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The US Constitution is anti-democratic Any reform will enrage the demagogues

Can we trust the Court? Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Can we trust the Court? Drew Angerer/Getty Images


November 6, 2024   6 mins

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.

“Yarvin has long argued that Edmund Burke’s swinish multitude ‘suck’ and should be replaced by something like a monarchial CEO”

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.


Matt McManus is a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan. He is the author or co-author of several books including The Political Right and Equality and Against Post-Liberal Courts and Justice. His forthcoming book is The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism.

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Andrew Roman
Andrew Roman
1 month ago

The US system of government has its flaws, but so do most democracies. In much of Europe and Canada parties that receive less than 40% or even 30% of the popular vote coalitions with other parties to become the government. This way the governing party will have been against the choice of some 2/3 of the electorate.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 month ago
Reply to  Andrew Roman

By the same token though in PR at least a majority voted for at least one of the parties in government. Other countries also tend to have many more parties to choose from which splits the vote somewhat, you’ll rarely get any party winning much more than a third of the vote

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 month ago

The electoral system does seem a stupid way of counting votes.
If a state currently gets 20 electoral votes why not simply divide that State into 20 similarly populated areas (like the UK seats) and give each a vote, rather than giving all 20 to a party despite it possibly only winning 10 or 11 areas?

Tom D
Tom D
1 month ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

First, it is each state’s laws that determine how the electoral votes are selected. Your “why not simply divide that State into…similarly populated areas” is precisely what Maine and Nebraska have done. Those areas are called congressional districts, and so the only remaining two votes from these states follow the total state popular vote. Nothing prevents the other states from implementing this schema.
Second, the present deficiencies of the Electoral College mostly stem from the fact that the House of Representatives is too small, a deficiency derived not from the Constitution but from Federal law.
Third, trying to preserve a Federal system is not stupid. The end game of proposals such as this article’s is to subvert Federalism and convert the states into simple powerless administrative regions, and lay the grounds for a majoritarian tyranny.

Terry M
Terry M
1 month ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

It is The United States of America, not the Peoples Republic. The USA was formed as, and is, an agreement among states. Each state has significant sovereignty over policies within the state that do not impinge on the other states. It allows power to be practiced at a more local level – a very good thing since it puts people closer to their government.

Tom Lewis
Tom Lewis
1 month ago

“ “common good need not justify itself before the bar of democracy” ”
….and haven’t our, modern day, rulers taken that to heart. Denouncing the ‘fash-ists’, all the while enacting, and behaving, more and more like the very people they deride.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

Matt should sue whoever printed out his diploma for malpractice. He clearly was completely uneducated. America is a Constitutional Representative Republic. Matt, please GFY.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

We are not, nor should we ever be, a democracy. Western Europe is allegedly democratic, yet its citizens wake up daily eith fewer and fewer rights. And just roll over and take it. Because the democratic government says their rights are a danger to democracy. Matt is a pathetic example of the difference between being educated and being wise.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

What rights do Americans have that Britain for example doesn’t?
Granted you can buy a load of guns to shoot up the local school (something that isn’t really possible in Britain), but Brits on the other hand can be trusted to drink a pint at 18, buy their kids a kinder egg and cross the street without waiting to be told to do so without risking a fine

Robert
Robert
1 month ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Umm… How about freedom of speech? We don’t have police showing up at people’s houses arresting them for mean tweets ‘misgendering’ people.
And, yeah – I like my second amendment rights, too.
I wouldn’t trade our first two amendments in the constitution for being able to drink at 18.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 month ago
Reply to  Robert

18? Pah!

Dunno about the kids these days, but many of us started at 16 (or even younger). We also, due to “getting it out of our system” tend to drink responsibly.

As for democracy, there will never be a ‘perfect’ system, and each has it’s merits and drawbacks. I’d say we’re all probably less democratic than say, 50 years ago, but the idea – mooted in these comments – that those of us in Western Europe “lie down and take it” is arrant nonsense. Here in the UK – the home of the Magna Carta – we lie down before no-one, whatever might be perceived elsewhere.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

I don’t believe we are less democratic than 50 years ago. We keep telling ourselves this because fewer and fewer people vote – laziness or the excuse, ‘too busy’. So we have a government voted in by 19% of the electorate and we deserve the punishment.

