The GOP Embraces Anti-Democratic Ideology Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

The GOP Embraces Anti-Democratic Ideology

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 3h

Throughout American history, majoritarianism has been the dominant and usually winning political ideology. But throughout that history there’s been a persistent contrary view as well: the idea that majoritarianism isn’t the ideal but actually a problem in itself. This was the core principle of John C. Calhoun, the great ideologue of pro-slavery ideology in the decades before the Civil War. This anti-democratic ideology took further root in the final decades of the 19th century as the native born, the wealthy and the white looked for a framework to justify excluding African-Americans and an expanding population of immigrant Slavs, Jews and southern Europeans from the vote and other kinds of democratic inclusion.

Now, we can treat it as a separate matter that what we see as the country’s democratic principles have been as often honored in the breach as the fulfillment. Moreover, much of American constitutionalism is bound up with protecting the rights of minorities against untrammeled majorities. Here though I’m focused on something distinct and separate: the creation of anti-majoritarian ideologies, fully articulated arguments for why democratic majorities should not in fact, as a matter of principle, hold political power.

And here I want to focus on a passage in an NPR write-up about redistricting which features a quote from Scott Walker, until recently the Governor of Wisconsin and now heading up the GOP committee trying to protect gerrymandering.

Critics fault districts that sprawl and stretch to sometimes wild extremes in order to include as many voters as possible desirable to Republicans, and exclude those considered unsympathetic — often in cities with more Democrats and nonwhite voters.

But as Walker observed, what Democrats call “fair” maps are those that effectively advantage them instead, because of their national popular vote edge. Proportional representation isn’t always necessary, Walker argued, because he feels it gives urban areas too large of an influence over the politics of an entire state.

If lawmakers are going to be in charge of drawing districts, they’re going to reflect partisanship one way or the other, he said.

This is a bracingly candid statement of the position: We need to reevaluate how we define “fair”. Because if “fair” means whoever gets the most votes (i.e., proportional representation) then Republicans are at an inherent disadvantage “because of their national popular vote edge.” I don’t think my explication really goes beyond Walker’s statement really at all: what Democrats call “fair” is the candidate with the most votes winning.

Where it gets interesting, and where Walker seems to be resting his argument, is on the idea that our political society is divided into cities and non-cities (suburbs, exurbs, rural areas, everyone not living in a major conurbation). If you’re just counting numbers then that gives the cities the inherent advantage because they have … not ‘have’, they are large concentrations of people. The fix is totally in, in other words.

This is slightly different from just saying the largest number of people shouldn’t win. And it’s worth getting our heads around the concept even if we disagree with it. If there were two countries with a dispute, no one would say that the country with more people should automatically get its way. If we have a border dispute with Mexico or Canada do we get our way just because we have a dramatic larger population? Of course not. We see states as national communities that have broadly equal standing and claims to sovereignty regardless of their size.

Beyond the opportunism and the fact that city vs non-city has a deeply racial dimension, at a basic level Walker wants to see city and non-city as two contending entities which deserve to contend on equal terms. But of course these concepts, city and non-city or city and rural areas have no existence in American law. Nor does the idea even have a factual grounding. There are plenty of Republicans in cities and Democrats outside the cities. It is simply a broad brush way of capturing a political division in American society which Walker – and a growing number of Republicans – has formalized to explain why laws and districts should be changed to ensure that his preferred candidates win even when they get fewer votes. When you break it down, it’s really as simple as that.

We’ve been here before.

Until the middle of the 20th century, it was commonplace that legislative districts might contain vastly different numbers of people. In the Vermont General Assembly the smallest district included 36 people and the largest 35,000. The largest Nevada state Senate district included well over 100,000 people while the smallest had 568. Some of these extreme cases were mere oddities. But there was a clear and overriding pattern: rural districts were given vastly more weight so their voting power (and that of organized wealth generally) wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the cities. It was a pattern and practice that grew rapidly in the first half of the 20th century as cities and immigrant populations grew. The Supreme Court abolished this practice with a series of “one man one vote” decisions from the early 1960s, starting with Baker v Carr in 1962. In Reynolds v Sims(1964) Chief Justice Warren wrote, contra Walker, “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.”

In today’s gerrymandering battles no one seriously disputes that legislative districts should contain roughly the same number of residents. The whole issue is how much you can pick and choose residents for different districts for maximum partisan advantage. But having lost the popular vote all but once in three decades Republicans are increasingly making arguments in principle that majority rule is in fact not a good thing. And we shouldn’t ignore the fact that a massive proof of that principle is staring us in the face. In those “one man one vote” decisions the Supreme Court first outlawed malapportioned state legislative districts and then did the same for federal House districts. But of course it could not apply the same principle to the federal Senate since the representation of states rather than voters (if not trees and acres precisely) is written into the very foundation of the constitution and by definition cannot be unconstitutional. That is the foundation and built on that foundation is the choice of presidents through the electoral college.

Of course, the advantage to small states is nothing new. It was written into the constitution by design. The difference between the biggest and smallest states is much larger today than it was in 1787. But the real difference is that the big state/small state divide has seldom lined up so clearly with the broader partisan division in the country. As long as Democrats and Republicans both had their parcels of small states it was more an oddity than anything one big political faction or the other needed to worry about. That’s changed significantly over just the last couple decades.

All of this is part of the central dynamic of our time: Republicans increasingly turning against majority rule and a widely shared franchise because majorities, when not sliced up into gerrymandered districts or state borders, increasingly favor Democrats. That’s why we have voter ID laws. It’s why we have resistance to early voting, felon voting and basically everything else that doesn’t keep the voting electorate as small as old and as white as possible. Most of these strategies have focused on things like election security, or cost or convenience or whipped up fears about voter fraud. But that’s starting to change. The explicit embrace of special advantages for Republicans outside major urban concentrations, the explicit embrace of majority rule not being the essence of electoral fairness, is coming to the fore.

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