Excerpt of New Book on US Democracy Published on theatlantic.com

Posted on by September 8, 2023

Whether you agree or disagree (and I largely agree) with the content of this excerpt of the book “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point,” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, which will be released on September 12, 2023, you will probably learn a lot about the US and other democracies of the world. I highly recommend this article.

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Excerpt of New Book on US Democracy Published on theatlantic.com — 56 Comments

  1. MINORITY RULE GERRYMANDERS SINCE

    1776 STATES/LOCALS

    1788 USA
    —
    TOOK 400 PLUS YEARS FOR OLDE ROMAN REPUBLIC TO ROT INTO EMPIRE / MONARCH TYRANTS

    … HEREDITARY CAESARS IN DARK AGE >>> *MODERN* KILLER LEADERS/MONARCHS
    —
    PR
    APPV
    TOTSOP

  4. The USA was never meant to be a democracy. Veering towards democracy, and the popular misconception that that’s what we’re supposed to be, is part of the ongoing downfall of the USA. Pure democracy is communist hell and nothing like what American founders wanted.

  6. Cool. So Kari Lake should be Governor soon and Blake Masters will be in the US Senate now, right? Because that would totally rock!

  8. I can’t agree or disagree with whatever the article might say because I’m not interested in giving them money or being datamined for their lists. The snippet I can see does not tell me anything.

  9. Switzerland’s constitution, which was inspired by the US constitution, seems to me to be strong that the US constitution right now. In general, I believe that there are two reasons for this:

    1. Switzerland has retained the federal nature of its constitution better. Even tho they are smaller than US states (Swiss cantons are able the size of US counties), Swiss cantons have more autonomy than US states on a lot of matters.

    2. The executive power is shared by a seven member council, who rotate the largely ceremonial title of President among themselves every year. This prevents the executive from getting too powerful, IMO.

    Yhe US could learn from them.

  10. US elections have been rigged frauds for over a century for purpose of pursuing militaristic imperialism without any democratic check on a fascist elite. The majority does follow the elite and relishes a belief in the greatest military power in the world ever. Thank you for service in fascism.
    Three reforms that could check suicidal mission of empire will not be permitted. Real elections without ballot censorship and a voter verifiable ballot, self-districting to abolish elite imposed gerrymandering to entrench the two-toad parties and enlarging the size of the House of Representatives to wrest control from the imperialist-fascist elite and restore it to the people IF there are leaders willing to risk telling people how they are manipulated and fleeced and impoverished.

  12. Pure democracy would be terrible for gun rights and all other constitutional rights since there would be no checks on what a majority could vote for.

    Walter Ziobro makes good points about Switzerland. If Swiss cantons have the population of an average US county at 100k and greater autonomy, they are already at partial implementation of Max plan.

    Better than voter verified ballot: standing count.

  13. There’s some obfuscation of historical facts in this article. The author does not explain how Democrats controlled the federal government for nearly 60 years, how the US Constitution purposely weakened the power of the federal government through minority rule, how federalism means states would have more power, how “modern democracies” tend toward collectivist policies versus protection of property and individual rights (and increased authoritarian power regardless). Frankly, the only positive takeaway is the idea of proportional election outcomes “proportional representation with multimember districts”: “parties that won, say, 40 percent of the vote could expect to win about 40 percent of the seats, which, as the political scientist Arend Lijphart has shown, helps ensure that electoral majorities translate into governing majorities”. The author alludes that all reforms are equal and positive. I think this article is not focused at all on solutions but rather to dig at some imaginary scoreboard of American civic life. Imagine, the author is applauding European constitutions that have changed/reformed/modified hundreds of times versus the US Federal constitution that is far more stable in being changed far less (there is a consistency versus reform argument here as well). The author supports change for change sake.

  17. ABOVE-

    NOW 1 MONARCH WOLF HAVING ALL FOR DINNER/SLAVERY.