Sue B
Sue B
26 days ago

British democracy took a massive hit during COVID. And no one is asking the most basic questions: was the loss of individual rights necessary? And once lost can they ever be fully recovered? The US may ask the same questions. But at least we have the 1st amendment and each state could follow their own emergency rules and restrictions.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Yeah most of us are in the pubs at 16 admittedly, I just thought I’d better say 18 because you know a pedant would write a long diatribe if I didn’t

Robert
Robert
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Here in the UK – the home of the Magna Carta – we lie down before no-one, whatever might be perceived elsewhere.
Well, you seem to be taking a ‘two-tier’ justice system lying down. I’m curious to see if you push back against that. Tweet crimes landing people in jail? And we just saw your justice system was hiding information regarding the Southport murders. Good luck sorting that out.
As far as the Magna Carta, well done! It was a great start! I like to think we improved on it with the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Our Declaration of Independence (no offense…) was stellar as well!

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 month ago
Reply to  Robert

You think the majority in the country are “lying down” in reference to the current minority-elected government and its regime acolytes? Your insult only reveals your own ignorance.

Think “Brexit”. We spoke then, and we’ll speak again. You ‘temporary’ types just make us laugh, reacting to the latest news item as if it defines an entire people.

Robert
Robert
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

It’s quite possible I’ve been following British politics longer than you’ve been alive, fwiw.
I’ve lived through Thatcher and Blair and the utterly failed Boris and Rishi. I give BoJo credit for Brexit, though.
I watch the small boats disaster ongoing while the politicians wring their hands in fear of the ECHR.
I watched you put Kier Starmer, he of the bent knee, in power.
I see Ed Miliband enacting the idiotic net zero policies Boris accelerated. Policies Brits and their politicians agreed to in the name of fighting the ‘climate crisis’.
From the outside – and I say this fully recognizing all of the faults of my country, America – it looks like you are committing national suicide, especially with net zero and immigration, while standing around looking at each other hoping someone will stand up and do something.
This seems true, also, with the ‘hate speech’ stuff happening. Putting people in jail for ‘hate speech’? Wow. Just, wow.
I will continue to watch with curiosity.
And I genuinely hope you are able to right the ship.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Where are the protests on behalf of the people being imprisoned for tweets or for whispering a prayer in public or for shouting at a policeman. You should sign up to the FSU newsletter.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 month ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

It’s not a case of “protesting”. The antisemitic protests (for instance) against Israel’s right to defend itself are loud, but don’t chime with the British character, which again, you’re misunderstanding (whether British or not).
Starmer and his regime will be gone. There were no protests or riots in the 1970s as the country was run down, but it ended. We do things the right way.

David Hirst
David Hirst
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Just ‘Magna Carta’ – no ‘the’ (since there’s no articles in Latin).

I’ll go now. All best.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 month ago
Reply to  David Hirst

Fair point.

Kirk Susong
Kirk Susong
1 month ago
Reply to  David Hirst

But there are articles in English… I’ll keep referring to it as the Colosseum and the Tiber etc.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
1 month ago
Reply to  David Hirst

A pedant’s point! Latin doesn’t have articles, but English does!

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

How did that strict gun legislation do for the young children knifed by a jihadi. How did those protests for the children’s murders go? As for guns being used to shoot up schools, yeah, that is tough. Like the jihad murderer most school shooters appear to have been well known to police, who arrived in minutes when seconds count. The vast majority of gun use in the US is on preventive measures to stop crime, not to commit crime.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Don’t confuse the events of one summer with an overall ability to withstand attempts to undermine the essential character of the British people. We’ve been acquiring our character for a thousand years, and recent trends in our population won’t change that.

