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

by Steven Levitsky

McPherson, the 1872 election was “the fairest and most democratic election in the South until 1968.”

Reconstruction proved politically hard to sustain, however. Eventually, the Republican Party divided. A faction known as the Liberal Republicans grew critical of the costs of enforcement. Prioritizing issues such as free trade and civil service reform, and skeptical of Black suffrage, the liberals began to question the wisdom of the Reconstruction project, preferring a more politically expedient “let alone” policy in the South.

The turn away from federal protection permitted a second wave of Redemption. In 1875 the Mississippi Democrats launched a violent campaign—known as the Mississippi Plan—aimed at regaining the state legislature. As Foner notes, terrorist acts were “committed in broad daylight by undisguised men,” severely depressing the Black vote in the 1875 elections and giving Democrats control of the state legislature.

By the time Grant’s successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, withdrew most of the remaining federal troops overseeing the South in 1877 (as part of a negotiated settlement of the disputed 1876 presidential election), Reconstruction had effectively ended.

Continued Black voting prevented Democrats from entrenching their rule. Amid the agrarian depression of the 1880s and early 1890s, third-party forces—Independents, Greenbackers, Readjusters, Farmers’ Alliances, and, beginning in 1892, the Populist Party—won support among disaffected white farmers and, often working with Republicans, forged biracial coalitions to defy Democratic single-party rule.

These biracial coalitions created a renewed sense of threat among the white supremacist Democratic establishment. Once again, the specter of “Negro domination” became a common refrain among Democrats.

is a flimsy statute—the Eight-Box Law.” Indeed, the tactics of terror and fraud that had brought the Democrats back to power in the 1870s were not permanent solutions.

Democrats across the South began to undermine democracy through legal channels. Between 1888 and 1908, they rewrote state constitutions and voting laws to disenfranchise African Americans.

republican form of government altogether.” Such “gentlemanly” techniques were pure constitutional hardball. Southern Democrats began by searching for ways to exploit gaps in the law to restrict ballot access. As we have seen, the Fifteenth Amendment contained a grave vulnerability: it only prohibited states from denying the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

State by state, southern Democrats did precisely this, crafting “ingenious contrivances,” or new restrictions that the Constitution did not explicitly prohibit, including poll taxes, literacy tests, and property and proof of residency requirements that, if vigorously enforced, would make it impossible for most African Americans to register and vote.

Another de facto literacy test came with the hardball introduction of the Australian (or secret) ballot, which required citizens to vote on government-produced ballots—and alone in a voting booth where they could not be assisted by a (literate) friend. Attractive to Democrats because it effectively made it impossible for illiterate people to vote, the secret ballot targeted Black voters who could not understand the ballots without assistance.

As the deputy to the Arkansas secretary of state described, the secret ballot works smoothly, quietly, satisfactorily, beautifully, and I pray God every Southern state may soon have one like it. It neutralizes to a great extent the curse of the Fifteenth Amendment, the blackest crime of the nineteenth century.

But these “legal” strategies faced a conundrum: they also caught poor, illiterate white voters—most of whom across the South were loyal Democrats—in their disenfranchising net. To circumvent this problem, Democrats often selectively enforced the law.

By 1908, all states of the former Confederacy had adopted poll taxes and seven employed literacy tests.

In one of history’s rare cases of a large-scale disenfranchisement, southern Democrats derailed America’s embryonic transition to multiracial democracy.

There remained one final check against this “legal” process of disenfranchisement: the federal judiciary.

In the 1890s, civil rights groups began filing lawsuits against state and county governments to protest the multitude of new laws targeting Blacks.

The 1903 Giles v. Harris decision delivered the deathblow to America’s first experiment with multiracial democracy. After Democrats won the presidency and both houses of Congress in 1892, they repealed key sections of the Reconstruction-era Enforcement Acts that enforced voting rights. Nearing the end of his life, the great abolitionist and civil rights activist Frederick Douglass lamented that “principles which we all thought to have been firmly and permanently settled…have been boldly assaulted and overthrown.”

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 ...

The Lodge bill was pushed back until after the 1890 midterm elections. But the Republicans’ crushing defeat in the midterms—the Democrats won control of the House—weakened the Lodge bill’s prospects. Senator Hoar doggedly brought his bill again to the floor of the Senate. But Senator Stewart shocked his Republican colleagues by pushing for another delay, calling for a vote on another measure: abandoning the gold standard for a silver-based currency.

Without federal protection of voting rights, any semblance of democracy in the South was soon extinguished: Black turnout plummeted from 61 percent in 1880 to an unthinkably low 2 percent in 1912. In Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, states in which a majority of citizens were African American, only 1 or 2 percent of Black citizens could vote.

The South succumbed to nearly a century of authoritarianism. Black disenfranchisement undermined political competition and locked in place single-party rule across the South.

Nearly a century after the end of Reconstruction, President Lyndon Johnson stood in front of a joint session of Congress in November 1963 and declared, “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”

This time the reforms were backed by majorities of both parties. Indeed, because the Jim Crow faction of Johnson’s Democratic Party vehemently opposed civil rights, the bills could not have passed without strong Republican support. One key player was the Ohio Republican congressman William McCulloch, a midwestern conservative and the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. A descendant of Ohio abolitionists, McCulloch co-sponsored the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

At a critical moment in the mid-twentieth century, then, the Republican Party played a vital role in passing civil rights and voting rights reforms, aiding America’s passage to a more democratic system. Sixty years later, that Republican Party has become unrecognizable.