    VIA 26 OLIGARCH WOLVES CONTROLLING 74 TAX SLAVES SHEEP

    [. 1/2 X 1/2 = 1/4 G MATH]

  18. Direct democracy works best on the lowest level of a multi level federal system. Open town meetings in small New England towns work pretty well. And most of those small New England towns are still Republican, altho today many of them are outvoted in the state by the larger blue, non-town-meeting cities around them.

    There are Swiss cantons even today that use direct democracy.

  19. ANY REAL MAJORITY IN SWISSLAND —

    OTHER THAN HAVING SECRET BANK ACCOUNTS AND A MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX ???

    HOW MANY LOCAL MINORITIES IN CANTONS ???

    SWISSLAND = SECESSIONISTS FRON OLDE FRANCE / GERMANY / ITALY MONARCH/OLIGARCH REGIMES IN LATE 1200S.

    NOT CRUSHED- TOO MUCH EFFORT IN ALPS AND CONFLICTS ABOUT WHICH MAJOR REGIME GETTING WHAT PARTS.

  21. Let’s also point out that the US Presidency has one of the highest death rates of any job.

    Also, 99% of the Senate and 94% of the House have at least a Bachelor’s degree, while only 38% of the 25-or-older US population does [Pew Research].

  22. SEE VARIOUS FOREIGN REGIMES WITH CANDIDATE PICTURES / PARTY SYMBOLS – PLANTS / ANIMALS / MATH / ETC.

    FOR ILLITERATE VOTERS

    INTO USA SHORTLY ???

  23. @Walter Ziobro. Spot on! The Swiss model was directly incorporated into America’s governing federated system. Not only that, but the direct democracy model often requires unanimous consent from everyone (the ultimate negative by a minority).

  25. The Calvinists of Switzerland and New England favored the congregational form of church government, which formed the core original source of democratic values in both places.

  27. Hector: weakened federal government as opposed to what? It strengthened it relative to the Articles of Confederation (illegally and unwisely so). On the other hand, you are correct if you meant the whole point of the Constitution is to give the federal government limited and specifically listed powers, thus excluding it from doing anything else. The federalists incorrectly argued that those limits would be understood by everyone perpetually and would withstand the test of time. The antifederalists correctly feared that the federal government would grow past all limits over time, and that the addition of specific limits on its power in the bill of rights would eventually lead to the notion that the federal government can do anything at all not specifically forbidden. The latter turned out to be correct. The rest of your comment is exactly correct.

    Hank is exactly right. The purest democracy is a lynch mob.

    Whenever anything cogent is posted about Switzerland, along comes AZ with his bigoted and retarded nonsensical rants about his dumb misconceptions.

    I don’t know what AZ means by real majority. Chances are he doesn’t either.

    Yes, of course all cantons have minorities. It would be absurd to imagine otherwise.

    CCPNN is of course fake news, and contrary to Absurd Zombie nonsense, the US is not a monarchy and hasn’t been part of one in nearly a quarter millennium.

    USSR today is of course also fake news. The second GOP undercard debate, like the first, won’t include anyone with a nontrivial chance at the nomination, is likely to be a boring snoozefest like the first, and thus there’s of course no reason to watch. I’m looking forward to seeing what Trump does instead.

  28. Walter Ziobro, everything works better at human scale. However, direct democracy is still extremely suboptimal, and not one of the better parts of the Swiss system. Switzerland manages to be relatively successful despite, not thanks to, direct democracy.

    Open town meetings are good, but they have limited jurisdiction. If they were true direct democracy with control of everything, they would be disasters of the sort Ayn Rand described led to the abandonment of the factory Hank and Dagny come across on their trip in Atlas Shrugged.

    AZ continues with his absolutely zany nonsense about Swiss history. In the late 1200s, Germany and Italy were not nation states in any meaningful sense. The Holy Roman Empire existed, but very nebulously as far as any real control or influence over people’s lives went. France had a somewhat more concrete monarchy, but even there, local control was far preeminent to anything emanating from the French monarchy.

