If those states’ legislatures had more accurately reflected the state vote, Trump’s scheme to overturn the election in the states would have been doomed before it started.
In some states, aggrieved minorities are turning to more and more extreme forms of antidemocratic action to thwart the popular majority, including threats of violence.
In 2018, Democrats won an outright majority of the vote in Michigan. That sufficed to carry Gretchen Whitmer to the governor’s mansion, but not to overcome Michigan’s deep pro-Republican gerrymander. When the coronavirus struck, the Michigan government was divided between a majority-rule governor who favored aggressive action, and a minority-rule legislature skeptical of lockdowns and masking. This divide is what brought armed men into the Michigan legislature last April seeking to intimidate Democratic lawmakers—and what ultimately inspired the plot to kidnap Whitmer.
James Madison and his colleagues believed that by deviating from theoretical majority-rules principles, the American republic would benefit from more stability, a better protection of rights, and generally a higher quality of person in positions of authority. But ironically, it is precisely where minority rule bites deepest that this promise is revealed to be most false.
Instead of upholding law and order in the states, gerrymandering has proliferated terroristic armed gangs that try to impose their will by intimidation. The Senate filibuster, as it has evolved over time, leads to wilder gyrations of public policy than would Senate majority rule. And the Electoral College elevated the most corrupt demagogue in the history of the presidency—who was installed not by the unpropertied urban mobs feared by the founders, but by wealthier voters in more rural places. (People who earned more than $100,000 a year were likelier to vote for Trump than for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and they swung even further toward Trump in 2020.)
Policy continuity, the security of public debts, the peaceful transfer of power by legal means: These are upheld by the American majority. But a political minority is pushing the country toward the evils supposedly associated with pure democracy: extreme ideologies, the normalization of violence, and the insecurity of public debts.
The American majority decisively rejects armed intimidation as a method of politics. Two-thirds of Americans believe that guns should not be allowed in government buildings. Yet a belligerent minority seems increasingly determined to brandish weapons in hopes of coercing legislators to disregard the preferences of voting majorities.
It’s the majority that has shown basic good sense on public-health measures to counter an airborne pandemic—and an overrepresented, armed, and even terroristic minority that until now has thwarted it. Most Americans accept and wear masks. But of the aggrieved and truculent anti-mask minority, a Pew survey found, 92 percent are Republican.
Read More: America Must Become a Democracy