
However Americans just voted, they can be in absolutely no doubt that the 2024 election was the most important ever. That, after all, is what both candidates have ceaselessly been telling them. For Kamala Harris, this is “one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime”. Donald Trump would surely not disagree. “She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist,” he’s warned about his Democratic opponent. “We must stop her country-destroying liberal agenda once and for all.”
Of course, these frantic proclamations make sense electorally: what better way of rallying the troops than monstering the enemy? Nor are they entirely wrong — whatever your politics, it’s clear that Harris and Trump represent, from economics to citizenship, two vastly different visions of the nation. Yet whatever happens over the next few days, I’d nonetheless argue that these scrambling attempts to save Americans from themselves are missing the point. For amid the ceaseless howls about guns or abortion, what everyone ignores is that our very Constitution is rotting at the roots. Until we pull it out, and start again, our democracy will continue to wither.
Until recently, Americans on both sides of the aisle wallowed in US exceptionalism, the idea that we represented the greatest democracy in the history of the world. Like most national myths, that inevitably involved some fudging. Yes, American democracy excluded a lot of people in the early days. But so did every other representative political system. Sure, America had seen its fair share of demagogues, from Huey Long to Dubya. But in the immortal words of Martin Luther King, this was also the country where the right to protest was sacred.
Seen from this angle, all that hand-wringing about our democratic discontent can feel like an aberration — or even shamefully un-American. The irony here is that these fears ignore the anti-democratic strain that’s thrived in our politics since the founding. As far back as 1776, after all, John Adams argued against expanding the franchise in his native Massachusetts, warning that it would eventually “prostrate” all ranks to a single level. Heaven forbid, Adams added for good measure, that children or even women should get the chance to vote.
Nor was he alone. In Federalist 10, for instance, James Madison rejected a “pure democracy” — by which he meant direct rule by citizens, claiming that such societies become “spectacles of turbulence and contention”. Like Adams, moreover, Madison expressed particular reservations about the dangers comprehensive democracy could pose to property. “Those who hold and those who are without property,” he says, “have ever formed distinct interests in society.” Even Thomas Jefferson, arguably the most democratic of the Founding Fathers, remained confident that there was a “natural aristocracy” which the best kind of government selected for high office.
These ideas endured long after the early republic of frock coats and periwigs vanished into history. From the mid-1820s, for instance, Vice President John C. Calhoun worried that an abolitionist populous North might one day wield excessive political power over the slaveholding South. And though these fears were clearly partly motivated by grubby sociopolitical realities — a South Carolinian, Calhoun owned some 50 slaves himself — he equally couched his concerns in the high-minded constitutional principle. In his A Disquisition on Government, for instance, he warned against the dangers of an “absolute democracy” which holds that a mere “numerical majority” should rule. This, in turn, would facilitate an egalitarian push, whereby the majority would attempt to “force the front rank back to the rear, or attempt to push forward the rear into line with the front” through the “interposition of government”.
There’s a risk, of course, of slipping into anachronism here. People in earlier centuries obviously believed plenty of things we’d disagree with now. Yet similar anti-democratic arguments have consistently reemerged into modern times. In a 1957 article, for instance, William F. Buckley argued that southerners were entitled to impose restrictions on black votes even “in areas where it does not predominate numerically” — because, Buckley claimed, whites for the time being represented “the advanced race”. In Suicide of a Superpower, published in 2011, Patrick Buchanan warned about how high levels of immigration threatened the “European” and “white” American majority. This, he explained, was because the “West worships at the altar of democracy, is deeply egalitarian, and has thrown open its doors to a Third World in which ethnonationalism is embedded”.
These days, a whole array of expressly anti-democratic thinkers have continued to carry Buckley’s torch. Adrian Vermeule makes appeals to the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, dismissing the alleged neutrality and toleration of liberalism and calling for an overtly theocratic politics. In Common Good Constitutionalism, Vermeule urges conservative jurists to abandon even the pretence of originalist neutrality, and simply issue decisions based on their own (reactionary) values. This may produce outcomes highly contrary to majority rule, but Vermeule doesn’t care: the “common good need not justify itself before the bar of democracy”. Not to be outdone, Peter Thiel, himself an anti-democrat, has long financed the work of Curtis Yarvin. A major influence on J.D. Vance, Yarvin argues that Edmund Burke’s swinish multitude “suck” and should be replaced by something like a monarchial CEO. Yarvin hopefully means someone less silly than Elon Musk — but he will presumably take who he can get.
This intellectual tumult is bad enough. But what’s really striking is that the Constitution’s anti-democratic legacy, traced right back to Madison and Adams, continues to have a desultory impact on American politics. Consider the Senate. The Constitution apportions senators on the basis of “state sovereignty” — a legal fiction — and guarantees that small states enjoy far more legislative heft than their larger neighbours. California and Wyoming both get two senators, despite the former having 80 times more people.
