The Crisis of American Democracy as Seen at the New York Times

AMAC Exclusive – By David Lewis Schaefer

The editors of the New York Times are deeply concerned nowadays about what they term the “crisis” of American democracy. As executive editor Joseph Kahn explained, the Times has recently “produced dozens of explanatory and investigative stories on the causes of our democratic decline,” domestically and internationally. At the same time, Times staffers regret that most Americans don’t attribute nearly the importance to our supposed democratic decline that they do. Hence, responding a few days ago to the latest Times/Siena College poll, which shows Republicans increasingly likely to win back a Congressional majority, writer Blake Hounshell, lamented the finding that even though 71 percent of polled voters agreed that democracy was at risk, “only 7 percent said that democracy’s fragile state was the most important problem facing the country.” Instead, amid rapidly rising inflation and interest rates, the share of likely voters who said economic concerns were the most important leaped since July, to 44 percent from 36 percent — far higher than any other issue. (And voters most concerned with the economy favored Republicans overwhelmingly, by more than a two-to-one margin.)

The Times’s concern, and its increasing remoteness from the outlook of ordinary Americans, is even more explicit in its Sunday “Opinion” section, renamed several years ago from “The Week in Review.” While under its previous title, the section had always skewed leftward in some of its articles, its main function was literally to review some of the week’s major events, particularly for those who hadn’t been paying close attention to each day’s news. The new title signified the abandonment of any pretense to impartial reporting. Instead, most of the “opinions” advanced in the section have the value chiefly of offering a window into what members of the fashionable left, in politics, culture, and social mores, currently believe. Inevitably, the opinion columns will influence some readers who want to appear au courant, at work or at their next social affair, toward the position taken by the authors featured in the Times.

The October 9 issue offered a particularly revealing sample of the ideas Times editors think worth promoting. Most notable, perhaps, was a column by Jamelle Bouie, a regular contributor to the  editorial page, which reveals the shocking (to him) discovery that the American Constitution “Is in Tension with Democracy.” According to Bouie, “We tend to equate American democracy with the Constitution, as if the two were synonymous.”

This observation is true, if one thinks merely of everyday political discourse. But Bouie explains that the two have “always been in tension with each other,” reflecting the Framers’ intention “to force national majorities through an overlapping system of fractured authority,” intending “to mediate, and even stymie, the popular will as much as possible.” In fact, he cites a new book by law professor Jedediah Purdy which laments the lack in “our mainstream political language of saying, with unapologetic conviction and even patriotically, that the Constitution may be the enemy of the democracy it supposedly sustains.”

Any decent introductory college (or even high school) course on American government would have taught Bouie that the American Founders were far from being “democrats,” in the original, literal sense (borrowed from the Greek). “Democracy,” literally, means “rule by the many.” In the view of political philosophers from antiquity through most of the eighteenth century, it is a defective form of government because it facilitates tyranny by the poor (who were in the majority until quite recent times) over the rich minority, thus engendering the endless battle between rich and poor that destabilized republican government from ancient Athens to Machiavelli’s Florence.

As a reading of The Federalist Papers, or Madison’s records of the Constitutional Convention will demonstrate, the Founders’ aim was not to “stymie” the popular will, but to refine or moderate it. Had they been hostile to popular government in the broad sense, they would hardly have devised a system of government in which (as The Federalist emphasizes) every officeholder outside the judiciary derives his or her authority from popular selection, either directly (the House of Representatives) or indirectly (originally, the president and Senate, and to this day the judiciary). Notably, the Constitution explicitly prohibits the awarding of any titles of nobility, fixes the terms of office of presidents and legislators, and sets limits to the powers of the federal government as well.

The Founders’ goal in devising such a complicated scheme of government was to ensure that what The Federalist calls the people’s “deliberate sense,” rather than transient whims and passions, ultimately determined public policy. As political scientists such as Joseph Bessette (The Mild Voice of Reason) and Greg Weiner (Madison’s Metronome) have explained, the goal of the Founders was to establish a “deliberative”form of majority rule – one in which the majority would tend to consist, over time, of a shifting coalition of groups, rather than a fixed economic, ethnic, or religious majority that would make the rights of minorities insecure.

Bouie’s real concern is not that the American system of government isn’t democratic, but that the Constitution’s provisions don’t always result in the election of the candidates that he favors. Adopting a narrow timeline, he cites “the democratic backsliding of the past six years,” pointing to the fact that a simple majority of voters favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016 and that, despite Trump’s 2020 defeat, “with a few tens of thousands of additional votes in a few states,” he would have won reelection. In addition, again citing Purdy, Bouie laments our system’s “counter-majoritarian” aspect, arguing it “inhibits lawmaking and slows down politics, ‘making meaningful initiatives hard to undertake.’”

