S E E D E D C O N T E N T 
Rosen’s essay, in the new issue of the Atlantic on the theme of American democracy in crisis, warns that those cooling mechanisms have broken down and Madison’s worst fears are now being realized. Presidents now “communicate directly with voters, and pander to the mob,” while Congress and public debate is inflammatory and polarized. The internet has made Madison’s observation that “the ease of communication in small republics [like ancient Athens and Rome] was precisely what had allowed hastily formed majorities to oppress minorities,” newly, terrifyingly relevant, Rosen laments.
The essay is not particularly clear about what instances of “mob rule,” exactly, terrify Rosen so. He suggests he is concerned by the prospect of an inflamed majority oppressing vulnerable minorities — the print headline of the piece is “Madison v. the Mob” — but names no examples of such minority oppression to illustrate his concern. He dubs Twitter and Facebook “virtual versions of the mob,” where “inflammatory posts based on passion travel farther and faster than arguments based on reason,” but doesn’t offer any examples of harm this has produced, even when incredibly obvious examples (like the Russian interference in the 2016 election) are available.
But if I’m correctly interpreting his concern, then Rosen has things exactly backward. American politics does not suffer from an excess of majority rule. It suffers, as the New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg has repeatedly argued, from an excess of minority rule.
The president was elected after losing the popular vote by a margin of 2.1 points, or nearly 2.9 million votes. Republicans won the popular vote for the House of Representatives fair and square in 2016, but election analysts argue that Democrats will likely need to win the House popular vote this year by anything from 6 to 11 points in order to gain a majority. “Only” winning by 5 points probably won’t be enough.
The US Senate is, by design, a grotesquely unrepresentative body that amplifies the power of small states at the expense of voters in big states. And given how America’s political geography has developed in the past two centuries, it’s now a body in which white rural interests are privileged over those of black and Latino city dwellers, given how much whiter the median state is than the median American voter:
The senate considerably dilutes the voting power of African-Americans and Latinos and Asians to a degree that should be unacceptable in polite company pic.twitter.com/gCzR7g46FR — ((David Shor)) (@davidshor) January 29, 2018
And then there’s the Supreme Court. These past few years, the Court has been dominated by a Republican-appointed majority that has issued rulings that happen to strengthen Republicans’ anti-majoritarian hold on power. In June, the Court banned a key financing mechanism for public sector unions , one of the financial and institutional backbones of the political party that won more votes in the 2016 presidential election.
We know from state experience with right-to-work laws that restricting the “agency fees” banned by the Court improves the Republican Party’s electoral margins and lowers voter turnout. So five members of the Court, in effect, invoked the Constitution to overturn a democratically agreed-upon social policy whose repeal empowers the political party that appointed all five of those members.
That’s one example, but there are plenty of others. In the 2013 case of Shelby County v. Holder , the Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act , which required states with a history of voter suppression to pre-clear new voting laws with the Justice Department. I initially thought that liberals were panicking excessively about that ruling , but subsequent empirical research suggests I was wrong. Emory political scientist James Szewczyk finds that the ruling “resulted in more restrictive voting laws,” which, in turn, caused the median voter in affected congressional districts to move to the right. That, in turn, led to the election of more conservative members of Congress, who were less likely to sponsor civil rights bills.
The Supreme Court famously ruled in the 2010 Citizens United case that individuals and corporations could not be prevented from funneling unlimited sums of money into political activities, so long as those funds didn’t literally make it to candidates’ campaign committees. Political scientists Nour Abdul-Razzak (UChicago), Carlo Prato (Columbia), and Stephane Wolton (LSE) find that the ruling, and the DC Circuit’s related ruling in SpeechNOW.org v. FEC , led the 23 states that previously banned corporate and union campaign spending to move rightward , relative to the 27 states that didn’t have a ban overturned. The GOP’s seat share in state legislatures grew by 5 points, and Republican candidates’ average vote share grew by 3 to 4 points, as a result of Citizens United, according to the study.
In both Shelby and Citizens United , five Republican appointees struck down democratically enacted laws, and in doing so wound up substantially increasing Republicans’ odds of electoral success. In Janus , the public sector unions case, they’ve likely done it again.