    Rather than the historical fiction that cantons seceded, it’s far more accurate to view Europe at that time as a patchwork of local governments similar to cantons, with hubristic monarchs laying various competing claims over large areas of land over which they had little to no actual control, and for which they provided nothing of any benefit. These inbred, insecure megalomaniacs were in reality little more than puffed up local feudal lords with grandiose notions, literate flatterers whose writings loosely based on reality happen to have survived, and perhaps a slightly better appetite or talent for bribing the Catholic church hierarchy than other lords. The Westphalian nation state came along centuries later, much to the detriment of Europe and the world, and Swiss cantons wisely declined to join the pernicious trend, preferring a loose coalition, much to their benefit.

  29. Alien Zygote is equally off base about World War 2 history. Conflict about other regimes getting parts and the presence of mountains were not the primary reasons Allies wisely stayed out of Switzerland in WW2. Austria has Alps too, as does Italy and France. Staying out of Switzerland was motivated for the same reasons Napoleon, Hitler, and both sides in WWI stayed out.

    AZ succumbs to the common error that bigger governments easily conquer smaller ones, despite numerous counterexamples such as American revolutionaries (not just in the US, but all over the Americas), former third world colonies separating from European colonizers more recently, the failures of Britain, the USSR and the USA among others in Afghanistan, the failures of France and the US in Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia, and so on. The far larger militaries were often sent packing, and even when they won, it was often at inordinate cost.

    Neutrality, widespread gun ownership and training, local control, and the fact that all sides had money in Swiss banks were far more important than the terrain.

    Literacy in the US has been negatively impacted by government education, and further by forced secularization and integration of government schools, cultural Marxism, covid lockdowns, etc. The Max plan has the advantage that no reading of ballots is needed, since a standing count is done instead.

    Voter registration would also not be needed, since voters in a local area would know each other well.

  31. Federalism tempers local direct democracy because it creates elites that produce an aristocratic class. In fact, even within the pre-independence American colonies, representative assemblies were reflective of a natural aristocracy of success. This carried over into the federal constitution.

    Something similar happened in the Swiss cantons; the merchants and educated classes created the leaders that built the federal system.

    As I have stated in earlier posts, I believe in a mixed system that Aristotle described in his Politics. A successful mixed system combines the features of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. Democracy is a necessary PART of a successful, mixed system of checks and balances, which have been best exemplified in history by the US and Swiss constitutions. And the British Commonwealth systems, to some extent; altho there, the aristocratic and monarchic elements are largely symbolic and weak.

  32. Walter Ziobro, great point at 5:48. I’d add the importance of scale. I’d eliminate elements of monarchy, and add elements of meritocracy, theocracy, and stratiocracy. I would say oligarchy/plutocracy rather than pure aristocracy, although there’s some obvious overlap. However, having both impoverished minor nobility and well off commoner background, I’m aware of the difference.

    A selective electorate is also important. Interestingly, some Swiss cantons were very late in relenting to the purile capitulation to female voting. Federal disgrace of elections with female votes was held off until 1971, and Appenzell Innerrhoden heroically holding out until 1990 or 1991 after undue interference from the federal supreme court. Even the earliest cantons destroyed the integrity of the family vote only in 1959.

    Switzerland also has been a champion at resisting internationalism, avoiding full UN membership until 2002, Schengen until 2005, and European Union and NATO. Immigration is better controlled than anywhere in Europe, as is travel by non-Europeans, and naturalization is relatively reasonably controlled as well.

  34. I think the Electoral College and the US Senate help preserve individual liberties and state influence which was an intent of the US Constitution. I hope these institutions are preserved. I admire Switzerland’s government and history. We should not change our government structure in the US because other countries have done so but rather we should should focus on upholding our Constitution.

  37. NY Times is fake news, and jokeapedia is making what point exactly? What is AZ trying to communicate with his cryptic comments? Never mind, it’s probably something stupid. Netherlands have been much easier to take over than Switzerland. Many parts of Europe have passed back and forth between different national claims many times. It’s not the same thing.

