On Sky News, Husam Zomlot was asked about people attending rallies carrying Hamas flags or glorifying the attacks on 7 October, and said:
"This is abhorrent, unacceptable. Those people hijack our cause for their own twisted logic.
The Jewish people have nothing to do with it. This is not a religious conflict. Many of those who demonstrated for Palestine yesterday were Jews. Many of those strong voices are the Jewish people defending us.
Those who have hate in their hearts for Jews would have hate in their hearts for Muslims and Christians, we have nothing to do with them and they should shut up."
But is has happened and has happened a lot.
You know who’s enjoying the mess that’s currently known as America’s Congress? Donald Trump. The GOP can’t even seem to choose…a Speaker of the House…they control. Chaos, paralysis, shoddy spectacle, pick your poison. And that only underscores the power of strongman “I alone can save you” demagoguery. Meanwhile, America’s careening through crisis after crisis like a dumpster on fire, and the world’s crashing and burning.
Welcome to the “Painful Stupidity” Phase of American Collapse.
What really happened to America? I’ll come back to that for a moment. For now, consider a striking if grim finding. More Americans are beginning to…blame…the GOP for the mess politics are in, especially the state of not being able to have a functioning Congress. But the numbers are barely higher than those who blame Democrats. Democrats may be many things, and we’ll come to that, but they’re not responsible for this pathetic saga. Worse, precisely the same number of Americans say they’d vote for Republicans today as they would Democrats…even while…the GOP…self-evidently…in the most egregious possible way…can’t…won’t…governing…let alone even function.
What the $@! Is going on here, exactly?
Let me give it to you straight. You might have been getting the sinking feeling lately that America’s ungovernable, and…you’re right. I used to speak of American collapse, and it turns out that while you might have thought I was kidding…I wasn’t.
America is now a failing state. Not my opinion, really. What else do you call a country where governance is broken? From the inside? Thanks to crackpots, lunatics, and fanatics? Not even out of anything like everyday differences of opinion, but…out of negligence, malice, folly, rage, incompetence, and…sheer…stupidity?
This is textbook failing state level stuff. Sure, America still has some of the superficial features of a functioning society. Or does it? There’s a long, long list by now of stuff that you can’t really get in America, or at least not in a modern way, as in, universally, affordably, reliably, because it doesn’t exist that way. Healthcare. Retirement. Higher education. Upward mobility. A stable career. Savings and investment and financial stability. Two thirds of Americans live at the perpetual edge, and over a third struggle to just pay the bills.
Let me put the above more formally. A badly broken economy, where you can’t make ends meet on a median income. Endemic crises, from debt to loneliness to depression, anxiety, suicide. Deaths of despair. Corroded social norms. The sense that life is zero-sum, me against you, in a perpetual battle for existence. Institutions that don’t function, in their proper sense, as in, the basic provision of goods and services, whether they’re healthcare systems or Wall St. Widespread pessimism, as generation after generation finds itself worse off than the last. All of this is failing state level stuff.
How did America get here? You see, there’s a strange thing that happens in American Discourse. There can be involved, abstruse discussions of, for example, the Founding Fathers, and their theories of politics and morality, right down to how many James Madisons can dance on the head of a pin. Pointless, really, because while it might intellectually satisfying for a Certain Kind of Guy…it doesn’t explain a whole lot.
The way America got here is much simpler than Americans imagine. Republicans have lost most of the last few elections, in terms of the popular vote, and meanwhile, the archaic institution known as the electoral college allows them outsized power. That’s at a national level. Meanwhile, at a state level, tactics like gerrymandering effectively keep Republicans in power for life. Facing no accountability, no incentive to not just change, but grasp reality, Republicans have gone from conservative to delusional to fanatical to at this point…blindsided by their own fanatics and lunatics, which is the hallmark of Category Five Stupidity.
What’s stupidity, anyways? What do I mean by it? There’s that famous Einstein quote. Along the lines of: doing a thing that isn’t working, banging your head against the wall, and keeping on doing it anyways.
This is where America is right now.
You see, the combination of institutional stagnation above creates a certain kind of fatal outcome. America’s destiny is now in the hands of 30% of its population…who happens to be fanatical. I don’t mean that as an insult, I mean it…objectively. Fanatical, as in, ideologically extreme, brooking no relationship with reality, and desiring of an authoritarian society, not a democratic one. By now, of course, they’re vocal about it.
They’ve put American into a Stupidity Trap, perhaps modernity’s hardest version of one.