So on the one hand, we have a president who lost the popular vote, the second time that has happened in the past five elections; a House districted in such a way that even a large, 5-point victory by Democrats in the popular vote in November wouldn’t give them a majority of seats; a Senate elected by a skewed, unusually white cross-section of America, where the median Senate seat is substantially more conservative than the median American voter; and a Supreme Court that is dismantling one party’s political economic base and helping preserve, even strengthen, the other party’s anti-majoritarian hold on power.
On the other hand, it’s definitely true that large groups of people attacking you on Twitter can be uncomfortable sometimes, and perhaps even feel “mob”-like. But contra Rosen, I’m much more worried about the ways America is falling short of any form of majoritarianism, reasoned or otherwise.
Photo:
CoC Rule
This is "up is down" demagoguery.
The right controls all the levers of power: the Presidency, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and an overwhelming majority of statehouses and governorships... while being a popular minority in the country.
And yet... here we have a complaint about "mob rule"... and we often see similar complaints throughout NT.
Can anyone explain such blatant disregard for reality?
Naturally... I expect all NT Mods to enforce the CoC.
I don't think Jeffrey Rosen would disagree at all with the author of the article, they're each just talking about different aspects of different but related problems.
Also it's interesting to see that there's already been an objective analysis of the impact of SCOTUS gutting the Voting Rights Act. No surprise that the impact is a very negative one.
I read Rosen's article in The Atlantic. I don't think the characterization given here is wrong.For example
Why does Rosen worry about "majority rule" when in fact we are in a much worse situation, with the media defects he describes, AND institutional minority rule?
As I said I doubt that Rosen would disagree, but his article really was just about the perverse "mob rule" aspect of social media especially when it's driven by ignorance.......as seems to be the case with most of the Faux News which informs Trump's clueless and gullible base.
Obviously it's a problem when the party in control is the minority party and the president is a fascist. In that regard America under Trump is like Iraq under Hussein. So that just means we need to be invaded by a hostile foreign power to fix our political system. Maybe Russia can help?
The Vox article author is quite right that various issues are coming together to make the problem really bad, like racist redistricting by the GOP, gutting of the VRA, etc and Rosen wouldn't disagree with any of that. However the reality is that America has always been governed by a minority elite.......rich white males don't generally reflect the interests of the majority. It's just gotten as bad today as it was during the robber baron era or perhaps the eve of the great depression. The bright spot in between those two periods was the Progressive movement and we're long overdue for a return of that.
It may be only a problem of title... but... there's a full-blown assault under way, against democratic institutions, and that assault is led by (as usual) a feint. The right screams "America is nor a democracy, it is a republic!" That's nonsense, since in reality America is both a republic and a democracy...
The right is working very industrially to replace democracy with oligarchy/plutocracy - probably has already succeeded.
So... I'm particularly sensitive to anything that blurs the clarity we need, when we discuss political institutions.
I heartily agree that social media must take a more "citizen" role. But that has nothing to do with "minority rule".
On a somewhat different thread...
What do you think of Madison's limit to about 50 000, for democracies?
Correct, but the latter wasn't even related to the topic of Rosen's article. He was talking about something quite different from what Matthews was talking about. But as I said, I doubt Rosen would disagree with Matthews.
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I generally agree that actual democracy where each citizen's views matter only works in small groups. Even at 50K we have a representative democracy where an elected mayor and city council make the day to day decisions, albeit with citizen input.
LOL. We're talking about the same Birther morons, Pizzagate dimwits and folks who thought a sociopathic scam artist would make a good leader, right? No wonder Trump loves the uneducated.
Bernie can't survive without them.
A popular vote against a ridiculously controversial figure does NOT indicate that the majority of voters are somehow liberals.
And 2014, 2012, and 2010....which was the largest ass whipping in 100 years.
Yes. It prevents tyranny of the majority.
So..... you are claiming that forcing people to pay unions favors one political party...and you think this should be legal?? Why not just enact laws requiring e
Unconstitutional democratically enacted laws.
That's how the SCOTUS works. They strike down unconstitutional laws. Like DOMA. And The Patriot Act. And much of the Affordable Care Act.
So in summary....the article is simply more "people don't agree with us and it's not fair" nonsense.
Pretty definitive.