Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point
Crown 2023 384 pp.
Reviewed by G. John Ikenberry Published on
Why has American democracy come so close to a breaking point while other Western democracies appear more stable? In this sobering study, Levitsky and Ziblatt blame the United States’ eighteenth-century constitutional order for its modern democratic woes. Forged in a pre-democratic age, this order increasingly thwarts the will of an expanding multicultural majority in favor of a shrinking rural white minority. The drafters of the U.S. Constitution worried that the great threat to democracy was “the tyranny of the majority,” so they devised important countermajoritarian instruments, such as an independent judiciary and the Bill of Rights.
The authors see many of these constitutional innovations as essential for the preservation of democracy but find others more worrisome. The electoral college system allows the candidate who receives fewer votes to win the presidency. The U.S. Senate overrepresents less populated states, and the filibuster requires a supermajority of 60 votes to pass legislation. The result is that majorities often cannot gain power, and if they do, they find it hard to govern. Levitsky and Ziblatt show that this paralyzing majoritarian rule makes the United States unique among its peer democracies. Germany and the United Kingdom have reformed their upper chambers to make them more representative of the population. Other democracies, with constitutions modeled on the United States’, have abolished indirect voting and the lifetime tenure of judges.
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