How long have you been acquiring your character? Don’t presume to understand the basic grit within us, once our normally phlegmatic spirits are roused.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

LL, I pray you are correct. However, I believe the amazing grit and fortitude is facing its greatest test since possibly the Restoration.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

We’ve been acquiring our character for going on 300 years. It’s a mixed bag though I’m not going be open to lectures from a country that opened the door to people who would erase its character. What does “British” even mean anymore? John Cleese was attacked for daring to say that London no longer looks like an English city. I hope your spirits do get aroused. Soon.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 month ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

I’m responding to those who’ve tried to lecture us – have another read – and who do so from a position of misunderstanding our character, which i can assure you, remains intact.
We’ve faced far worse, including when one half of the nation was set against the other during the religious conflicts following the schism from Rome.
300 years ago, we’d been through several of these testing periods, and we’ll emerge on the other side once again. We never, ever, give up on ourselves.
Good to see something is beginning to happen in the US which apparently matches that type of fortitude.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

How many more children would have died if he’d been armed with a couple of semi automatic rifles?

Wilfred Davis
Wilfred Davis
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

The vast majority of gun use in the US is on preventive measures to stop crime, not to commit crime.

Adjusted for population size, gun deaths in the US run at about 340 times more than the gun deaths in the UK. Wow, that must amount to a perfectly astounding number of crimes being prevented in the US every single day.

[From the internet – Gun death rate: In 2021, the US had a gun violence death rate of 4.31 per 100,000 people, while the UK had a rate of 0.013 per 100,000 people. Homicide method: In 2022/23, only 4.9% of homicides in England and Wales were by shooting, compared to 85.7% in the US in 2021.]

Kirk Susong
Kirk Susong
1 month ago
Reply to  Wilfred Davis

These comparisons are dumb. The US is a country founded by men fighting off an army of oppressors and then fighting off man and beast to civilize the frontier. Guns have a place in American civic culture that Brits almost willfully misunderstand.

As for the idea that if guns magically disappeared from the US there would be less violence… you can’t compare rates of violence between ethnically homogeneous and ethnically heterogeneous countries. As the UK becomes more ethnically diverse violent crime has increased dramatically. We’ll see what the future holds.

Tom D
Tom D
1 month ago
Reply to  Kirk Susong

Yes, as we saw in the recent machete parades.

Kent Ausburn
Kent Ausburn
1 month ago
Reply to  Kirk Susong

It’s important to note that the US gun death statistics include suicide by gun, which accounts for over 50% of reported gun deaths.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
1 month ago
Reply to  Wilfred Davis

If you remove a handful of cities where crimes occur in predictable places among predictable people from the stats, the US and its guns don’t look quite so menacing. Sensibilities would, no doubt, be offended by being specific about the people and places, but that would make that reality no less true.
For a country with more guns than people, the gun death rate – which is annually topped by suicide – is less scary than you want to think. Also, does the difference in homicide method make those killed in England and Wales less dead than the people shot?

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
1 month ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

Right. So if you remove large numbers of gun deaths from the statistics then they start to look more favourable you mean?
If I removed all the wrong answers from my school exams I’d have passed every subject with 100%

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 month ago
Reply to  Wilfred Davis

Have you made knives illegal yet? Brollies are after that.

I think you need to include knives to make any comparison.

Micael Gustavsson
Micael Gustavsson
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Are you talking about the Rwanda born Christian “jihadi”?

Bernard Hill
Bernard Hill
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

…there is an element of pathos in his stuff which I’ve followed for a while, but his real problem is that he only has half a male brain. The right hemisphere is largely inactive.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Exactly. You know what is sacrosanct in our Constitution and system of government ? The right to dissent, because dissent is critical to getting it right. Dissent is built into the way that legislation is passed, to the rulings and structure of the Courts, and to the electoral college itself. The power of the right to dissent is what keeps us honest. Donald Trump’s third term is keeping us honest.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

I was thinking neither.

j watson
j watson
1 month ago

Changing the US Constitution was made deliberately v difficult by the Founding Fathers and the chances of the sort of amendments suggested by the Author fairly minimal, especially during a period of ‘anti-consensus’.
It’s easy to poke holes in western forms of democracy. None are perfect, and nor could they be. But go and live under a Totalitarian Autocrat or Theocrat for long and you soon come to see how lucky we are.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 month ago
Reply to  j watson

But go and live under a Totalitarian Autocrat or Theocrat …
… or just stick around in the UK for another couple of years under Starmer, Cooper, Lammy et al.

j watson
j watson
1 month ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Just silly response that HB. We’re a million miles from Starmer being a Putin, Xi or Kim Wrong-Un. When’s last time you saw them have to respond at a PMQs as just one example?

