At the risk of being obvious, it seems to me that it is little noted how connected attempts at minority rule in the U.S. are to the shifts in demographics. I mean, people have connected them, but not nearly enough nor flatly enough.
For the decades leading up to about the mid-2010s, I had rather smugly been pointing out how the shifts towards increasing black voters, recent immigrant voters, and other marginalized Democratic-leaning groups spelled disaster for conservative politics. It was just a matter of time before such voters, who were growing in size faster than white, and presumably Republican, voters were growing, so therefore it was inevitable that the U.S. would swing to the left (on a world-scale, to the center) politically.
Smug as I was, I hadn’t counted on the right to become opposed to majority rule. I had assumed that they would become outvoted, and either accept those results as a loyal opposition party or shift their own views leftward to remain politically viable. I did not anticipate that the right would simply endorse minority rule, and certainly not as openly as they have in recent years.
Though this seems simplistic, even to me, it is the best explanation I have found for the polarization of politics that is forming a crisis in this country, basically, white, conservative, Christian voters have come to accept that their views will no longer dominate American culture as it had in the past, and they have become willing to throw the concept of majority rule overboard in order to hold onto power.
There may be other valid explanations, but they all come under this one heading. This one covers almost all of it for me.
An interesting thought. There’s probably graphs showing how small you can get as a percentage of the voting population and still remain in government while neutralising your opposition by a range of different tactics. I’d suggest a spicy combo of:
dissuading certain people from voting [in countries where it is optional] by making different parts of the process complicated, frustrating and detached from relevance in their lives;
gerrymandering electorates to minimise one-person-one-vote vulnerability
othering the opposition, so you instill fear in your own voter base that They are coming to take away your guns / 4WDs / liberty / all-meat-diet, to boost your own turn-out;
carry on like drunk circus clowns to disengage the community from bothering to vote, because clowns;
enshrining electoral rules that allow all manner of bad behaviour to be allowed as democracy and free speech without penalty, such as out-and-out lying;
out-and-out lying
aligning the ultra-rich who love power and wealth even more than you do to your world view, and persuading them that you are their only hope of rescue from the guillotine.
The important thing I’d note from your suggestion is that pursuit of power is the driver, and racism and targeting the poor are products of seeking to gain and maintain power. Racism etc is not inherent, its just a very useful tool to that end in a society that is still massively fucked-up with its history of race relations.
The difficulty is that these people don’t actually think of themselves as a minority. They feel that they represent the “True America”. So the fact that they their world view is no longer represented as the majority in the election results, means that the system must have been broken or manipulated in some way. In their minds they aren’t being anti-democratic they are just fixing the breaks in the system, so that the actual “majority” is represented.
The problem for conservatives is that they have tied themselves into racial politics. They have identified themselves as the party that will protect white people from non-white people (and have told white people that non-white people are a threat they need to be protected from). This has won conservatives the support of white people who feel they are entitled to preferential treatment but it has lost them support among everyone who isn’t white.
This wasn’t inevitable. Conservatives could have worked on crafting a non-racial agenda that appealed to both whites and non-whites.
I think liberals tend to put way too much weight on race and too little on religion. I know that anecdotes do not = data, but I’ve seen a big number of Hispanic evangelical conservatives here in Texas who are pro-Trump and for whom race seems to mean little but religion is everything - at least, their perceived twist on religion. Such people would far sooner vote for a white Trumper - even a racist one - who is anti-abortion and anti-LGBT, than some Hispanic liberal who is pro-abortion and pro-LGBT. You could bring in 10 million such additional Hispanics into America and the result wouldn’t be a demographic shift in favor of the D’s because of race, but rather, a shift in favor of the R’s because of religion. Same for many Asian-Americans. I go to a Chinese church here in Texas and many immigrants from China are pro-Trump and pro-Republican despite all of Trump’s anti-China rhetoric, all because of religion and how Trump/GOP lines up with their own attitude/culture.
I disagree. I think that liberals tend to put weight on marginalized groups, regardless of their race or religion. But, to abandon that would be to abandon a core value of what makes one a liberal.
Explain that to the conservatives that claim that Democrats are in favor of immigration in order to turn elections. Democrats don’t try to increase immigration in order to win elections, they do it because it’s the right thing for both our country and the immigrants in question.
It is absolutely true that the Republicans have been pandering to the religious in a way that Democrats do not. I say that’s a problem for the Republicans, in that they promise to inject religion into law, ironically doing exactly what the people screaming about Sharia law are worried about.
Basic game theory shows that, in a democracy, in order to rule as a minority, you need to form a coalition with several other minorities. It is left as an exercise whom the Republicans, or the Democrats, or immigrants, or religious parties or whoever is assumed to be the minority might ally with.
Do you think liberals think any differently? This NPR article might suggest otherwise:
"“Progressive means challenging power, whether that means challenging corporate power on behalf of workers or whether that means challenging systemic racism,” Green said. “It fundamentally boils down to being willing to challenge power on behalf of the little guy.”
I’m arguing that basic game theory has gone out the window, and that Rs have decided to exploit flaws in the system (Electoral college, gerrymandering, and the 1st Amendment’s extension to encourage political lying, among others) so that 40%, if it comes down to that, can prevail over the remaining 60% and claim they’re merely working within the system. The days of “Oh, well, we lost the vote there” are gone. Dudn’t matter–what matters is that asserting you won means you won.
Which is why a Republican will tell you that we are not a democracy, and then work to prove it.
A democracy requires compromise, and they don’t want that.
So, instead of forming coalitions, they take advantage of structural electoral inequalities created at the time of the founding of the country, and push to create even more ways of preventing the will of the people from being expressed.
It doesn’t matter if you have a strong majority of the actual people of the nation, when games are played that remove the electoral power of the majority.
I suspect that there are few, on the left or the right, for whom majority rule is the highest ideal. Most people value something else more, whether that be (their view of) justice, peace, prosperity, or raw political power. If the majority support some policy which they think would be morally objectionable or practically disastrous, they’re not going to want to see the majority prevail.
Yes, government is designed to prevent a tyranny of the majority, and there are all sorts of checks against the majority turning into a dictatorship. But the Rs have enabled all those checks to create a tyranny of the minority.
When I saw the OP title, I wondered how many posts would pass before someone offered up the Frum quote. The answer was zero!
Please supply citations of Democrats refusing to accept the results of elections, attempting to violently overturn those results, engaging fraudulent electors to alter election results, and attempting to install state officials who will award their state’s electoral college votes to the GOP nominees regardless of the state’s popular vote. I eagerly await your contribution to this discussion!
I feel this fits with what I was saying. Conservatives didn’t need to play the race card. They had other options. As you point, out they could have focused more on religious conservatism.
I feel that democracy is a good system. Any political system is going to tend to put the interests of the rulers ahead of the general interest. In a democracy, this means the government is at least trying to advance the interests of a majority of the population rather than the interests of some small ruling ruling class.
It’s not a perfect system; the majority can trample on the rights of minorities. And often times the majority doesn’t see what’s in its best interests. But these problems exist in other political systems and democracy lessens their effects.