Jamelle Bouie is increasingly a voice crying in the wilderness, and increasingly important to read and remember, as in these excerpts:
Minority Rule Is Steadily Undermining Our Democracy — Again
Jamelle Bouie, New York Times – Oct. 21, 2022:
“Americans take for granted the idea that our counter-majoritarian Constitution — deliberately written to constrain majorities and keep them from acting outright — has, in fact, preserved the rights and liberties of the people against the tyranny of majority rule, and that any greater majoritarianism would threaten that freedom.
Well, what if that’s not true? Yes, majorities acting through our representative institutions have been overbearing and yes, the Supreme Court has occasionally protected the rights of vulnerable minorities, as well as those of the people at large. But there have been just as many, if not more, examples of the reverse: of majorities safeguarding the rights of vulnerable minorities and of our counter-majoritarian institutions freeing assorted bullies and bosses to violate them.
I’ve written about some of these episodes before . . .
If allowed to stand in full, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 — passed by only the third U.S. Congress to have Black members, who were elected in some of the first truly free elections in the South — would have outlawed discrimination in public accommodations like railroads, steamboats, hotels and theaters and prohibited jury exclusion on the basis of race. But the court, in an 1883 opinion, decided that neither the 13th nor the 14th Amendment gave Congress the power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals.
The advent of Jim Crow, similarly, had less to do in the beginning with a nefarious majority of voters rushing to the polls to subjugate their Black neighbors than with a long campaign of violence meant to neutralize Black voters and intimidate their white allies. . . . As the historian C. Vann Woodward summarized it. . . “In spite of the ultimate success of disfranchisement, the movement met with stout resistance and succeeded in some states by narrow margins or the use of fraud.”
. . . We cannot know how American history would have unfolded in the absence of our counter-majoritarian institutions. But the example of Reconstruction and its aftermath suggests that if majorities had been able to act, unimpeded, to protect the rights of Black Americans, it might have been a little less tragic than what we experienced instead.
It is an insight we can apply to the present. It’s not the national majority that threatens the right to vote or the right to bodily autonomy or that wants to strip transgender Americans of their right to exist in civil society . . . . If it were up to majorities of Americans — and if, more important, the American political system more easily allowed majorities to express their will — then Congress would have already strengthened the Voting Rights Act, codified abortion rights into law and protected the civil rights of L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Even the legislative victories most Americans rightfully admire — like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — were only possible with a supermajority of lawmakers assembled in the wake of a presidential assassination.
If it were up to the national majority, American democracy would most likely be in a stronger place, not the least because Donald Trump might not have become president. Our folk beliefs about American government notwithstanding, the much-vaunted guardrails and endlessly invoked norms of our political system have not secured our democracy as much as they’ve facilitated the efforts of those who would degrade and undermine it.
Majority rule is not perfect but rule by a narrow, reactionary minority — what we face in the absence of serious political reform — is far worse. . . . It is not just that rule of the majority is, as Abraham Lincoln said, “the only true sovereign of a free people,” it is also the only sovereign that has reliably worked to protect those people from the deprivations of hierarchy and exploitation.”