Meet me at the wrecking ball

Don’t dismantle our republic.

The colonists issued the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, because, they argued, the British government had infringed “certain unalienable Rights.” After some turbulent years following victory over Britain in 1783, a convention assembled in 1787 to write a constitution to, among other things, “secure the Blessings of Liberty.”

George III may have gone, but the framers believed that tyranny could come in other forms. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville warned of the “tyranny of the majority” and M.J.C. Vile noted in his classic textbook Politics in the USA that the framers “were equally afraid of autocracy and mob rule.” To guard against both, the Constitution they authored rested on two pillars: federalism, enshrined in the tenth amendment — “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” — and the separation of powers, which established:

…barriers between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, giving them the ability to check each other’s actions. It is this combination of federalism and the separation of powers which gives to the United States its particular characteristic as a system of limited government, in which no part of the system has the power to dictate to others.

It was once said that Donald Trump is a threat to the Constitution who must be resisted. It is now said that the Constitution itself is a threat to democracy.

In Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that “part of the problem we face today lies in something many of us venerate: our Constitution,” the flaws in which “now imperil our democracy.” “The U.S. constitutional system contains an unusually large number of counter-majoritarian institutions,” they explain, like the Electoral College, Senate, and Supreme Court, which allow “partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them.”

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s solutions include: “Abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a national popular vote”; “Reform the Senate so that the number of senators elected per state is more proportional to the population of each state”; “Establish term limits…for Supreme Court judges”; and “Make it easier to amend the Constitution by eliminating the requirement that three-quarters of state legislatures ratify any proposed amendment.”

Of course, the framers intended these institutions to be “counter-majoritarian.” They realized that in a country as diverse as the United States was even in 1790, allowing Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts (combined population of “free white males of 16 years and upward” of 317,177) to dominate the 10 states with the smallest populations (275,706 combined) was a recipe for discontent, even disunion. The checks and balances they created were designed to necessitate the location or creation of common ground.

Yuval Levin makes this point in American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation ― and Could Again. “These counter-majoritarian restraints often feel not only frustrating but, in fact, divisive,” he writes:

…because they force us to confront the reality of the existence of opposing views in our society, even when our side wins elections and makes appointments. But those divisions are there whether we confront them or not, and it is by being forced to confront them that we are moved to overcome them through negotiation.

He illustrates this in defense of the much-maligned Electoral College:

Where a direct popular vote for chief executive would encourage each of the two major parties to focus on getting out its most devoted voters in the least politically competitive parts of the country, the Electoral College means there is little advantage to winning by an even wider margin in the safest states and that candidates, instead, have to focus on voters in the most competitive states, which tend to fall near the ideological middle. This is good for both national unity and the competitiveness of our politics.

Arguments like Levitsky and Ziblatt’s presuppose that there is a great frustrated majority in America. There isn’t. In the 10 presidential elections since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide, the highest winning vote share is Barack Obama’s 52.9 percent in 2008, and the average is 49.0 percent. America is a 50/50 nation. And, if American politics really are becoming more “tribal,” it is hardly sensible to hand one tribe unfettered rule over the other on a margin of one or two percentage points. America’s political divides are not a product of federalism, the separation of powers, or the Constitution and will not disappear by taking a wrecking ball to them in favor of the very things the framers feared. Now that Republicans hold the Presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives, “liberals” will relearn the value of “checks and balances.”

This article originally appeared in Thinking Minnesota, Winter 2025