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 month ago
Reply to  j watson

We’re a million miles from Starmer being a Putin
There are many fewer people in prison for social media posts in Russia than there are here. Starmer is quite clearly a man with extremely authoritarian instincts. And the suppressed violence and anger in his PMQ responses suggests he’d do away with debate altogether if he could. People are foolish to believe that this man has entirely abandoned his youthful extremism.

Bad Captain
Bad Captain
1 month ago

Anti-democratic is a feature, not a bug. The author references the federalist papers but it’s not clear he’s read them. The arguments against direct democracy are well reasoned and contrary to progressive fever dreams, aren’t predicated on keeping immigrants, minorities and women down. There’s plenty more to say, but the founders did a much better job!

For the record, I don’t claim it’s the only way, but given the very real differences between the USA and most other nations, it’s probably the best for us. See my home state California for exhibit A of American “democracy” gone amuck.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

Please read the bio of the author. Reread his screed. He is much worse at every level. How pleasant that the American prople have given him the finger on the day this mut pushes the destruction of America on Unherd.

Right-Wing Hippie
Right-Wing Hippie
1 month ago

In a sense, this is unremarkable: the judiciary has anti-democratic foundations too. 
You’re absolutely right. In fact, why have a supreme court at all? The very notion of judges reviewing the Constitution and imposing their will on the rest of us is undemocratic. Constitutional issues should be submitted to the people directly; we could do it via online poll.
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.
A striking and compelling argument, although not for the side in the debate the author intends.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 month ago

that many foreigners now consider the US Constitution yesterday’s news, the political equivalent of Mahler in an age of brat summers.
We need a new word for ‘philistine’, the conventional meaning doesn’t even get half way to describing just how crass this is. This article should be in the Guardian.

Thomas Wagner
Thomas Wagner
1 month ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

I have a feeling the Guardian would reject it. It belongs in the WaPo.

Michael W. S
Michael W. S
1 month ago

“Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition”
US Navy Chaplain, Chaplain Forgy, on the deck of the USS New Orleans during the attack of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii 1942

Louise Durnford
Louise Durnford
1 month ago

What was the point of this useless article?

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

So Matt could demonstrate in a powerful way how intellectually empty Marxists are.

Tharmananthar Shankaradhas
Tharmananthar Shankaradhas
1 month ago

Electoral College is as price of creating a Federal state of many states especially as breakaway is constitutional.

Jürg Gassmann
Jürg Gassmann
1 month ago

No, this is completely wrong. McManus confuses constitutionalism and checks-and-balances with authoritarianism/elitism/oligarchy/fascism. McManus does not bother to define his bugbear, he just throws out scary anecdotes.
Already at the time the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, there was intellectual tension between “absolute” democracy à la Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and constitutionalism, where “constitutionalism” means that the majority are limited in what laws the legislature can pass.
Already at the time of the Founding Fathers, there was intellectual tension between freedom, i.e. “I can do whatever I want, nobody can stop me” (again Rousseau), and autonomy, i.e. “I can live my life in peace”. The Founding Fathers did not opt for “life, liberty, and property” (John Locke’s triad), but “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui).
No, the Constitution is not rotten, but it lives by the actions of citizens. There is no legal mechanism to guarantee functioning of the body politic. If citizens no longer believe in the Constitution, it is dead.
The argument that something has to be destroyed to make way for something new is the essence of ideological movements that end in totalitarianism.

Kirk Susong
Kirk Susong
1 month ago

This may be the dumbest article I have ever read on UnHerd. And this guy lectures on politics at Michigan? Yet more proof that it’s time to end the subsidy.

