Tyranny of the Minority

Tyranny of the Minority by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, © 2023, 368 pgs. 

On February 6, 1934, far-right leaning groups stormed the French National Assembly building. The tension in France had been building since the end of World War I, but with the Great Depression, political instability and general unrest, a dam finally broke. Fascist groups organized and stormed the facility, throwing rocks, setting buses on fire, breaking windows, firing guns, slashing the legs of police horses, crying "Hang the deputies!" Some were killed and hundreds were injured. 

Though France was able to beat back the rioters, there was an investigation that wasn't taken seriously by all of parliament. "Mainstream conservatives' sympathy for the anti-democratic extremists was a major factor in the attack." They downplayed and justified the rioters. As a result, French democracy was hobbled and their democracy would be dead within a few years. Sound familiar? 

In their previous book, How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt, two Harvard professors of government, highlight how democracies backslide and how elected leaders subvert the constitution to enable more power for their party. Here, the authors take a different spin on tyranny, focusing on "counter-majoritarian" mechanisms and institutions that thwart progressive, majority-backed legislation and work to undermine democracy itself from within. 

Lots of illuminating information to be had here. The electoral college was originally conceived to undermine poorer classes of people deciding who would run the country--America is the only country that continues to use this system--every other major democratic country has removed it. Know who the most democratic country is? Not us by a long shot. America is very much like a ship; you can't turn it on a dime. It takes decades and generations and social movements to make the kinds of change a majority of us all agree on. But counter-majority institutions and the people elected who promote them threaten to derail our democracy into something we can't even imagine. There's kind of an eerie sense of history repeating itself in this book, but highly recommended for understanding where we are now and where we might end up by next year.