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

by Steven Levitsky

0 and 100 each year, with 100 being the most democratic. In 2015, the United States received a score of 90, which was roughly in line with countries like Canada, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, and the U.K. But after that, America’s score declined steadily, reaching 83 in 2021.

extremist forces actually ascended to national power, whereas in Europe they have been largely confined to the opposition or, in a few cases, coalition governments.

The threat facing American democracy was never simply a strongman with a cultlike following. The problems are more endemic than that. In fact, they are deeply rooted in our politics. Until we address those underlying problems, our democracy will remain vulnerable.

worried that democracy risked becoming a “tyranny of the majority”—that such a system would allow the will of the many to trample on the rights of the few. This can be a real problem: Governing majorities undermined democracy in twenty-first-century Venezuela and Hungary and are threatening to do so in Israel.

“Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.” Losing hurts, but in a democracy it is inevitable. And when it happens, parties must do what the Peronists did: accept defeat, go home, and then figure out how to win a majority in the next election.

Two conditions help. First, parties are most likely to accept defeat when they believe they stand a reasonable chance of winning again in the future.

A second condition that helps parties accept defeat is the belief that losing power will not bring catastrophe—that a change of government will not threaten the lives, livelihoods, or most cherished principles of the outgoing party and its constituents. Elections often feel like high-stakes battles, but if the stakes are too high, and losing parties fear they will lose everything, they will be reluctant to relinquish power. In other words, it is an outsized

Research in political psychology teaches us that social status—where one stands in relation to others—can powerfully shape political attitudes.

When a political party represents a group that perceives itself to be losing ground, it often radicalizes. With their constituents’ way of life seemingly at stake, party leaders feel pressure to win at any cost. Losing is no longer acceptable.

Fear is often what drives the turn to authoritarianism. Fear of losing political power and, perhaps more important, fear of losing one’s dominant status in society. But if fear can drive mainstream parties to turn against democracy, what exactly does it drive them to do?

But in more established democracies, the methods are often harder to see and harder to stop.

First, they must respect the outcome of free and fair elections, win or lose. This means consistently and unhesitatingly accepting defeat. Second, democrats must unambiguously reject violence (or the threat of violence) as a means of achieving political goals.

But there is a third, more subtle action required of loyal democrats: they must always break with antidemocratic forces.

Democracies get into trouble when mainstream parties tolerate, condone, or protect authoritarian extremists—when they become authoritarian enablers.

First, they expel antidemocratic extremists from their own ranks, even at the cost of antagonizing the party base.

Second, loyal democrats sever all ties—public and private—with allied groups that engage in antidemocratic behavior.

Third, loyal democrats unambiguously condemn political violence and other antidemocratic behavior, even when it is committed by allies or ideologically proximate groups.

Finally, when necessary, loyal democrats join forces with rival pro-democratic parties to isolate and defeat antidemocratic extremists.

History teaches us that when mainstream politicians take the more expedient path of semi-loyalty, tolerating or condoning antidemocratic extremists, the extremists are often strengthened, and a seemingly solid democracy can collapse upon itself.

Mainstream politicians can help kill a democracy by enabling antidemocratic extremism. But they can also undermine it another way: through constitutional hardball—behavior that broadly conforms to the letter of the law but deliberately undermines its spirit.

Sixty years later, that Republican Party has become unrecognizable. The same party that was pivotal in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was unanimous in rejecting federal legislation to restore it in 2021. But the Republican Party has done more than walk away from voting rights. It has, in the words of the sober-minded British publication The Economist, “walked away from democracy.”

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.”

This is the logic that would drive the “Long Southern Strategy”—a decades-long Republican effort to attract “white southerners who felt alienated from, angry at, and resentful of the policies that granted equality and sought to level the playing field for [minority] groups.”

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.”

Barack Obama’s election (2008) and reelection (2012) laid bare the limitations of the GOP’s southern strategy. In 1980, Ronald Reagan had won 55 percent of the white vote and translated that into a landslide forty-four-state victory. Thirty-two years later, Mitt Romney won an even more overwhelming 59 percent of the white vote but still lost the election.

Having alienated this emerging majority for short-term electoral gain, Republicans suffered a political collapse of historic proportions. They lost control of the California legislature in 1996 and never regained it. They lost all U.S. Senate elections after 1992.