Tom D
Tom D
1 month ago
Reply to  Kirk Susong

“The US Constitution is anti-democratic Any reform will enrage the demagogues”
The insanity here is that not only is the U.S. Constitution in part anti-democratic and was meant to be, but the current push to ‘give it greater democracy’ is the province of many of today’s demagogues. And recall classical Greece: democracy and demagoguery have the same root.
The incoherence on this level alone is astounding.

John Pade
John Pade
1 month ago

It’s supposed to be. The world is full of countries with better constitutions and worse societies than America. The Constitution has worked as intended and continues to do so.

Russell Sharpe
Russell Sharpe
1 month ago

“The Constitution […] 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.”
A transparent non sequitur. That all states send the same number of senators means that small states enjoy exactly the same legislative heft as their larger neighbours, at least as far as the Senate is concerned. (They have far less heft in the House of course) This of course is exactly what was intended by the Founders, the USA having been set up as a federation of equal states.
What the writer was (I assume) trying to say was that individual citizens of smaller states have (in the Senate) far more legislative heft than those of larger states. Which is a trivial logico-arithmetical consequence of what was intended, and once again, not exactly news.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
1 month ago

Let me guess: the author is not pleased with the morning’s result. What an interesting title. Sure, let’s get rid of the document that paved the way for the single greatest experiment in self-governance that the world has seen. The author must be unaware of the people’s ability to amend the Constitution, something that’s been done two dozen times.
This is a telling passage: 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.” If states right were legal fiction, then no state would have its own laws that govern firearms or abortion or a host of other issues that the federal govt also weighs in on. And one point of the Senate is to keep the smaller states from being overrun by their larger neighbors. Another is to have a cooling off space as a buffer against the House.

R Kays
R Kays
1 month ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

From the author’s piece:

“… the Dobbs decision rolling backs women’s reproductive rights.”

Until Matt can be honest about what abortion is/does, and until he drops the silly conflation of abortion with “reproductive rights,” his perspective is unreliable.

Courtney Maloney
Courtney Maloney
1 month ago
Reply to  R Kays

Right there, where he asserts “reproductive rights,” was confirmation I had unwisely invested time from my short existence and within the comments is where an intellectual gain can be found.

mac mahmood
mac mahmood
1 month ago

The exclusion of a lot of people in US democracy continued unabated into the 1960s until a decisive leap was taken in expanding the franchise, by enacting the Voting Rights Act as a means of denying the Soviets a propaganda win. So we have to thank the Soviets for that. However, that does not mean that US stopped subverting democracy at home and and abroad as the countless coups followed by the installation of right wing military juntas in countries aligned with the West all over the world amply demonstrate. In contrast The Soviets seem to have done better in India in helping it to emerge as the ‘world’s largest democracy’.

Gayle Rosenthal
Gayle Rosenthal
1 month ago

Matt McManus, lecturer in Marxist Class politics, at the anti-democratic, socialist and fascist institution of the University of Michigan. There … I said it. It MUST be true ! I have a law degree and 45 years of experience in the real world. Not the Ivory Tower.
If this so-called political scientist wants to name call rather than discussing the facts which highlighted the value of the electoral college then I can present an egalitarian response. Grow up Matt.
Yes, when I was 15 years old in high school, in the 10th grade, we were assigned in the advanced level of English class, to write a persuasive essay on any topic. I wrote an essay about the anti-democratic nature of the electoral college. It’s very easy to do. It is a simple mathematical problem: 90,000,001 is greater number than 89,999,999, by 2 votes. I got a grade of ‘A’ on the paper, not because my teacher agreed with me, but because I was a good writer and supported my thesis with a simplistic, but well-presented argument. So yeah … I understood the “anti-democratic electoral college” when I was more or less still a child. I owned no property. I had no bank account. I had a minimum wage part-time job. I was a teenager and liked to thumb my nose at authority. My teacher was old and strict. She sent me home one day for wearing hip-hugger, bell-bottom jeans and a tank top which violated the school’s dress code. I left her class with a loud slam of the door. But still she gave me an ‘A’ because she was a woman of integrity and a foremost an excellent teacher.
In sum … those persons like Mr. McManus who decry the oppression of the electoral college should wise up and grow up. The U.S. Constitution was formed out of an agreement between the states. States rights are paramount. I don’t believe for a second that majoritarian rule, as he calls it, is necessary or smart. Federalism is important. And everything not spelled out by the Constitution as a federal concern is in the purview of the states.
I am a lifelong Texan. Texas left Mexico in 1836 because of a proposed threat to federalism. If our bargain, the U.S. Constitution, is undermined as it was in Mexico, there will be civil war. As it is, the best and brightest are coming to Texas. Hopefully our Republican majority will hold. Hell, even the Democrats here in Texas have common sense.
Not only this … look at where Mexico is now. It is a narco state full of corrupt oligarchs of European ancestry and their peasant toadies. And I say that lovingly because, yes, the Mexicans are coming here too … for safety and for employment and opportunity. The toadies are staying in Mexico because their bread is buttered by the crooks running the narco state.
Have you heard of the Greater Idaho movement ? Or did you know that three western Maryland counties want to realign with and join West Virginia ?
Grow up Mr. McManus. And a hint to the Political Science Department at the University of Michigan – don’t award Mr. McManus tenure. He’s a danger to the minds of students at your institution, and a danger to the Republic. Remember the Pledge of Allegiance ? To the “Republic, for which it stands ?” Lest you think only men like Donald Trump talk this way … you should know that I am a wise, white grandma.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

