The Anti-Majoritarian Mistake
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Highlights
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He doesn’t exactly define it, but the idea comes across clearly enough: political legitimacy and liberal justice require that the preferences of the majority generally prevail. Jonah rejects this because he’s of the opinion that “a liberal society can be just with remarkably little democracy.”
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The ideological constitutionalist treats his contested ideological conception of justice or the best regime as a condition for the legitimacy of government and argues that, therefore, it must be constitutionally codified and sheltered from democratic revision.
- A 6-3 minority party court majority gives the minority party an option to veto anything the majority party does—even if the majority party has unified control of government and enacts measures supported by a large majority of voters. There’s no way to justify this in principled, broadly liberal terms. None.
- At best, begging the question against political rivals on matters as basic as the meaning of the Constitution and the content of our rights and liberties amounts to a naive failure to grasp the political problem posed by pluralistic disagreement. At worst, it represents an illiberal urge to bulldoze the problem of pluralism by denying that political rivals with incompatible views can have a valid claim to power.
- The confidence of the minority in its righteousness is irrelevant. If the minority gets high on its own supply and chooses to exercise its power in a way that tramples on our basic rights and interests, as the majority understands them, the system can rapidly destabilize.
- No matter how you slice it, your ideas about the Constitution are yours. You’re responsible for them and they don’t come with a whit more binding authority than anyone else’s ideas. After all, what makes you so special? Your ideas are not especially distinguished or formidable contestants in the teeming battle royale of democratic contention, just like the rest.
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We need a method of collective decision-making that does not require unanimous agreement or anything close to it, because we’ll never get it. Majority rule is functional and fair, and there is nothing numinous or mysterious about the nature of this fairness.
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The authority of majority rule derives from our shared recognition that it’s better when more rather than fewer people get what they want. It really is that simple.