As a result of my frequent (and shameless) self-promotion (which practice, to be fair, was urged on me by my publisher), I suppose that most people who chance upon this blog know that I have written a book on democratic theory and that I write reviews of other books on democracy for 3:16 AM.
The latter fact of course entails that others are or have been also engaged in the writing of books on democracy. But did you also know that other people write reviews of democracy books too?!? No? Well, believe it or not...they do!! In fact, in the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Louis Menand (of The Metaphysical Club fame) has provided his take on two new ones, Erwin Chemerinsky's No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States (Liveright), and the Paul Pierson/Eric Schickler offering, Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era (Chicago).
Menand recognizes that neither of these works is particularly good and says so. He points out, with some amusement, that while Chemerinsky used to blame democratic failures in the U.S. on the Courts and formerly lavished praise on the Constitution, he now blasts both as terrible. Menand also suggests that Chemerinsky hasn't got a single workable proposal for fixing anything. Meanwhile, Pierson and Schmickler are derided for seeming to think that it is the Constitution ("America's software") that should be blamed for the extreme polarization in the U.S. today. Menand points out that both hostile segmentation and an almost complete lack of trust in government seem to be global, rather than domestic problems nowadays.
It's a little disturbing that these are the sorts of books that tend to get reviewed when there are so many democracy books coming out nearly every day, some of them quite good. Menand even lets us in on the fact that neither of his subject books is elegantly written. So, I suppose one may wonder why Menand and/or the New Yorker picked these two particular duds to promote...if only in Menand's negative fashion. (Indeed, Michelle Goldberg recently indicated in the NYT that she wasn't much more satisfied with the new Levitsky and Ziblatt book she reviewed there.)*
Whatever. What I want to talk about here is what Menand himself gets wrong about democracy in his review of these two mediocre books.
He writes, "Political decisions can't be entrusted entirely to the will of a bare majority of voters, in part because voters tend to be relatively uniformed about politics, but, more important, because nothing prevents majorities, once in power, from oppressing minorities." And he warns that Madisonian factions that are "actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community" may cause us to end up with "either a movement led by a man on a white horse or a tyranny-of-the-majority regime." I.e., either a Trumpian autocrat or a French Revolution-style terror.
Back in 1993, this "liberal" way of looking at the matter was brilliantly rebutted by the Harvard Constitutional scholar Richard D. Parker in a passionate article entitled, "Here, the People Rule." Parker there wrote of that sort of Menandian thinking that it is basically "grandiose puffing" that relies on the assumption that only "better-than-ordinary-people" can make decent laws. Parker noted that when we hear "the best people" conceding that, in spite of their obvious superiority, sometimes they must nevertheless"defer" to the majority, we should understand just how "haughty" the remark is. And he explained that an apparent desperation to "get out of the way of a big, vulgar group" is how we can tell that the condescending (and twee) narrator of Mann's Mario and the Magician should be placed with his fellow hapless liberals. Finally, he says that such attitudes are why that (perhaps intentionally) feeble group prefers the august judgments of those who have been elevated to "the bench" to what they might discover on the street. For, when one is troubled by anti-populist fears, one is likely to consider judges to be "so very superior to political actors, that they can represent our 'better' selves."
Parker is at pains to point out (as I was also, both in my book and in this paper) that "to attribute much past or present oppression to 'majorities' is...a ridiculous exaggeration. Majorities rarely rule at all. Certainly, they almost never rule directly. When believers in 'majority tyranny' imagine their worst fear, they aren't thinking of a New England town meeting." And he notes, quite rightly in my view, that "[m]ost oppression...is the work of minorities. And much of it is the work of elite minorities--refined and well-educated--whose hands tend in real life to clutch the immediate levers of power." It is a very compelling paper, and one that I recommend everybody read.
In any event, I will sum up here by saying that, while Menand's review is surely better than the two books covered in his piece (or than the above-mentioned release recently discussed by Goldberg in the NYT), in the immortal words of Skip James regarding The Cream's take on I'm So Glad, "It's slick, but it still needs a little more grease."
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*Among terrific recent books on the subject, one could mention those by Rosalyn Fuller and Jan-Werner Muller. But nevermind: the sublime mysteries of how some books get a ton of publicity and others almost none are certainly far beyond my humble ken.
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