  38. George Whitfield started out strong, but then his comment went downhill. The reason to change the structure of government is not because other countries have or have not.

    For that matter, Max is right, it’s time to stop thinking in terms of “countries” of tens and hundreds of millions or even billions of people. They need to be broken up into many pieces. He inspired me to start reading about some ideas along those lines from writers like EF Schumacher, Leopold Kohr, Ivan Illich, Karl Hess, Thomas Naylor, etc.

  39. Hector Roos writes above that direct democracy often requires unanimous consent. That may be true with Occupy communes and things like that, but as far as I know whenever anything approaching an actual territorial government, even of a moderate size town, has experimented with direct democracy, that’s never the case.

    In the governance of organizations which subscribe to unanimous consent, I’ve seen it work out two ways:

    1) nothing ever gets done or

    2) Everyone says yes to go along and hurry things up because they don’t want to be the one to hold something up.

    Neither of those strikes me as great.

    I’ve seen manipulated, manipulative groups like Agenda 21 use discussion manipulation techniques to make people feel like they had an open discussion and arrived at a consensus, whereas in fact they were led through a “Delphi technique” and other psychological manipulation to come to exactly the conclusions the fake-neutral “facilitator” wants, plus got fooled into thinking they freely arrived at those as a group.

  40. How big of a group could realistically self govern with unanimous consent direct democracy without such games? My hunch is very small, single digit most likely.

  41. UTOPIAN–

    UNANIMITY — UNANIMOUS YES ON EVERYTHING

    ANARCHY — UNANIMOUS NO ON EVERYTHING

    2 EXTREMES OF STANDARD 3 —

    DEMOCRACY / OLIGARCHY / MONARCHY
    —
    P-A-T

  42. DIRECT DEMOCRACY FATAL ??? – SEE FEDERALIST 10.

    HOW MANY BLOWN UP *SMALL* DIRECT DEMOCRACY CITY-STATES IN OLDE GREECE ???

    — IE CRUSHED MINORITIES ASKING/GETTING FORCE AID FROM OTHER DOMESTIC/FOREIGN REGIMES.
    ———-
    NOTE 2022 PUTIN CLAIMING RUSSIANS IN UKRAINE ALLEGEDLY BEING CRUSHED AS AN EXCUSE TO ATTACK/INTERVENE.

    SEE HITLER SAME ABOUT GERMANS IN AUSTRIA, CZECKLAND, POLAND. ETC >>> WW II.

    ANY OLDE GERMANS ALIVE TO CELEBRATE HITLER REV EFFORT IN NOV 1923 TO TAKE OVER BAVARIA IN GERMANY ???

    P-A-T

  44. Anarchy is not “unanimous no on anything.”

    No states in Greece had “direct democracy,” since they all had majorities of people who could not vote, such as women and slaves.

    You should read all the federalist and antifederalist papers, not just federalist 10. And federalist 10 in context isn’t nearly so one sided.

    Putin is right about Ukraine. The Ukrainian Nazis / Khazar Khaganate are pawns of EU/NATO to attack Russia.

    “Lost folks”???? What????

  45. J6 FOLKS *LOST* THEIR BRAINS OUTSIDE/INSIDE THE CAPITOL BLDG ???

    MAGIC LOST/FOUND PORTAL C.B. DOORS ???

    TELL THE JUDGE AT JAIL TIME SENTENCE DAY – A BIT LATE ???

  47. Hector Ross: ““proportional representation with multimember districts”: ‘parties that won, say, 40 percent of the vote could expect to win about 40 percent of the seats, which, as the political scientist Arend Lijphart has shown, helps ensure that electoral majorities translate into governing majorities’. The author alludes that all reforms are equal and positive. I think this article is not focused at all on solutions but rather to dig at some imaginary scoreboard of American civic life. Imagine, the author is applauding European constitutions that have changed/reformed/modified hundreds of times versus the US Federal constitution that is far more stable in being changed far less”

    I don’t have a subscription, but I am a fan of Arend Lijphart’s work on consociationalism (although I’ve read more by Matthew Shugart, who has similar views on Proportional Representation aka ProRep).

