwashed, uneducated louses. This then validates the elite theory of democracy, that you need elites to take care of commoners.
The elites will use excuses for why commoners don’t deserve help, such as: Money can’t be spent because it’ll put us in a budgetary deficit; or give them money and it creates dependency; or they’re just lazy and shiftless people; or there’s no such thing as a free lunch; or help them and then everyone will want to be helped; or it’s all about personal responsibility; or you have to pull yourself up by the bootstraps; or they’ll spend it on booze or cigarettes or video games or iPhones; or, and this goes to the heart of the Roe v. Wade decision, all they want to do is have sex, get pregnant, and then have abortions in order to wash their hands of their lustful sins; the list goes on and on and on.
It’s time this tyranny of the minority is put by the wayside. The way to do this is by either systemic reform by doing such things as:
***Enacting term limits on Supreme Court justices;
***Adding more justices to the Supreme Court;
***Impeaching Supreme Court justices;
***Ending the Electoral College;
***Reforming the electoral process by establishing ranked choice voting and multi-member House districts;
***Increase the size of the House;
***Make the Senate more representative of the population;
***Allow for more direct democracy;
***End the dark money that pollutes the legislative process;
***Repeal Citizens United;
***End the filibuster;
***Rewrite the U.S. Constitution;
***And more
The other method that will end the tyranny of the minority and its potential to destroy democracy, and has historically taken place in other countries—and the U.S.—when people become enraged by the actions of the minority, is revolution.
No one wants bloodshed. No one wants a revolution. Peaceful reform is the best path and what everyone wants.
The great majority knows the overturning of Roe v. Wade is wrong. A direct democracy, where people have more input and the will of the majority is heard and enshrined as law, is the antidote both to the tyranny of the minority and revolution.
Roe v. Wade has shown that the U.S. is in dire need of a direct form of democracy. Without this transformation, the U.S. is on the path to becoming an illiberal democracy.
An illiberal democracy is defined as “democratically elected regimes often re-elected or reinforced by referendums that ignore the constitutional limits of their power and deprive their citizens of basic rights and liberties.”
Examples of illiberal democracies are Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Slovakia, Turkey, Singapore, Brazil, and a few others. The next step after an illiberal democracy is an authoritarian government, such as in Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and others.
When .000000002 of the American population is telling the entire country what the law should be, that is not democracy. That is an illiberal democracy bordering on authoritarianism.
And because there’s also a religious element underpinning Roe v. Wade’s overturning, it’s also a step in the direction of theocracy.