Indeed, about a month before Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, a leading Republican U.S. senator, Mike Lee, questioned the basic principle of democracy itself. “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are,” Senator Lee tweeted. “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

In 2020, V-Dem concluded that in terms of its commitment to democracy the Republican Party was now “more similar to autocratic ruling parties such as the Turkish AKP and Fidesz in Hungary than to typical center-right governing parties.”

Paradoxically, the roots of the GOP’s transformation lie in its reaction to the very multiracial democracy it helped construct. This transformation did not happen overnight. In the first half of the twentieth century, Republicans were a party of business and the well-to-do, with factions that included northeastern manufacturing interests, midwestern farmers, small-town conservatives, and white Protestant voters outside the South.

But things changed in the 1930s as the Great Depression and the New Deal reshaped American politics. Millions of urban working-class voters—Black and white—rejected the Republicans, establishing the New Deal Democrats as the new majority party.

To break the New Deal majority, the Republican Party did what losing parties are supposed to do in democracies: it cast about for new constituencies.

But changes taking place within the Democratic Party created an opening. In the late 1930s, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party had forged an alliance with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to advance civil rights, pushing for anti-lynching laws, abolition of the poll tax, and fair employment law.

Cracks in the Democratic coalition emerged in 1948, when the segregationist South Carolina governor, Strom Thurmond, responded to the party’s pro-civil-rights platform by bolting and running a third-party presidential bid with the newly formed States’ Rights (or “Dixiecrat”) Party.

The conservatives eventually won the day. High-profile events such as the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, and the 1957 deployment of federal troops to integrate Little Rock Central High School generated widespread southern white resistance. By the early 1960s, the journalist Robert Novak reported, many right-wing Republican leaders “envisioned substantial political gold to be mined in the racial crisis by becoming…the White Man’s Party.”

These efforts began in earnest in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act. Although most congressional Republicans voted for the act, powerful forces pushed in the other direction. Chief among these was Senator Barry Goldwater, the GOP’s 1964 presidential candidate. Following a strategy that he described as “hunting where the ducks are,” Goldwater actively pursued the southern white vote.

Although Goldwater suffered a landslide defeat in 1964, he won the Deep South easily.

The civil rights revolution shook up America’s party system. After 1964, the Democrats began to establish themselves as the party of civil rights, attracting a majority of Black voters. The Republicans, by contrast, gradually repositioned themselves as the party of racial conservatism, appealing to voters who resisted the dismantling of traditional racial hierarchies.

Mounting white resentment over civil rights would propel what the strategist Kevin Phillips called the emerging Republican majority. In a society that was both divided over race and still overwhelmingly white, Phillips argued, the GOP could regain its majority status “if the Democrats could be labeled the ‘black man’s party’ and the GOP established [itself] as the defenders of southern racial traditions.”

Republican politicians could attract racially conservative whites via implicit or “coded” language that emphasized “law and order” and opposition to busing and other desegregation measures. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s southern strategy. It worked: four-fifths of southern whites voted for either Nixon or the third-party candidate George Wallace, a longtime segregationist, in 1968.

But Reagan added a new prong—a white Christian strategy.

But if the Great White Switch created a new Republican majority, it also created a monster. By the turn of the century, surveys showed that a majority of white Republicans scored high on what political scientists call “racial resentment.”

In this case, the Republican Party was captured by its racially conservative base. This mattered because, although the Republicans remained overwhelmingly white and Christian into the twenty-first century, America did not.

American society grew far more diverse in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which was passed with strong bipartisan support, opened the door to a long wave of immigration, particularly from Latin America and Asia.

But such rules provide partisan minorities with a powerful weapon: a veto. When such vetoes extend beyond the protection of civil liberties or the democratic process itself, they allow legislative minorities to impose their preferences on the majority.

The political theorist Melissa Schwartzberg adds an important observation: while supermajority rules may protect minority rights in theory, in practice they often end up advancing the interests of other, more privileged minorities.

After dismantling democracy in a 2014 coup, the Thai military, under the new ruler, General Prayuth Chan-ocha, sought to return to constitutional rule without actually giving up power. So the army established a bicameral parliamentary system with an elected 500-member House and a military-appointed 250-member Senate. The prime minister would be elected by a simple majority in a joint session of both houses. Because the military appointed all 250 senators, pro-military parties had to win only 126 of 500 House seats to ensure that General Prayuth would be elected prime minister.

Similarly, when Chile democratized in 1989, it did so with a highly counter-majoritarian constitution imposed by the military dictator Augusto Pinochet. The 1980 constitution stipulated, for example, that nine of the Senate’s forty-seven members would be appointed by the armed forces and other members of the outgoing dictatorship.

So not all counter-majoritarian institutions strengthen democracy. We must distinguish clearly between those that protect minorities, preserving democracy, and those that privilege minorities by granting them unfair advantage, thereby subverting democracy.

Counter-majoritarianism also has a temporal dimension. Present-day majorities may be held in check by decisions made in the past—sometimes the distant past. This happens in two ways. First, since constitutions may endure for decades and even centuries, one generation inevitably ties the hands of majorities generations into the future. Legal theorists have called this the problem of the dead hand.

Jefferson even proposed an “expiration date” for constitutions, suggesting that they be rewritten every nineteen years—or once a generation. Though rejected by Madison, this Jeffersonian principle was incorporated into France’s revolutionary constitution of 1793,

Madison and others recognized that there was value to entrenching constitutions. Indeed, the whole point of a democratic constitution is to establish a set of rights that are protected from the transient whims of present-day majorities.