There Is No Liberalism Without a Healthy Democracy
Regardless of the outcome of this election, freedom can't survive in America without fixing the perverse structural incentives for extremism in its electoral system
It has become commonplace to hear of democracy being under attack—and it certainly is, all around the world. But the story of liberal democracy’s travails doesn’t begin and end with the rise of its current illiberal challengers. Something about the way our democracies are structured has invited or at least made possible the threats we now face, especially in the United States, where the ascent of illiberal populism has been more potent than in most other core Western democracies. It does us no good to avoid a reckoning with these vulnerabilities. And as critical as it is to remain focused on liberal democracy’s most urgent challenges, we should not do so at the expense of grappling with its longer-term systemic flaws. Even as we rush to defend democracy from imminent danger—such as Trump’s dictatorial ambitions—we shouldn’t lose sight of deeper structural issues that brought us to this point.
The idea that our liberal-democratic systems contain flaws is not an admission of defeat. No democracy is perfect—no human institution ever can be. That’s because no matter how carefully calibrated the incentives and feedback loops of our electoral architecture, we are always discovering new faults, unintended consequences, and outdated features as circumstances change. It’s therefore worth taking a step back from our current crisis to consider: How is it that explicitly anti-democratic movements have reached a point where they are existential threats to our liberal democracies? And how have we enabled their rise?
Expanding and improving democracy is inseparable from the commitment to democracy itself as an essential bulwark of freedom. And the connection between liberalism and democracy is not incidental: democracy disperses and checks the exercise of state power. That’s why broad-based electoral coalitions provide incentives pointing towards more liberal outcomes. And it’s why, by contrast, systems which allow narrower coalitions to govern, up to the point of minority rule, are inherently illiberalizing. Unfortunately, our current system has come to increasingly resemble the latter.
Collective Action, Individual Freedom
At the narrowest, a single autocrat has no need to respect fundamental rights—and none ever has. Likewise, limited franchise (or Herrenvolk) democracies, such as apartheid South Africa, the Jim Crow South, or the era before women’s suffrage, invariably oppress those who are excluded. By requiring broad social consensus behind the uses of state power, at least on the level of a majority and in some cases supermajorities, democracy is a liberalizing force. This is true both theoretically but also in practice, in the long history of how democratic regimes tend towards much more liberal policy outcomes, while undemocratic regimes tend towards oppression.
An important way to think about the problem is to consider the breadth of the coalition needed to take power. A political faction which can govern with the consent of fewer people is inherently more drawn to authoritarian measures and injustices, doling out special privileges spreading hate toward designated outgroups to consolidate its base. The broader the base of support required, the harder it is to assemble a coalition sufficient to take power. (This is the essence of James Madison’s factions argument in Federalist no. 10, among other classical liberal theorists who have noted it, including Voltaire.) More extreme and authoritarian policies are at a disadvantage in assembling a broader and thus more diverse coalition. While requiring democratic majority support is no guarantee of liberal outcomes, the correlation is obvious.
There is of course a danger of going too far and imposing excessive supermajority requirements. At the most extreme, the liberum veto, or unanimity rule, contributed to the collapse of pre-partition Poland, and similarly excessive unanimity rules hobbled the United States under the Articles of Confederation. A minority with unlimited ability to veto majority decisions can become a kind of minority rule unto itself. But at a minimum, in a democratic society, we should aim for governing parties to reflect the support of at least a simple majority of the population.
Unfortunately, our majoritarian electoral processes can and do fall short on this score. The system of state-run partisan primaries, a uniquely American oddity, supercharges the power of a smaller and in some ways unrepresentative slice of the electorate. Plurality elections, known as a first-past-the-post system, also play a role in sometimes lowering the threshold of support needed to win. The Electoral College, gerrymandering, and the two-party system itself all contribute as well—more marginally but often with asymmetrical effects on the two major parties.
The Primaries Are the Problem
But it’s our primaries that are the worst offender. Consider, for example, the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won with 63 million votes out of about 129 million cast nationwide, or 46% of the total. While this was a couple of points and almost three million votes behind Clinton, the real narrowness of Trump’s needed coalition came earlier in the process, before the Electoral College.
In the Republican primaries that year, about 31 million votes were cast, amounting to just 23% of the number who voted in the November general election. Of these, Trump won just over 14 million, or about 45%. In other words, Trump secured the Republican nomination, and with it one of the two viable spots in the general election, on the votes of just 10% of the total electorate. In practice, the real number is slightly smaller, since a few states only voted after Trump had already secured the nomination and his opponents had all left the race.
The figures are similar on the other side of the aisle. Joe Biden won the 2020 Democratic primary with 19 million votes, or 12% of the total number of voters in November. Farther down the ballot, the situation is even more extreme, with primaries for Congress and state offices attracting lower turnout than the presidential race.
