Towards a Supermajority for Constitutional Democracy
by The Renovator Editorial Board
Towards a Supermajority for Constitutional Democracy
by The Renovator Editorial Board
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Will our constitutional democracy survive? Can it?
Our institutions feel old and creaky, groaning under the strain of population growth, bureaucracy, and elite capture. Technology has made the public sphere harder to understand and handle. We resent an economy that seems to function like a spoils system for the few while trashing the climate for all. If we’re going to fix or even mitigate any of this, it will require big, institutional changes. But how do we make those changes a reality?
One of the bleakest data points about our societal health concerns a difference across generations in their sense of attachment to democracy. As political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa have reported in a few different publications (here’s one), there’s been significant generational decline in how people value democracy. In the starkest formulation, made in 2016, roughly 70% of Americans in the generation born before World War II consider democracy very essential, while not quite 30% of Americans who are now about 40 and younger do so. This trend of young people disbelieving in democracy has only gotten worse since.
The ‘democracy’ brand is deeply underwater. This is an existential threat. If the trend continues, then in 30 years, a majority of Americans won’t want one. Ironically, democracy can end itself democratically.
We can’t have a democracy if citizens don’t want one. The very first thing any democracy must agree on is whether or not to even have a democracy at all. If we believe democracy is worth preserving and renovating, then we have to reverse this dynamic of disaffection.
Hope lies in another important truth to be found in the data from Mounk and Foa. Our fullest attachment to democracy, even at its high-water mark in the mid-twentieth century, was never unanimous. The best we seem to have done was a supermajority— over two-thirds of voters— offering wholehearted support of constitutional democracy.
A supermajority for constitutional democracy: more than two-thirds of us committed to the basic norms and guardrails. That’s what we need to work towards. It’s a difficult goal, but also an attainable one. As Americans, we’ve done it before. Helping to forge this supermajority is one of The Renovator’s core missions.
Any supermajority at a large scale is going to be cross-ideological, multiracial, nonpartisan, and pluralistic; forging it will involve a concerted effort to find common ground across groups with whom we might rarely overlap. We are a large and diverse country, and we don’t all want the same things from government. The real test of health for a democracy is not whether a large majority of us can agree on this or that policy, or this or that candidate, but whether it is possible to forge a cross-ideological supermajority in support of the core norms of constitutional democracy that enable us to have those debates at all.
That supermajority must affirm a set of basic norms: commitments to constitutionalism, rule of law, full inclusion, nonviolence, and respect for elections. Too many of our fellow citizens have been radicalized to reject one or another of these norms. This process of radicalization has been accelerated through the efforts of adversaries such as Russia, Iran and China. These countries have tapped into the power of social media to exacerbate the divisions, vulnerabilities and paranoias organic to our culture.
To reverse this will require serious cultural and institutional efforts. Many nongovernmental organizations have worked on deradicalization in conflict zones around the world— now, we need their help here at home with similar work. It turns out that cultivating a genuine love of constitutional democracy, spreading understanding of the norms and values essential to its function, and securing the mutual commitments of American citizens to one another are all critical matters of national security and global competitiveness. This cultural work is just as important as economic influence, military might, or technological progress.
Historically, there have been cases of backsliding democracies where the people stepped in to reverse that downward trend. In countries like India and Poland, people put aside their deep and important and substantive policy fights across a very broad right-to-left spectrum to fight together for freedom, to reestablish rules of the game that make it possible to fight for policy issues inside the framework of free institutions.
If they can do it, so can we. Those of us who have not been radicalized, on both sides of the aisle, have a responsibility to forge a cross-ideological supermajority. “We the people” includes more than just the people who always agree with us.
Firstly, we need to believe such a supermajority is possible.
Happily, the evidence abounds that we are less divided than we tend to think. Supermajorities are still possible. Encouragingly, some recent state ballot initiatives have been decided with cross-ideological supermajorities. Here are some examples:
Legalization of recreational marijuana (New Jersey 2020), 67%; (Maryland 2022), 67%; (Mississippi 2020), 74%
Restoring voting rights to those who have completed felony conviction (Florida 2018), 65%
New state flag without Confederate emblems (Mississippi 2020), 71%
Curb predatory medical debt interest rates (Arizona 2022), 72%
Right to repair in support of small auto shops (Massachusetts 2020), 75%
At the national level, YouGov surveyed Americans about 155 broadly appealing national policies, and found that “70% (109) are strongly or somewhat supported by majorities of Democrats and Republicans. 95% of the policies (148) are supported by a majority of Americans overall.”
Look at these decisions and you’ll see American supermajorities voting again and again for fairness, inclusion, and protecting the person getting the short end of the stick. This is not only a cross-ideological supermajority in the making; it’s one with good, salt-of-the-earth values.
Drawing on these values, we need to forge an American supermajority for constitutional democracy. No democracy can be stable without a supermajority supporting the basic rules of the game. Inside the bounds of those rules, we can fight like the dickens over specific policy questions. But the rules themselves require supermajority support for stability.
