These threats are not new but today pose a special urgency. Some of these are embedded in the Constitution; others in our history; still others have important historical antecedents. We need to take them into account if we are to deal with the threats to our current form of government.
The writers of our Constitution would have had no trouble understanding our current political moment and how we got here. In fact, they were already worried specifically about the political chaos that could arise within a democracy from populism, demagoguery, wealth inequalities and widespread political ignorance. They feared that if political power were taken out of the hands of the elites (the merchants and wealthy land owners) and put into the hands of the populace:
- the government would redistribute wealth to further equality;
- the elite would lose power and wealth;
- the “people” (many without formal education) would not be able to make wise decisions;
- the economy would disintegrate and the country would devolve into economic chaos, anarchy and war.
The Federalist Papers
We can find help in understanding the thinking behind the Constitution in the Federalist Papers—a series of 85 essays written by several signers of the Constitution in order to convince the states to ratify it. In Federalist paper 10, for instance, James Madison writes of his concern that a democracy would allow an unpropertied majority to redistribute the wealth of the elites (to which Madison belonged).
Recognizing that the country's wealthiest property owners formed a minority and that the country's unpropertied classes formed a majority, Madison feared that the unpropertied classes would come together to form a majority faction that gained control of the government. … [to] use their majority power to implement a variety of measures that redistributed wealth. (Federalist 10)While Madison did not specifically name the political party (which did not then exist) as a faction, his arguments against factions might help us understand today’s political polarization, anyway.
What structures did the Framers impose to protect us from “too much democracy”?
Voter Suppression:
The most obvious protective structure, of course, was the Constitution's suppression of voter rights. The continuation of slavery, enshrined in the Constitution, wrote off about twenty percent of the population, hardly considering slaves to be people, much less eligible to vote. In addition, because there was no agreement on nation-wide voting standards, the Constitution gave the states the power to regulate their own voting laws, some of which discriminated on the basis of religion. It wasn’t until 1828 that “Maryland becomes the last state to remove religious restrictions when it passes legislation enfranchising Jews.” For the most part, however, only white, land-owning men were allowed to vote. When George Washington was elected, only six percent of the American population could vote.
Disproportionate power of less populous states
In addition, because of the politics of the constitutional convention, the representatives from the smaller states were worried that their state would be outvoted by the larger states if Congress were completely apportioned according to population. As a result the Constitution guarantees every state two senators regardless of the number of voters. The less populous states—which are today mostly agricultural and religiously conservative—have disproportionate power in the Senate: The voter in Alaska (the least populous state), for instance, has 53 times the influence on Senate votes as the voter in California (the most populous state). This too is a variety of “voter suppression”.
In the interest of brevity, I’ll end this first part of the post here. Next time,I will look at the constitutional structure of government (the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch) and its impact upon democracy.