The bottom line is that candidates can be put on the path to winning an election by obtaining the support of a shockingly small number of voters. Only about half of eligible voters vote at all, only about half those vote in the primaries, cut in half again when considering only one party’s primary, and half that (or less in a crowded field) to win that primary.
For our politicians, the base of support they most need, and face the stiffest competition for, thus amounts to only a single-digit percentage of all adults. This is a recipe for exactly what we have seen: escalating extremism, runaway polarization, the unleashing of authoritarian impulses. It should be no surprise national political figures rarely enjoy net-positive approval ratings.
What’s more, the fact that primary contests are a more attractive and feasible option than competing in the general election has the consequence of further entrenching America’s unusually absolute two-party system. Even in other nations with first-past-the-post elections, which tend to produce two dominant parties per Duverger’s law, it is common for other smaller parties to win at least some seats in the national legislature. Not so in the United States, where the only viable path runs through the major-party primaries.
Moving Towards Genuine Majority Rule
Some aspects of our constitutional system are so heavily entrenched there is little prospect for reform. The Electoral College, whatever its flaws, is unlikely to go anywhere absent a constitutional amendment, and proposed workarounds suffer severe practical defects. The idea of equal representation of states in the Senate, which provides a modest Republican advantage (there are, of course, deep-blue small states like Vermont and Hawaii), is insulated from even the difficult hurdle of the normal constitutional amendment process.
But neither of these aspects of our electoral system get to the real heart of our current minority rule problem, which lies elsewhere and therefore requires different solutions which are relatively less intractable. Many elements are amenable to reform on a simple statutory basis, and many can also be improved at the state level, where our “laboratories of democracy” have a great deal of autonomy.
One common idea, gaining steam in several states and already implemented in Maine and Alaska, is ranked choice voting. Under this system, voters can vote not just for one candidate but rank all their choices, with the tabulation continuing through multiple rounds until one candidate has won an absolute majority. RCV by its nature encourages broader coalitions and less divisive campaigning, though its effect in a traditional two-party race is somewhat limited. More than in the general election, RCV is particularly promising as a primary reform, where more crowded fields tend to more often produce a narrow plurality win well short of a majority.
Alaska’s implementation of RCV showcases another important element of reform: nonpartisan primaries, where all voters and all candidates participate in a single primary regardless of party. Again, the effect is to encourage candidates to seek a broader base of support than just their own party’s most extreme base voters.
In general elections, breaking up the two-party system is essential. Here, reforms primarily center around kinds of proportional representation which avoid the binary incentives of Duverger’s law. When more parties can win seats in state and national legislatures, coalitions are by necessity more diverse. Instead of only voters who happen to be a local majority in single-member districts, all voters are represented in proportion to their numbers. For Congress, proportional representation and multi-member districts can even be implemented by statute, rather than needing a constitutional amendment. Similarly, fusion voting, where multiple parties can nominate the same candidate, has a long history in the United States and offers a path to a more multi-party system.
These and other electoral reform proposals all share a common idea: ensuring levels of support that at least approach genuine majorities of the electorate. The ever-present temptation to authoritarian rule is checked by deliberately making the collective action problem of assembling a winning coalition more difficult. After all, securing the future of liberal democracy is inseparable from making democracy increasingly more representative of, and more accountable to, more and more people.
That is the urgent task to which we must all dedicate ourselves, regardless of the outcome of this election.
© The UnPopulist, 2024
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Pardon my ignorance here but I’m not familiar with fusion voting. Explain further?
The author's conception of ‘liberalism’ is so clearly written between the lines of this essay as to make it an excellent argument for anarchy to those who profess individualism, or for unbridled majoritarian tyranny to those who profess collectivism.
”There is of course a danger of going too far and imposing excessive supermajority requirements. At the most extreme, the liberum veto, or unanimity rule, contributed to the collapse of pre-partition Poland, and similarly excessive unanimity rules hobbled the United States under the Articles of Confederation. A minority with unlimited ability to veto majority decisions can become a kind of minority rule unto itself.”
That the ability of a minority to veto majority decisions to exercise the state's coercively sustained monopoly power to physically coerce or punish the individual(s) comprising that minority is regarded by the author as “a kind of … rule unto itself” reveals that his ‘liberalism’ entails a liberal tolerance of tyranny.
Historically, such tyranical liberalism has consistently demonstrated its natural tendency to metastasise. Political power is the opiate of tyrants.
Eventually, the victims of tyranny will begin to recognise the odor of the renamed rose and to reject its painful thorns. The stench of theft prevails despite having been renamed ‘taxation’ and slavery is soon revealed aka ‘compulsory public service’.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” – Thomas Jefferson
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” – John Adams
The United States is stll a young nation, and the limitations of the Constitution on the perils of democracy have only weakened since its inception. Adams and Jefferson may come to be known, not only as founders, but also prognosticators.