Thank you for your little tirade, Ms Rosenthal. As a Canadian, I look to the system that my neighbour to the south set up centuries ago with some envy. Here in the frozen north, we are experiencing the problems inherent with majoritarian democracy where large urban centres in the east, largely populated with our most recent arrivals and their kin who choose to live in their self-imposed enclaves, decide the outcomes of elections, while the concerns of the other half of the country which is more sparsely populated but which contributes more than their share economically, are ignored or repudiated. So it ends up being a situation where those who are paying the bills don’t get a say. And this problem is only going to get worse since the doors have been thrown open to welcome all comers.

mike flynn
mike flynn
1 month ago

Agree with your intent. But, thought we, the people, are paramount. Even over the states?

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

Texit

David Yetter
David Yetter
1 month ago

The Founders did not give America a democracy. They were as suspicious of democracy as they were of monarchy. They gave us in the words of Benjamin Franklin, “A republic, if you can keep it.” In the list of anti-democratic features of our Constitution, the author leaves one out: the Bill of Rights, which Kevin Williamson, a working-class fellow who writes for National Review, described as “a list of things you idiots don’t get to vote on.”
The genius of America is not democracy, but limited government and division of powers (between Federal and state, between branches of the government). If, God forbid, we ever have to engage in nation building again, that is what we should be exporting, not “democracy”.

Richard Ross
Richard Ross
1 month ago

Once again, John Adams has the defining word on the Constitution:
“Our Constitution was intended for a moral and religious people. It is wholly unsuited to the governance of any other”. Any form of government will be bent, in practice, to the shape of the national character. This is why both a constitutional monarchy and a democratic republic worked very well as long as Adams’ pillar for both stood steady, and neither is working well since it has eroded.

Dash Riprock
Dash Riprock
1 month ago

Majoritarianism would split the union

michael harris
michael harris
1 month ago

Gave up reading at ‘war criminal George Bush’. If you want to be accurate Mr McManus, try ‘patsy George Bush’ plus ‘patsy Colin Powell’ and ‘war criminal Richard Cheney’.

mike flynn
mike flynn
1 month ago
Reply to  michael harris

Agree. Bush the front. Powell the mouthpiece. Cheney the rabid dog war criminal.

Andrew Holmes
Andrew Holmes
1 month ago

The population of the UK is about 68 million, while the US is about 340 million. The UK spans an island, while the US spans a continent. Democracy, as defined by McManus, apparently doesn’t work in the UK, given the devolution of authority over many issues by England to multiple lesser parliamentary bodies. The US has a wider range of economic and social issues. The US constitutional structure addresses diverse interests by making states sovereigns subordinate to a federal center. Contrary to McManus, state authority is real, just as Scots have real authority. Further, the allocation of Senators two to each state, and the Electoral College system, serve to protect minority interests. James Madison and those who worked with him to design the Constitution were students of history who clearly explained their reasoning. McManus addresses none of their concerns.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 month ago

Majoritarianism isn’t democracy. It is tyranny of the majority. There is already too much of that in every system.

