David Frum: The Founders Were Wrong About Democracy

[Nevilledog]

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Adam Jentleson 🎈
@AJentleson
Here comes @davidfrum making a powerful case against the filibuster. In particular, he debunks the argument that eliminating the filibuster will lead to legislative whiplash and instability. Defenders of minority rule are quickly running out of arguments. https://theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/america-must-become-democracy/618028/…
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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/america-must-become-democracy/618028/

If there was one idea shared by just about every author of the Constitution, it was the one articulated by James Madison at the convention on June 26, 1787.

The mass of the people would be susceptible to “fickleness and passion,” he warned. They would suffer from “want of information as to their true interest.” Those who must “labour under all the hardships of life” would “secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings.” Over time, as the population expanded and crowded into cities, the risk would only worsen that “the major interest might under sudden impulses be tempted to commit injustice on the minority.”

To protect property from the people—and ultimately, the people from themselves—the Framers would have to erect “a necessary fence” against “impetuous councils.” A Senate to counterbalance the House of Representatives, selected from a more elite few and serving for longer terms, would be one such fence. The indirect election of the president through an Electoral College would be another. A federal judiciary confirmed by the Senate and serving for life would provide one more. And so on through the constitutional design.

The system of government in the United States has evolved in many important ways since 1787. But the mistrust of unpropertied majorities—especially urban unpropertied majorities—persists. In no other comparably developed society is voting as difficult; in no peer society are votes weighted as unequally; in no peer society is there a legislative chamber where 41 percent of the lawmakers can routinely outvote 59 percent, as happens in the U.S. Senate.

This system is justified today with the same arguments as when it was established a quarter millennium ago. “We’re not a democracy,” tweeted Senator Mike Lee of Utah in October. Lee explained his meaning in a second tweet that crammed Madisonian theory into fewer than 280 characters. “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and [prosperity] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

*snip*

[Hermit-The-Prog]

1. The filibuster amplifies the power of the minority in the Senate to near veto power.

If we can't eliminate the Senate, eliminate the filibuster. If we can't eliminate the filibuster, at least eliminate the idiotic virtual filibuster of today.

[dchill]

2. If you don't have majority rule, then what you do have is wrong.

[TygrBright]

8. The majority is not always right.

The white majority in this country oppressed black citizens for nearly 200 years in America.

The straight majority and cisgender majority are still perpetrating horrific injustices on queer citizens.

The Christian majority seems more than willing to trample on the human rights of atheist, Muslim, and other non-Christian citizens.

No, I have little faith in the majority, I know it too well.

What I have faith in is the Constitution- especially the Bill of Rights- which keeps us pointed in the direction of equal rights and greater economic opportunity for all, whether they fit with "the majority" or not.

passionately,
Bright

[Maraya1969]

3. Right. If they ended the filibuster during Obama's term the DACA people wouldn't

have had to go through the Hell that they went through.

I vote to end the filibuster. And that way we can bring in new states like Washington DC, Puerto Rico, The Virgin Islands etc and maybe keep our majority. As it is now they probably won't be able to become states because we know the GOPQ will stop it.

[Midnightwalk]

4. Very good article

One thing Frum didn’t mention is how the filibuster makes it so the average person doesn’t know why congress rarely passes popular legislation.

Many people only see that it doesn’t matter if there is a democratic or republican majority. Either way nothing gets done. It’s one reason so many say there is no difference between the parties.

They don’t realize that it is republicans that are preventing progress all the time.

[coti]

5. Yeah, the Constitution is quickly becoming outdated.

The filibuster is the least of it. It's time to start talking about making enormous changes to our federal structure.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

6. Chomsky: "That Dangerous Radical Aristotle"

https://chomsky.info/commongood02/

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Aristotle also made the point that if you have, in a perfect democracy, a small number of very rich people and a large number of very poor people, the poor will use their democratic rights to take property away from the rich. Aristotle regarded that as unjust, and proposed two possible solutions: reducing poverty (which is what he recommended) or reducing democracy.

James Madison, who was no fool, noted the same problem, but unlike Aristotle, he aimed to reduce democracy rather than poverty. He believed that the primary goal of government is "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." As his colleague John Jay was fond of putting it, "The people who own the country ought to govern it."
-----

James Madison should be considered the forefather of today's Republican party, as far as I'm concerned.

Republicans have fought for ESTABLISHED WEALTH for many decades, mostly relying on the propaganda of hate and fear to maintain it. (If and when that doesn't work, they'll naturally turn to fascism instead.)

[SunSeeker]

7. I disagree with Frum. The Founders absolutely favored democracy.

They just favored it only for propertied white men, that's all.

This Atlantic piece from last November by George Thomas, Professor of American political institutions at Claremont McKenna College, does a much better job of explaining the thinking our Founders:

Democracy was also susceptible to demagogues—men of “factious tempers” and “sinister designs,” as Madison put it in “Federalist No. 10”—who relied on “vicious arts” to betray the interests of the people. Madison nevertheless sought to defend popular government—the rule of the many—rather than retreat to the rule of the few.
...
American constitutional design can best be understood as an effort to establish a sober form of democracy. It did so by embracing representation, the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the protection of individual rights—all concepts that were unknown in the ancient world where democracy had earned its poor reputation.
...
The American experiment, as advanced by Hamilton and Madison, sought to redeem the cause of popular government against its checkered history. Given the success of the experiment by the standards of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, we would come to use the term democracy as a stand-in for representative democracy, as distinct from direct democracy.  
...
The greatest shortcoming of the American experiment was its limited vision of the people, which excluded Black people, women, and others from meaningful citizenship, diminishing popular government’s cause. According to Lincoln, extending meaningful citizenship so that “all should have an equal chance” was the basis on which the country could be “saved.” The expansion of we the people was behind the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ratified in the wake of the Civil War. The Fourteenth recognized that all persons born in the U.S. were citizens of the country and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizenship. The Fifteenth secured the vote for Black men. Subsequent amendments, the Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth, granted women the right to vote, prohibited poll taxes in national elections, and lowered the voting age to 18. Progress has been slow—and sometimes halted, as is evident from current efforts to limit voting rights—and the country has struggled to become the democratic republic first set in motion two centuries ago. At the same time, it has also sought to find the right republican constraints on the evolving body of citizens, so that majority rule—but not factious tempers—can prevail.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/yes-constitution-democracy/616949/

Nonetheless, Frum does an excellent job in his essay beating back the argument idiot Republicans like Senator Mike Lee make that minority rule is more stable. Frum correctly describes just how unstable Republican minority rule has been.

[calimary]

9. A keeper.