That’s where each and every one of us comes in. We can join the cross-ideological supermajority for democracy that’s emerging, and encourage its spread. Take a look at those core norms again; reasonable Americans across the political spectrum must prioritize and embrace basic commitments to:
constitutionalism,
rule of law
full inclusion
nonviolence
respect for elections
Can you commit to all of them? Are you willing to speak up in their defense when others express skepticism? Are you willing to put aside smaller policy disagreements in order to unify behind these essential frameworks for a free society?
Even harder, are you willing to reach out to one of the friends, relations or acquaintances you’ve lost in recent years and ask them to join you in forging a cross-ideological coalition for democracy? Are you willing to stop hating those who voted for the other political party, in order to unite behind the fundamentals? This is what is asked of us, if we are to have the constitutional democracy we desire.
People often tell us we’re crazy or naive for believing this is possible— they say we’re blind to the realities of the fierce fight in which we now find ourselves.
But it’s not that we don’t see the fighting. It’s that we also see a deeper current below the surface, a current that bubbles up in real-world interactions unmediated by screens. We see a people hungry to reconnect. Furthermore, we see people acting on that hunger in positive ways all over this country. Those coalitions that formed to support the ballot initiatives named above are just a few examples. Our goal for The Renovator is to bring you one example after another of people working together across ideological divides to get real work done for their community and for their country.
We want you to believe again that this supermajority for constitutional democracy is possible. This is what we need if we want to end the processes of radicalization that threaten to devour us; this is what we need to make our constitutional democracy stable, inclusive, and effective; this is what we need to agree on, if we want to preserve our right to disagree healthily on everything else.
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Read more:
“The Road From Serfdom: How Americans can become citizens again” By Danielle Allen for The Atlantic, December 2019 Issue
“Will you join the supermajority for constitutional democracy?” by Danielle Allen for The Washington Post, Feb. 22, 2024 (The inspiration for this piece!)
https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/146210/TFR68_Education_National_Security.pdf
It might help you to know that the reason (until recently) that I seriously doubted the wisdom of saying we have or we should want a democracy is that I didn’t know what democracy actually meant to anyone who advocated it. I looked for answers in all the wrong places. I looked for answers from people who used the word “democracy” and tried to understand what they meant.
I’ve had a change of heart, and I think I like what I think the concept of constitutional democracy means. I stopped looking for the meaning of the word “democracy.” Instead, I re-considered the writing of James Wilson and James Madison that shed light on the meaning of the sovereignty of the people. See, e.g., my comments re: “A Bear in a Trap, Part 2” and “Renovating Democracy.” Does constitutional democracy mean to you what the sovereignty of the people under our Constitution means?
I’m not implying or suggesting that “the people” means what it meant in 1787. Far from it. I see “the people” as Montesquieu saw us. “In a democracy the people are in some respects the sovereign, and in others [the people are] the subject,” i.e., of the laws they create. Montesquieu emphasized that the “exercise of sovereignty” in a democracy is by citizens “by their suffrages.” Suffrage clearly is the quintessential speech of sovereigns.
The sovereign people of America are the citizens with the right to vote. Our Constitution Amendment XIV expressly identifies “citizens of the United States” as “All persons born or naturalized in the United States.”
The Preamble introduced the first generation of sovereigns, i.e., “We the People” who voted for the delegates to state conventions that ratified our Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Justice Wilson in 1793 in Chisholm v. Georgia emphasized that the first and foremost separation of powers in our Constitution is between the sovereign people and our public servants: “The PEOPLE of the United States” are “the first personages introduced” by our Constitution. “To the Constitution of the United States the term SOVEREIGN, is totally unknown,” but there is only “one place where it could have been used with propriety.” Only “those, who ordained and established that Constitution” could “have announced themselves ‘SOVEREIGN’ people of the United States.”
The second generation of sovereign people included (at least) citizens protected by Section 2 of Amendment XIV (all “male inhabitants of [each] State, being twenty-one years of age”) and Amendment XV (outlawing discrimination regarding citizens’ right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”).
The second generation also necessarily included female citizens. Amendment XIV clearly established that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States” are “citizens of the United States,” and that obviously included women. “No State” thereafter had any power to “make or enforce any law” that “abridge[d any] privileges or immunities of [female] citizens of the United States.” “No State” had any power to “deprive any [female] person” (citizen or not) “of life” or any “liberty” or any “property” until after affording them all “process of law” that is “due.” “No State” had any power to “deny to any [female] person” (citizen or not) “the equal protection of the laws.”
The third generation especially clearly included citizens protected by Amendment XIX (outlawing discrimination regarding citizens’ right to vote “on account of sex”). The fourth generation included citizens protected by Amendment XXIV (outlawing discrimination regarding citizens’ right to vote on account of wealth (ability “to pay any [ ] tax”). The fifth generation included citizens protected by Amendment XXVI (outlawing discrimination regarding citizens’ right to vote against people “eighteen years of age or older . . . on account of age”).
But the greater democratic significance of Amendments XIV, XV, XIX XXVI outlawing discrimination on account of certain characteristics regarding the right to vote is that they each establish a right: the right not to be subjected to any discrimination on account of such characteristics. They also finally made the sovereign people the same as the people.