Russ Roberts: But a lot of politics, I mean to say in America today, but of course it’s true throughout most of history Any Democracy. That’s certainly true here in Israel. There’s a fear that the political process is a zero-sum game: if the other side wins, we lose, and we lose in a devastating way.
I support the United States. I think there is a view in the United States that if the left wins, the United States is no longer the United States. And there is a view on the left that if the right wins, the United States is no longer the United States. That would be kind of a disgrace and a failure of its original mission.
And I often put it this way: There is no longer a common narrative. I don’t know if that’s a useful way of thinking, but the country is divided and each side is effectively blaming the other. RebelliousIt’s very hard to get anything done. That’s part of what your book is about, but it also seems to me to imply that there’s a cultural failure and a political failure going on at the same time, as you describe in your book. Do you think the United States is in that situation, and is your book in some sense an antidote to that ill?
Yuval Levin: I think we’ve reached that point, in a way, where I think it’s possible to recover from something like this. because Our political tradition gives us much to work with in this area.
So I would say that people’s sense that the stakes are absolute is the result of a misunderstanding of how democracy works.
And it’s a misconception that is at the root of why some democracies fail. And what’s amazing about the American Constitution is how aware it is of that danger.
So democracy is rooted in the idea that majority rule is essential to political legitimacy. I believe that’s absolutely true. And the framers of the United States Constitution started from that premise.
There teeth At the heart of it all is democracy: everyone is ultimately accountable to the people who vote for them.
But there is another fact about democracy: majority rule can be very oppressive. And it is terrifying to minorities. Because if everything depends on the majority, and everything the majority does is considered legitimate, then if you are not in the majority, you are in big trouble. And elections are the moments when a society decides who is the majority and who is the minority. So if everything is at stake in every election, the stakes are very high, and therefore it is really teeth A deadly battle.
The U.S. Constitution empowers the majority while also intentionally placing a series of constraints on that majority.
To be honest, that’s what we complain about with the Constitution. A lot of the people who criticize the Constitution are majoritarian in nature. They say, “The majority of the people voted for this party, and they get nothing.” end “Because we have to negotiate with other agencies and with counterparts within the agency.”
And it’s true. In America, anyone who wins a presidential election or a congressional election sooner or later has to say, “Look, I won the election. Why am I still here?” transaction With these people?
The reason you are still dealing with these people is because the Constitution is acutely aware that majorities must be checked before they can be empowered; or, at the very least, because it recognizes that to be truly legitimate, majorities must be broad and enduring, not narrow and fleeting, temporary majorities.
So what this system does is it creates a bicameral parliament, with two houses elected in two different ways, and it creates branches of government that are constantly getting in each other’s way, it creates an executive branch that is elected in a very specific way and that has to be accountable to the parliament at all times.
All of this is to ensure that simply being in the minority doesn’t make you a loser. That’s not how American life should be.
And in a sense, the competing and interacting majorities that the system creates are a way of ensuring that everyone is sometimes in the minority, or at least able to imagine that they are, and therefore that minorities have to worry about how to be protected from the power of the majority.
How to balance the power of the majority with the rights of the minority is therefore a challenge that all democracies must face.
The US Constitution actually explicitly states good That’s not easy to do, but that’s why narrowing down the only majorities that exist in 21st-century America is so frustrating.