Because…well…think about it this way. Remember the Einstein quote? By now, surely, something should have been learned here. Along this bleak trajectory, from Reagan to Gingrich to Trump to…LOL…Jim Jordan. For international readers, he’s been at the center of a…scandal…shall we say.
Something should have been learned here. Namely, that this form of thinking, ideas, theories, mindsets…doesn’t work. Maybe, once upon a time, you could have said, “well, here all these theories. And we don’t know the results yet. So isn’t it fair to want to try them?” Hence, America had its Grand Social Experiment with Reaganomics, with Gingrich style politics, with Trumpism, and so forth. And what happened? The wealth didn’t “trickle down.” No, people didn’t ascend to a whole new level of prosperity. Nope, society didn’t come together in some kind of grand liberation. People didn’t even turn nicer, smarter, more trusting, and happier, like somebody like poor old David Brooks trumpeted once upon a time.
None of it worked out. The way it was supposed to. Now, here, you can be a good leftist cynic and say: “it was only to make the 1% richer, anyways!” Maybe, sure. But the point is that way back then, the Grand Experiment hadn’t been run, and I suppose, at least giving people the benefit of the doubt, you could say, the results weren’t in yet. But now we know the results of America’s Grand Experiment. None of it…worked out. Not the economics—trickle downism and “free markets.” Not the politics—take a look at Congress. Not the social angles—see how miserable, lonely, angry, stressed, and depressed Americans are today.
When I say none of it worked, I’m not kidding.
Einstein. The wall. Beating your fists—or banging your head—against it. Learning something. If what you’re doing isn’t working, stop. You’d think Americans would have learned something through this fatal trajectory of decline.
And some did. Young people in America these days are about as likely to put capitalism as the same category as “the devil.” Portions of society have “moved left,” as American pundits say, but an actual social scientist would just say: they learned something about reality and political economy. Even among older generations, that’s true. Minorities, who were the least likely to have gone along with the Grand Social Experiment, have become more vocal in their objections. So Americans did learn.
But not the 30%. The fanatics. And what makes them fanatics is that they…don’t learn. Because they won’t. Not because they can’t, crucially—here I am, and here are a lot of other people, explaining to them, patiently, time and again, what a modern society is, why America fell apart, what to do differently. They’re not interested in hearing any of that, because their blinders are already on. They’ve turned ideas into hardened, immovable ideology—which can never be wrong.
And so their adherence to this failed set of ideas isn’t just as strong as it ever was, it’s only grown stronger. Trickle down economics didn’t work? Great, let’s give billionaires even more money. Endless work and not enough pay only made people stressed, depressed, and took households apart at the seams? Great, let’s have even less pay and more work. Not having decent healthcare and retirement didn’t work out? Awesome, let’s take a knife to it entirely. The endgame, as we all know by now, is a neofascist authoritarian society, based on blood and faith and soil and all the rest of the tired old cliches of what a “real” person is. The fanatics have grown even more extreme about America’s failed set of choices and ideas, in an attempt to…
Never to have to learn anything.
And so America’s in a Stupidity Trap. Decades of GOP politics, growing more and more fanatical, extreme, rigid, senseless, pointless…didn’t work out? Great, let’s go from Reagan to Gingrich to Trump to…Jim Jordan. Scratch that, let’s not even elect a Speaker, because who need a functioning anyways? In the current chaos gripping Congress, you can see the Stupidity Cycle etched out in such stark relief it’d make a Roman stonemason cry.
So what’s America to do about all this. How does a nation get out of a Stupidity Trap, anyways? Well, I have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is for the world, not America. See America? Now you can learn what not do. Don’t step over the edge of such an abyss, because the roaring cyclone of Stupidity has a force stronger than gravity on Jupiter. Don’t mess with the ideas that America’s failed Grand Experiment proves don’t work—like Britain, which has, astonishingly, in an even great act of Stupidity, decided to repeat America’s experiment, and so…have you ever seen an actual time-warp? It’s in one, turning Dickensian all over again.
For America, though? The bad news is that you can’t usually get out of a Stupidity Trap. Remember: it’s when a nation’s held hostage by a minority of extremists, but the definition of “extremist” is “I’m not going to learn a damned thing, and I’m not going to let you, either, and that means if I have to burn the house down, I will, even if I’m sleeping in it, too.” More often than not? Nations don’t really escape Stupidity Traps. They…have to…kind of…outgrow them. By way of generations which can finally let all those failed paradigms go, once and for all. Think of the Soviet Union, for example.