And when voters realize they can vote themselves the labour of their neighbours that is also the end of democracy.

A fate the us may well have avoided for one more term. Think things like young blue collar families paying the tuitions for Ivy League louts. That sort of thing.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
1 month ago

This author displays a staggering lack of understanding of history. He clearly knows the facts, but understands none of the context. His central point that the Constitution is not democratic is correct, but so what? The Constitution is not a document that was ever intended to create a Democratic nation. It was a document that was intended to ensure that there was one nation instead of thirteen. It was a compromise. Without such things as the 3/5th compromise, a Senate apportioned by geography, and the division of powers between state and federal levels, there would be no America, because some or all of the colonies would not have signed it, as it would have gone against their interests to do so. Then, as now, Georgia had a very different society than New York and had vastly different economic interests. What was good for Georgia might be bad for New York and vice versa. The small states wanted some guarantee that their interests wouldn’t simply be ignored by the larger states. The larger states wanted recognition of their larger population. The existence of a House based on population and a Senate based on geography was a direct result of that conflict. If there was a crisis so dire that the states deemed it necessary called a new constitutional convention (which by the way is allowed in the constitution), does anyone seriously believe Alaska, Hawaii, Rhode Island, or any of the tiniest states would ever agree to a single purely democratic system? Of course not. We would see the same conflicts emerge between rural and urban, traders vs. farmers, etc. as Jefferson, Washington, and Adams did.

The author’s hypothetical is a non-sequitur. A pure democracy the size of the United States should not ever exist and probably could not exist for very long. It would, simply by virtue of its size, be anti-democratic as the voices of millions would necessarily be silenced by sheer force of numbers with no recourse but the timeless option of revolutionary violence which assuredly would be regular and vicious. The Constitution allows room for internal conflicts to be fought between states and the federal government, and the states themselves, in Congress and in the Senate, and in the courts, rather than on a battlefield by men with guns. We are in the midst of one such conflict now. If the nation survives intact, it will not be because of high minded idealists pounding on the table for absolute democracy and crying about the unfairness of the electoral college and the Senate, it will be by realists who understand that such a large area as the United States cannot simply be governed effectively using any single unified system, democratic or otherwise. It would invariably devolve into one or another sort of constant civil conflict.

I’d be fine with pure majoritarian democracies, if it were accompanied by the immediate dissolution of the Union into at least fifty and realistically more like 60-75, sovereign nations not bound to each other in any way or in some sort of loose economic union like the EU as it existed prior to 1993. Pure democracy only works at the smallest scales of population and geography. This is pure wishful thinking on the part of the author. He may as well curse at the sky because it’s raining for all the good it will do. The chances of anything like he suggests happening are roughly zero. It’s amusing to me that anyone thinks this way. Nobody with such idealistic delusions should ever be allowed near the levers of power. I think this sort of ‘voter’ is precisely what Jefferson, Adams, and company were probably worried about.

mike flynn
mike flynn
1 month ago
Reply to  Steve Jolly

Says he’s a college prof. So his influence is greater than his one vote.

charlie martell
charlie martell
1 month ago

I hope he enjoyed writing that more than I did reading it.
He should worry more about what the left does to democracy, given enough time, than the laws in the US constitution. And I hope he bemoaned the make up of the House when it was dominated by the Democrats for decades, and the SCOTUS when it too had a liberal majority for so long.

mike flynn
mike flynn
1 month ago

Four terms for FDR was a godsend to him.

Dan Comerford
Dan Comerford
1 month ago

I found this piece to be a rambling screed cherry picking historical behaviors which don’t always align with the intention of the constitution. The reality of our country is it is a work in progress, and we are still improving. Throwing out the baby with the bath water is not a strategic solution.

mike flynn
mike flynn
1 month ago

Well, an academic shredding the US Constitution and political structures. What an original thinker. One thought and 5000 profs espousing it. Yet offers no alternative. Just pure majority rules. Really ignorant of factual history.