gracchusdixit

After a presidential election, the outcome of which can only be described as a tragedy for the nation, questions are being asked about the future of our two major political parties.   In the case of the Republicans:  How can traditional conservative principles and policies be squared with the loud, angry and often vicious populism of the Trump electorate?  How can traditional Republicanism even survive with Trump at the head of the party?  In the case of the Democrats:  Having nominated (though “coronated” might be the better term) a quintessential member of the political establishment in a vehemently anti-establishment era, will the party decide to purge itself of the Clinton-connected elite in its upper echelons?  Will it further decide that its future lies with millennials and minorities?  Will it abandon what appears to be a hopeless and perhaps imaginary “center,” turning leftward toward the militant progressivism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren?

These are significant questions, beyond doubt.  But they pale in comparison with a far more consequential issue.  That issue is the failure of the political and governmental system bequeathed to us by the Founding Fathers.

For more than 200 years, we have congratulated ourselves on the stability and continuity of our political system, heaping mountains of praise on the wisdom of the Founders who created it.  This rosy self-congratulation, if it was ever justified, now seems decidedly shaky.

The Founders gave us, not a democracy, but a republic, hemmed in by an extraordinarily complicated set of “checks and balances.”  These include three branches of government, each empowered to limit the powers of the others; an electoral college designed to moderate the excesses of the popular will; a wall of separation between the authority of the federal government and the prerogatives of the individual states.

All these complications, all these checks and balances, came into being for two reasons.

First of all, the Founders, having been subjected to the oppression (in their minds, at least) of a distant and all-powerful British monarchy and parliament, were determined to constrain the power of the central government.  Indeed, more than a few of them thought of the “united states” as a confederation of separate countries, not as a single nation in the modern sense.

Second, and more consequentially, many of the Founders were fearful of democracy and democratic majorities, believing that most ordinary people could too easily be swayed by their emotions and persuaded by demagogues or would-be tyrants to trample on the rights of everyone else.  There were those, of course, like Thomas Jefferson, who put their trust in the common man and advocated for a true democracy.  But they were the exceptions, and they did not prevail.

Thus it was that, for all their purported and in many respects genuine wisdom, the Founders made one, enormous mistake that has plagued us throughout our history.  They failed to understand that tyranny can take many forms.  In particular, they failed to anticipate that the labyrinthine system they created to defend against a tyrannical democratic majority might someday spawn a tyrannical anti-democratic minority.

It was a tyrannical anti-democratic minority that sustained slavery for nearly a century and, after slavery was finally abolished, installed Jim Crow in its place.   It took another century for that wicked system to be overturned.  And now, half a century later, many of its worst aspects are creeping back into our public life.  This outcome is not an aberration or an abnormality.  It is the direct consequence of the political system created by the Founding Fathers.

In fewer than 20 years, tyrannical, anti-democratic minorities have imposed their will on the nation, not once but twice.

In 2000, Al Gore won the election by more than half a million votes but was denied the presidency by five conservative justices on the Supreme Court.  Among the many terrible consequences of this anti-democratic intervention were the invasion of Iraq, the deaths of at least a million people, and the financial collapse of 2008.

Just days ago, Hillary Clinton won the election by a quarter of a million votes.  The size of her victory would beyond doubt have been substantially greater without the “checks and balances” that allowed Republican legislatures to suppress the votes of those who oppose them.  Nonetheless, Hillary Clinton was denied the presidency by the antiquated and anti-democratic mechanism of the electoral college.

When all is said and done, George W. Bush was not the democratically elected President of the United States, and neither is Donald J. Trump.  These men were imposed upon us by tyrannical anti-democratic minorities.  It’s time to recognize that the Founders and the institutional arrangements they bequeathed to us are to blame.  Had they put more trust in true democracy and the wisdom of the American people, our latest national tragedy would never have occurred.