    I don’t see ProRep as change for change’s sake. Many people are interested in reducing the cost of ballot access so as to increase the amount of political competition, which both improves representation as well as increasing accountability of the major parties. Increasing the number of seats up in a district and allocating them proportionally has a very similar effect as reducing the cost of ballot access. It lowers the threshold a small party needs to win a seat!

    As such, take any metric you would like on a country’s health and look up the countries that score the best on that metric. I’m willing to bet that you’ll find the top of that list dominated by multi-party countries using Proportional Representation.

    For example, here’s one of my favorite indices:

    https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

  49. Yes. There are two axes of government power, economic and social. The more power government wields, the less liberty individuals enjoy, and vice versa. Per the above Heritage index, the governments with the most limited intervention in economic markets are Singapore, Switzerland, Ireland, Taiwan, New Zealand, Estonia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden.

    The countries with the most limited intervention in society are, per the Cato/Fraser Human Freedom Index, Switzerland, New Zealand, Estonia, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

    https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2023-01/human-freedom-index-2022.pdf

    Please let me know if you are aware of better metrics than the above two. All of the above countries except Singapore and Switzerland use proportional representation (ProRep). And Switzerland uses direct democracy, which arguably goes a step further than ProRep in basically having each individual voter be their own political party because they get to represent themselves.

  51. Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden have huge nanny states. I’m not sure about some of the others, but I’m pretty sure New Zealand does too. Most of them were ultra communist about the scamdemic, especially new Zealand, except for Sweden which was relatively less communist.

  52. Switzerland only has some limited elements of direct democracy. Proportional Representation does not produce smaller, more limited government. I don’t know of a better ranking system and I don’t know exactly where Cato and Heritage screwed up, but being personally familiar with some of those countries and in touch with people who live there, those are not the words I would use to describe them.

  53. In my opinion, a claim backed up by evidence is stronger than a claim without such backing. As I’ve observed earlier, it is elitist behavior to expect a claim to be believed just because of who they are.

    Also note that judging countries involves juggling numerous pros and cons about each country. Nobody is perfect, and thus countries made up of people cannot be perfect either. More importantly, both sources are transparent about their methodology. For example, here is the country report on the Netherlands from Heritage:

    https://www.heritage.org/index/country/netherlands

    They score highly on judicial effectiveness, property rights, and government integrity, and score poorly on government spending.

    The US is notably out of the top 20 in both indices, and as we all know, our government has been steadily growing to a leviathan as the decades go by. After all, in a two-party system, the only party that complains about the deficit is the party that is out of power. Any party with majority power faces incentives to *increase* their influence by increasing the size of the government, and there’s *always* a party with majority power.

    Decentralizing power away from the duopoly would fix that.

  54. Evidence? Have you ever been to the Netherlands? Know anyone who lives there? They have a humongous, gargantuan welfare state. I don’t want to spend a lot of time digging into their methodology. Clearly there’s a lot they missed, based on results and my personal knowledge and experience. I have other things to do besides prove it to you. At least you acknowledge they score poorly on government spending. A lot of the other things you listed, without digging into them, sound fairly remote from the heart of the concept of size and scope of government. That’s probably part of the problem. I don’t know how you rankings handle all the EU bs either. That alone makes any place inside EU borders significantly worse.

  55. Yes, I have been to the Netherlands. More importantly, the scientific approach to furthering liberty is to see what countries have better achieved it and then examine to see what institutions they have in common. A good test to see whether someone really cares about furthering liberty is whether they think this effort is worthwhile or not.

  56. You’ve been to the Netherlands and think it’s a good example of small, limited government? We must have very different concepts of what small and limited mean.

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