As these remarks indicate, Bouie’s real concern is not with democracy as such, but with the fact that the American electorate is closely enough divided that each party normally has a reasonable chance to win presidential elections and that partisan control of Congress periodically, even frequently, shifts (a sign that both of our major parties have to lobby hard to please an electoral majority, and that a governing coalition will be drawn from various parts of the country).

In other words, Bouie (and Purdy) don’t want a government that makes policies with some deliberation (hence taking longer to elicit popular support for radical innovations like Obamacare), but one that acts in accordance with the people’s “will” at any particular moment – as if the people’s will didn’t frequently shift. With his concern about presidents winning office with only narrow majorities (or slight minorities) of the popular vote, one might have expected Bouie to lament the way that recent Democratic innovations in just the past two years, such as Biden’s several budget-busting bills, and Obamacare a few years earlier, were passed with such slight congressional margins. But of course, he has no objection to this since it conforms to his view of the people’s “will.”

Alongside Bouie’s column, the Times printed another column of warning about the current threats to American democracy—in this case, regular contributor Pamela Paul’s account of the significance of a 1933 novel composed by a German Jew, of which a new translation is forthcoming: Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermans. As she observes, the novel “reads like a five-alarm fire,” having been written during a nine-month period in which the protagonists, prosperous Jewish merchants and professionals, foresee their (and their country’s) ruin as Germany suddenly falls under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship. Paul finds the novel “relevant” to our time since it portrays a series of “misbegotten assumptions” allegedly common to Hitler’s Germany and Donald Trump’s America, including the beliefs that “populist ignorance cannot prevail in an enlightened world,” that “technology will out disinformation,” and that “the situation was inevitable.” Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, the comparison of him to Hitler, or of American political life to the chaotic Weimar Republic that enabled Hitler’s rise, is obscene.

But the October 9 issue contains a note of hope as well: an essay on “The Fiery Brilliance of Obama’s Lost Book Manuscript,” by one Timothy Shenk, “author of a forthcoming book about the partisan hacks and political visionaries struggling to control our democracy.” The manuscript in question is one that Obama composed in the 1990s with a friend, with the “working title of ‘Transformative Politics.’” “Speaking with a candor he would soon be unable to afford” once he pursued a political career (recall Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber’s explanation that the law could never have been enacted with “transparency,” given “the stupidity of the American voter”), the young Obama “denounced a broken status quo in which cynical Republicans outmaneuvered feckless Democrats in a racialized culture war, leaving most Americans trapped in a system that gave them no real control over their lives.” According to Shenk, Obama’s denunciation helps us understand why, “more than 30 years after” he “set out to transform politics, American democracy has reached a dangerous impasse” – but also, potentially, “how to get out.”

According to Shenk, “the crisis of democracy…is really a problem of the Democratic coalition,” because the electorate’s current division over “cultural” issues (think: abortion, defunding the police, racial quotas, promotion of transgender ideology) prevents Democrats from winning more than a “wafer-thin” majority, whereas a focus on issues of class such as Obama envisioned would restore the successful New Deal/Great Society coalition, offering “a truly democratic solution” to the ostensible crisis. Since polls show that “62 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on millionaires,” 71 percent “approve of labor unions,” and 83 percent “support raising the federal minimum wage,” Democrats need only divert voters from the “controversial” positions that their “activists” take on cultural issues in order to achieve “structural changes that break American politics out of its current doom loop.” Eat the rich!

This is not the place to explain how minimum-wage laws boost unemployment, how labor unions (mostly in the public sector) block needed reforms in fields like education, and how raising taxes on the rich reduces investment and hence national prosperity.

But as for those nagging cultural (moral) issues that just won’t go away: one more contributor to the same Opinion section offers “A Cure for the Existential Crisis of Married Motherhood.” Her revelation: “married heterosexual motherhood … is a game no one wins,” so women who, like the author, discover that “straight monogamous marriage” no longer satisfies the needs of their “souls” should get divorced, arrange 50-50 custody of the kids, and emulate the success of “many same-sex couples” in figuring out “how to divide household labor according to preference and availability, instead of gender roles.” 

Another contribution to the section is an excerpt from the new memoir by Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, who was sentenced to 35 years for leaking hundreds of thousands of pages of classified military documents, but was pardoned after seven years by President Obama just before he left office. In the book, titled “README.txt,” Manning (whom the Times describes as “an American activist and whistle-blower”) claims to be a true patriot rather than a traitor. 

Following Jonathan Gruber’s advice, loyal Times aficionados had better keep those last two pieces away from the blue-collar voters on whom a secure, restored Democratic majority depends. The “stupid” voters might get the “wrong”—or rather the right—idea about the modern Democratic Party and its journalistic champions.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.