Member-only story
We Americans like to tell ourselves that we have a majoritarian system of government. While we’re not a simple “democracy,” we are a “representative democracy” — what our framers would have called, “a republic.”
Yet that majoritarianism has always been precarious. Because of the Senate, which allocates two Senators per state, regardless of population (so California, with 39.5 million people, gets 2 Senators; Wyoming with 578,000 people, also gets 2 Senators), and the Electoral College, which allocates electors based on the number of representatives and senators, there’s always been the possibility that the minority party nonetheless would win control of our government. Gerrymandering means that sometimes the Republicans have controlled the House, or certainly state delegations in the House, while receiving fewer votes than Democrats. That frequently happens in the Senate. And it has happened with the President — five times in our history, Donald Trump and George Bush most recently. Yet these aberrations may be relatively rare. Ordinarily, the majority does win. Ordinarily, the system is close to representative—or maybe, close enough for government work.
But there’s another model of government, whether we call it a democracy or not. That other model is minoritarian…
