Madison Never Envisioned Minority Rule

I strongly recommend Jamelle Bouie’s piece on James Madison, majority rule and the imperative of questioning the structure of the government. He’s right that the Senate is one of several institutions that are now giving the Republican Party disproportionate power relative to its popular support. And he’s correct that the Framers in general, and Madison in particular, didn’t advocate for representation-by-state in the Senate out of a principled belief in protecting minorities; the compromise that created the Senate was simply a power grab by the smaller states.

But one thing I’d add is that we shouldn’t forget how young representative democracy was at the time. It’s hardly surprising that Madison et al. didn’t work it all out properly. Even those who defend the constitutional system and Madisonian democracy in general – and I’m certainly one of them – should be clear that the original 1787 document had flaws that have only been partially repaired through amendment and interpretation. We should fight for the best, most democratic interpretation of Madisonian thought, not the government as it existed in the 1790s or the 1850s or the 1950s.

And what is Madisonian democracy? It certainly isn’t rule of any minority. But I don’t think that it’s quite right to say that “Madison wants majorities to govern” (emphasis Bouie’s). Madison assumes governing will be by majority rule because that’s how things are done in democracies; that’s what he means in Federalist No. 10 by the “republican principle” in which the minority loses by “regular vote.” But that doesn’t mean he wants a majority to govern by itself. Instead, Madison wants the entire government, not just a fixed majority, to work together in governing – and, by extension, he wants all the people to govern through representation.

(Madison and the other Framers didn’t come close to that standard, of course, given that their idea of citizenship excluded more than half the population. Again, we’re thinking of the best interpretation of Madison’s ideas, not what the Framers actually did.)

This is best explained by Hannah Arendt, in “On Revolution”:

We decide things by majority votes. But strictly speaking, majority rule is almost as antithetical to democracy as is minority rule.

In Federalist No. 10, Madison argues that the virtue of a large republic is that majorities simply won’t form – that so many interests will emerge that none of them will dominate. That’s supplemented by the mechanisms he discusses in Federalist No. 51, in which ambitious politicians bent on self-interest will prevent majorities from forming and scheming against everyone else.

So, yes, Madison didn’t want absolute rule by majorities. But he didn’t see absolute rule by a minority as the more democratic alternative; I don’t think such a thing would’ve even occurred to him. Democracy is, at its core, rule by the people. Not a majority of the people. And obviously not a minority.

1. Gabriele Spilker, Vally Koubi, Lena Schaffer and Tobias Böhmelt at the Monkey Cage on the effects of climate change.

2. Dan Drezner on Jamal Khashoggi and the Saudis.

3. At Governing, Louis Jacobson looks in on state-level secretary of state elections.

4. Michael Klarman makes the case for Democrats to pack the Supreme Court when they have the chance.

5. McKay Coppins has an excellent profile of Newt Gingrich and the damage he’s done to democracy. One point he doesn’t make: It’s far from clear that Newtism has ever helped the Republican Party win elections, let alone make policy.

6. Jared Bernstein on climate and the economy.

7. And a new site from Daniel Nichanian, The Appeal: Political Report, looks like a great resource for information on state and local elections. Check out their page on voting reform ballot measures.

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