No less important, the Constitution also doesn’t guarantee any American citizen the right to vote, only preventing abridgement of an entitlement to vote on the basis of race or gender. Historically, even this thin shield has been easy to circumvent. States implemented a vast array of workarounds-literacy tests. They also restricted voting based on taxes paid — even as many freed slaves still had little or no income. Just as striking, the Supreme Court has often upheld such outrages. One example here is the infamous Williams v Mississippi case, where the court unanimously found that disenfranchising black people was actually fine.
In a sense, this is unremarkable: the judiciary has anti-democratic foundations too. Belying its reputation as a body of sober judgement, the Supreme Court has more often than not exercised that power on behalf of conservative causes even when they’re deeply unpopular. In the past few years, these have included the perennially unpopular Citizens United decision, giving corporations massive power to spend money to electioneer, and the Dobbs decision rolling backs women’s reproductive rights. As Erwin Chemerinsky has noted, meanwhile, the fact that Supreme Court judges are given life tenures thrusts a stake through the country’s democratic pretensions. “No other country in the world gives its judges life tenure,” the constitutional scholar says, “and that is for a good reason: individuals should not exercise such great power for such a long period of time.” As Chemerinsky adds, when the country was founded average life expectancy was much lower than it is now. These days, of course, you can have jurists making monumental decisions about the future of the republic well into their dotage.
Then there’s the Electoral College, despised by a majority of Americans and which has a long history of producing anti-majoritarian results, with small, rural states enjoying an outsized influence on American elections. This has twice benefitted Republicans in the 21st century, when their candidates won the 2000 and 2016 elections despite losing the popular vote. But it also nearly brought John Kerry to power in 2004, when he came very close to winning Ohio, and therefore the election, despite losing the popular vote to war criminal George W. Bush.
All this has had a profound impact on the day-to-day practicalities of American democracy. Especially when dovetailed with the Constitution’s theoretical problems — and the way that promoted a reactionary intellectual tradition from Calhoun to Yarvin — America was prevented from becoming a genuine democracy well into the Sixties. Quite aside from the sufferings of African Americans, who were habitually disenfranchised right across the South, Asian and Native Americans have also battled for their rights deep into living memory. No wonder scholars have found that many foreigners now consider the US Constitution yesterday’s news, the political equivalent of Mahler in an age of brat summers.
Turning things around will mean confronting these realities directly, recognising that saving democracy will involve expanding it — and changing the existing constitutional order to eliminate its anti-democratic features. An obvious beginning would involve moving away from the electoral college towards a directly majoritarian system. This wouldn’t be easy, with smaller states unsurprisingly resenting such a move. But it isn’t impossible: several states have already aligned with the “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact” pledging to give their electors to whoever wins the popular vote. Reforming the Supreme Court wouldn’t be simple either. But legislative reform to impose term limits, and a popular push for the court to enact a more stringent ethics code, show that change is in the air.
It goes without saying that any reform will enrage those demagogues who exploit the constitution’s weak points, gaining power against the wishes of most voters. But two centuries on from the drafting of our anti-democratic constitution, it’s finally time to hand power to the people.
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SubscribeThis is called running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds. Almost 20 paragraphs decrying the speculations of amatuer sleuths while liberally reproducing them for the readers delectation.
“In this case, it will probably mean that a 19-year-old boy staggering home from a rave died, parched, on a slope in the Canary Islands, only to become a martyr to Netflix-addled nosiness.”
Γνῶθι σαυτόν
One of the many, many examples of why I jettisoned my Facebook account about 5 years ago; vowing never to return.
Despite all this amateur sleuthing, these people lack any real curiosity. If they had some, they would be more thoughtful.
As they are, they skate over the surface of reality. Their use of their imagination is simplistic.
As Sherlock Holmes says, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
If they read this Unherd article, would they see their own shortcomings?
If you live in a bubble of stupid people who watch Love Island etc and submit to enjoying the fb rage triggering techniques, you probably have such a lack of self awareness you can’t see you are manipulated by everything you watch.
Reminds me of Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty. As it ever was.
Unplugged the tellybox 30 years ago to avoid inviting the dregs of humanity into my life
Yes the “idiot’s lantern” gets more idiotic by the month.
As was predicted more channels led to more rubbish and finding anything of quality is much more difficult, in fact hardly worth the effort. And that includes the alleged “news” programmes.
“…Jay, who was handed a community order for splitting a 17-year-old boy’s head open with a machete along with seven accomplices in August 2021…”
Um…. He what now?
Yes, I found that the most disturbing thing in the article. I have no opinion on where ‘Jay’ is or what happened to him, but I’m very worried by a society where you can split someone’s head open and not go to jail.
