The US and UK political systems are now controlled by a shrinking minority out of step with the rest of the country
- The UK general election and impeachment proceedings in the US have laid bare how distorted the two countries' political system have become.
- Instead of protecting minority voices from mob rule, both countries have political minorities dominating the system.
- It raises a question: Can systems designed to prevent majority tyranny, and push representative democracies to centrist consensus, survive the assertion of extreme minority-held positions over the opinions of the majority?
- Dan Alpert is an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School and founding managing partner of the New York investment bank Westwood Capital LLC.
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In the same week, the results of the general election in the United Kingdom and images of Republican members of the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives railing against the impeachment of President Donald Trump brought into stark relief a problem with representative government that has brought the most ancient and the most prominent of modern democracies to existential crisis.
In both the US and the UK we see the culmination of a decades-long trend: proactive minority coalitions of voters using constitutional systems designed to protect the few from domination by the many, to advance policy and shield actions that lack clear majority support.
Much ink has been spilled by liberals - in both nations - bemoaning the obstacles to economic and social progress posed by a minority alliance. Whether it's the small government conservatives and small state, heartland voters in the US, and "little England" nationalists in the UK. But that is not the real problem today. Protection of minority opinion from tyranny of the majority is a concept deeply ingrained in the fabric of both nations.
Supporters of democratic governance have feared mob rule since the ancient Greeks. Devices such as the Senate and Electoral College in the US and the approval of legislation by Peers under the UK's constitutional monarchy are designed to protect against this type of governing by the whim of the masses.
Even the American constitution, to quote a line attributed to George Washington himself, provided that we "pour our [often populist] legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it" - a wise protection against the passions of the masses.
The aforementioned features, however, are not intended to empower to the few to drive actions and outcomes that lack clear popular support.
Yet today - from the minority's election of a new Brexit-focused Conservative Party government in the UK to the minority's protection of a US president deemed undesirable and unfit for office by the majority - we find ourselves with systemic factional dictatorship.
The 2-pronged problem in the US
For the fifth time in US history - and the second time in this century alone- the US has a president elected by the minority of Americans.
The Electoral College, designed to protect America from the election of a self-interested demagogue as its leader - has arguably served to enable the installation of same in the Oval Office. This is itself, of course, a travesty. But there is an insidious twin phenomenon that has come with it.
The supposedly passion-cooling US Senate - intended by the founders to protect the interests of small states such as Delaware and Rhode Island and to act as the "adults in the room" legislatively - has instead become a factional redoubt controlled by 53 senators elected by only 43.6% of the votes cast in Senate elections.
This is due in part to the unanticipated (by the founders) growth in the number of low population states in the US. It is also due to the inherently anti-federalist, self-sufficient views of many who live in areas (even those within larger states) removed from the complexities of life in the more diverse and larger economies of the more populous states. This affords a rich soil for conservative Republican and right-libertarian ideologies to dominate the political and social debate therein.
Accordingly, in the present 116th Congress, 97.3 million votes for US senators determine the composition of the Senate chamber in opposition to the opinions of those who cast the other 131.1 million votes. Was this really what the founders had in mind? (I know some of you are thinking about gerrymandering in congressional districts in this context, but, let's face it, the present House of Representatives is almost perfectly reflective of the polity today, gerrymandering notwithstanding).
The result is not just the legislative deadlock we have seen in recent years, but, when combined with control of the executive by a non-popularly elected president from the same faction as the majority in the Senate, the ability to thwart constitutional protection against unilateral l behavior by the chief executive, and to enable the rise of one-man rule.
The UK has a similar problem
Last week saw a challenge to the sensible will of the majority in the UK as well. I say sensible here because the principal issue in the 2019 general election for members of the House of Commons was, quite clearly, the withdrawal of Britain from the European Union: Brexit.
Yes, the opposition party fielded an awful, deeply unpopular candidate, but the existential nature of Brexit almost certainly meant that a vote cast for the aggressively pro-Brexit parties was a vote cast against remaining in the EU.
In June 2016, some 51.9% of voters in a special referendum on whether the UK should leave the EU voted to do so - a narrow majority. Over the course of the three and a half years since, it has become evident to many in the UK that assumptions they made in casting their votes to leave have been challenged by the dismal realities of actually doing so.
And in last week's election, perhaps unsurprisingly, 53.3% of the votes cast were for candidates from parties that were either passionately anti-Brexit or for the dominant opposition Labour Party that lost pretty much all of its leave-supporting voters to the pro-Brexit parties.
Despite this clear majority on the issue of the most paramount importance to Britain, of any in half a century, the Conservative Party won the House of Commons in a landslide.
This is because of two principal factors - the way in which parliamentary constituencies are allocated around the UK and Britain's "first past the post" winner-take-all system of elections with no requirement for a majority of votes to win. Accordingly, had there been a run-off second round among the two leading candidates in each constituency, it is nearly certain to have produced a very different result.
These problems are systemic, yet they are caused by unprecedented economic and ideological polarization among the electorate. And this raises a question: Can systems designed to prevent majority tyranny, and push representative democracies to centrist consensus, survive the assertion of extreme minority-held positions over the opinions of the majority?
Given the massive tests these democratic systems are facing, I have serious concerns.
Dan Alpert is an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School, a senior fellow in macroeconomics and finance at the school's Jack C. Clarke Business Law Institute, and founding managing partner of the New York investment bank Westwood Capital LLC. He has been active in commercial real-estate banking and finance since 1982.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author(s).