Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

by Steven Levitsky

brief political opening in the late 1880s had presented an alternative path—one that, if taken, might have set the country on a different course. In 1888, Benjamin Harrison, the Republican former senator from Indiana and a vocal supporter of more robust voting rights protections, was elected president, and the Republicans regained control of both houses of Congress. Moreover, Black suffrage and federal enforcement of voting laws remained in the Republican Party platform, which called for “effective legislation to secure the integrity and purity of elections.” Two influential Republican leaders, Senator George Frisbie Hoar and Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge (later U.S. senator), began work on a national plan to protect voting rights. Hoar and Lodge were both from Massachusetts, and both men had imbibed their home state’s “abolitionist and radical sentiments.” The legislators drafted a seventy-five-page bill that protected voting rights in the South and oversaw elections in the North by extending the 1870 Enforcement Act’s federal supervision to all congressional districts. The bill empowered independent (court-appointed) federal supervisors to scrutinize all stages of the election process, and it allowed citizens in every district in the country to request federal supervision of elections in their district. It was the most ambitious voting rights bill in U.S. history, surpassing even the 1965 Voting Rights Act in its geographic scope, and it would have fundamentally altered ...