Didn’t Samuel Melia get two years for distributing far-right stickers? Imagine if he’d actually hit someone; heavier sentence? Community order? I honestly don’t know any more.
Jay sounds like the type of person who would be of interest to drug traffickers and dealers looking for new recruits. So it is not unreasonable for the police to be considering this line of inquiry.
Or of interest to the friends, family and acquaintances of the person whose head he split open.
Most of these people are allowed to vote.
Some decades ago we had no internet or mobile phones and many more of us frequented local pubs. In every pub in every village, town or city there would usually be at least one socially dysfunctional character best avoided for his tedious crackpot obsessions. This was often stuff like Hitler being misunderstood, the Bermuda triangle hiding a secret US government testing facility, or how all economic and social problems could be fixed be the middle-classes having their money and property forcibly taken away.
Deeply irritating as these guys could be (they were almost always men by the way) they were relatively easy to escape and being socially isolated they rarely met anyone of similar ilk. If you were very unlucky you would come across a small group getting themselves worked up about class warfare, but that was about the extent of it.
Fast forward 30 years and now this hitherto relatively small handful of slightly tragic men trying to strike up conversations with strangers in pubs has found each other via social media. What’s more they’ve been joined by all the true crime obsessed women in the world who for various reasons didn’t go in pubs alone back in the day. So they’ve reached a kind of hyper-connected event horizon whereby literally any theory, no matter how utterly ludicrous, pointless and easy to disprove, can gain global traction if enough people jump on it.
The chances are they will not find this young man Jay Slater alive now. From what I’ve read he sounds like a bit of a scrote to be honest, but he doesn’t deserve what may have been a terrible death. Maybe there has been some foul play involved as I can’t imagine Tenerife raves are entirely free of criminal elements. But regardless of whether the truth is simply that he foolishly wandered off unprepared into the murderous heat or got on the wrong side of the wrong people, it won’t stop the social media speculation because it never does once the story takes on a life of its own.
It’s not just “social media” though, is it. The BBC news website (cobwebsite?) has been leading on this story for days. A brief glance was enough; Poppy’s piece confirmed the banality of a young man finding himself out of his depth – unfortunate but also un-newsworthy.
In the ‘Trial by TikTok’ Moscow Idaho one, the BBC presenter seems just a bit too like the influencers for comfort – she has a touch of the same narcissism.
it’s disturbing as the narcissism of influencer and online ‘sleuth’ is not a world a way from the narcissism of the killer himself, living out his ‘truth’ as they live out theirs.
But theirs just requires endless attention and yabbering shit into a camera . . . his ‘actualisation’ requires other – doubtless more socially successful and well-adjusted people – to die.
I can’t wait for the ‘outtakes ‘ and the sure-to-be forthcoming BBC documentary about how they made the documentary about how they made the…..
Same story here, on the insanity that descended on Moscow, Idaho after the 2022 murder of the four students :
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001x8mz
Not ONE of the TikTok sleuths got within a thousand miles of any piece of evidence or even had an inkling of the suspect.
He was detected by dogged, thankless, old-school police work. A slow & deliberative process of elimination of cars on traffic cameras, and pings on mobile phone towers, found him. And then a tiny piece of DNA he left on a knife sheath, collared him.
The influencers just spent their time harassing anyone who looked a bit weird, didn’t seem to be grieving appropriately or they sat there risibly, sighing & farting as they received messages from ‘spirits’ and the dead.
Village gossip – now with added internet!
There’s a documentary on Netflix called The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel, produced by Ron Howard, that is not only a good true crime story but also illustrates the horrors of true crime online sleuths.
Thank you, Ms Sowerby, for this expose of what is happening in the outreaches of “social media”. It is disturbing that many of those thus engaged also have the right to vote in the next election. But I have to wonder if they’ll bother with such a banal subject? If they won’t, it then follows that one should ask whether their activities even merit reporting. Obviously when they cause distress to others, it should at least be recorded.
On the other hand those ‘others’ (family & friends) do not have to read the trash being posted, and can remain blissfully ignorant should they wish. It would hardly be the first time affected relatives cancelled their social media feeds, including “friends” who persisted in passing on offensive material. As viewers used to point out to the campaigners against some types of TV programme, there is always The Off Switch (something I use ever more frequently as I age).
Maybe the lesson is that we should all be very aware of the likely reaction should we ever find ourselves closely linked to a human tragedy, and ready to self-isolate, along with our true friends.
Man, we’re bored. Somebody needs to invent faster-than-light travel tout suite so that we can head out into space and start having meaningful adventures again.
Best comment in awhile.
Yes. Who could have guessed that having everything at our fingertips would lead to mind-boggling boredom?