First, election fraud—especially voter impersonation fraud—is virtually nonexistent in the United States. Under President George W. Bush, the Justice Department launched an unprecedented effort to identify and punish cases of voter fraud. They found almost no cases. Out of hundreds of millions of votes cast, only thirty-five voters were convicted of fraud between 2002 and 2005. Most of these cases were simple mistakes or violations of voter registration laws. None would have been prevented by a voter ID law.

particularly Black, Latino, and poorer citizens—to vote. This is the second problem with voter ID laws: they are biased.

Earlier we listed three basic principles that democratic parties must follow: they must always accept the results of fair elections, win or lose; they must unambiguously reject the use of violence to gain or hold on to power; and they must break ties to antidemocratic extremists.

During the 2022 primary season, The New York Times found more than a hundred Republican television ads in which candidates brandished or fired guns. We can think of no other major party in any contemporary Western democracy in which candidates so openly embraced violence.

Modern democracy is not simply a system of majority rule; it combines majority rule and minority rights.

Elected governments, for example, should not have the power to determine whether or how we worship; they should not decide what books we may read, what movies we may watch, or what may be taught in universities; and they shouldn’t decide the race or gender of the people we marry. Although the scope of rights to be protected will always be a matter of some dispute (and will likely change over time), there clearly exists a broad range of individual liberties that, in the words of Justice Jackson, “may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”

The opposition’s right to compete on a level playing field is another essential minority right.

Israel has no written constitution, so many democratic rules can be changed by a simple parliamentary majority. That’s too low a barrier.

Two domains must always remain within the reach of majorities: elections and legislative decision making.

Legislative majorities should be able to pass regular laws—provided, of course, that such laws do not violate civil liberties or undermine the democratic process.

Supermajority rules like the Senate filibuster are often cast either as essential safeguards for minority rights or as mechanisms for compromise and consensus building. 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.

while supermajority rules may protect minority rights in theory, in practice they often end up advancing the interests of other, more privileged minorities.

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.

The judicial branch is prone to another variant of this problem, especially when judges are appointed to powerful positions with no expiration date—no term limits or retirement age.

Democracies cannot survive without some essential counter-majoritarian institutions. But they also cannot survive—at least as democracies—with excessively counter-majoritarian institutions. And this is where the United States finds itself today.

A severely malapportioned Senate, in which all states are given the same representation, regardless of population.

Then there are the counter-majoritarian institutions that are clearly undemocratic, in that they empower partisan minorities at the expense of electoral and legislative majorities. One is the Electoral College, which allows a candidate with fewer votes to win the presidency. Another is the Senate, which dramatically overrepresents citizens of less populated states (such as Wyoming and Vermont) at the expense of populous states (such as California and Texas) and allows partisan minorities to use the filibuster to permanently block legislation backed by large majorities.

It’s not unfettered majorities that threaten us today. It’s fettered majorities that are the problem.

Something similar is happening in America today. Like nineteenth-century European conservatives, America’s conservative party is now consistently given a leg up by political institutions that remain frozen in place despite sweeping societal change.

Because the U.S. Senate heavily overrepresents sparsely populated states, the Electoral College has a modest rural bias of about twenty votes in the 538-seat college, which gives the Republicans a small but potentially decisive advantage.

At no time during the twenty-first century have Senate Republicans represented a majority of the U.S. population. Based on states’ populations, Senate Democrats have continuously represented more Americans since 1999.

Four of nine current Supreme Court justices—Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—were confirmed by a Senate majority that collectively won a minority of the popular vote in Senate elections and represented less than half of the American population. And three of them—Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett—were also nominated by a president who lost the popular vote.

Recent research has found a growing gap between Supreme Court rulings and majority public opinion in the United States. This trend is no accident: the court’s conservative majority was imposed by a partisan minority.

Imagine an American born in 1980 who first voted in 1998 or 2000. The Democrats would have won the popular vote in every six-year cycle in the U.S. Senate and all but one presidential election during her adult lifetime. And yet she would have lived most of her adult life under Republican presidents, a Republican-controlled Senate, and a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees. How much faith should she have in our democracy?