When you’re in a Stupidity Trap? The point isn’t just to escape, because…that’s almost impossible. It’s just to stop digging, because that’s what a Stupidity Trap really is. Not just falling into the Pit of Collapse, but falling in, and then digging yourself even deeper. Sane Americans despair in frustration and disbelief, because that’s what the 30-40% of extremists keep on doing to them, day after day. Pulling yourself, out though? That’s…it doesn’t happen often. Because when you’re being pulled down, time and again, every time you place a damned foot outside the lip of the abyss…not easy, is it?
That’s where America is. Welcome to the Painful Stupidity Phase of American Collapse. You know why I used to warn about that very phrase, idea, occurrence, “American Collapse”? Because this is sort of place social collapses tend to go. And because the greatest force in human history, the mightiest of all, before which even the tallest empires crumble? Stupidity itself. Stupidity can lay to waste in days what’s taken centuries to build. Humankind knows no greater power. And so, as ever, it should’ve been something to always have been on guard against.
The whole world feels as if it’s gone insane. I have always thought that I’m old enough that I will likely be dead before men actually start WW3, or burn the earth up. But the insanity seems so widespread and intense that right now I’m not so sure.
Israel is clear about its intentions in Gaza – world leaders cannot plead ignorance of what is coming
The UN is warning of a ‘risk of genocide’ against Palestinians. Future pleas of ‘If I knew then what I know now’ will not cut it
If I knew then what I know now. For many of the guilty men and women who plunged Iraq into blood and chaos, this became something of a stock phrase. When, in 2004, the then Tory leader, Michael Howard, was asked if he would still have supported the British government’s motion backing the war – only 16 Conservative MPs rebelled a year earlier – he replied: “If I knew then what I know now, that would have caused a difficulty. I couldn’t have voted for that resolution.” “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have voted that way,” protested Hillary Clinton during her doomed first campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. “If I knew then what I knew now, I wouldn’t have voted for it,” said Labour’s then deputy leader, Harriet Harman, a few weeks later.
Prepare yourself for the revival of this phrase. As the calamity of Israel’s onslaught against Gaza becomes apparent, those who cheered it on will panic about reputational damage and plead their earlier ignorance. Do not let them get away with it this time.
The claim was nonsense even in the context of the Iraq cataclysm. As the Chilcot inquiry later concluded, Blair was warned that an invasion “would increase the threat from al-Qaida” and other groups. As a result, the inquiry did “not agree that hindsight is required”, noting that everything from “internal strife in Iraq” to Iranian intervention to the rise of al-Qaida was “explicitly identified” before the war. Warnings of the disaster to come were not confined to private intelligence briefings to Blair. From the lack of weapons of mass destruction – as former foreign secretary Robin Cook detailed in his resignation speech – to violent strife to a boost for al-Qaida, the coming disaster was widely predicted in public. There was no shortage of evidence to justify the then-secretary general of the Arab League warning that the war would “open the gates of hell”.
In the aftermath of Hamas’s unjustifiable atrocity, Israel’s military onslaught has already slaughtered thousands of civilians, many of them children. That the worst is to come is not supposition, but evident from the public pronouncements of Israel’s political leaders. They have made no effort to disguise their intentions, and thus they have left their cheerleaders with nowhere to hide, no ignorance to plead. “The emphasis is on damage, not accuracy,” declared the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents,” said one IDF official, adding, “There will be no buildings.” Israel’s economy minister, Nir Barkat, told ABC News that hostages and civilian casualties will be secondary to destroying Hamas, “even if takes a year”.
One prominent supporter of Keir Starmer on Labour’s national executive committee claimed that Israel was not in breach of international law on the grounds that its actions were “proportionate”, and that the “command structure involves sign-off by lawyers to ensure conformity with intl law for all IDF actions”. So let’s hear from one such lawyer, Israel’s former chief military advocate general and the country’s former attorney general no less, who declared that to destroy Hamas “then you have to destroy Gaza, because everything in Gaza, almost every building there, is a stronghold of Hamas”.
Israel is dropping leaflets on northern Gaza warning that civilians who remain there may be considered an “accomplice in a terrorist organisation”, self-evidently arguing that non-combatants can be considered fair game. Leaving aside that southern Gaza is itself being bombed, contrary to Israeli claims that it’s a safe zone, and that many are unable to flee – not least the injured and infirm – this is a public confession of what could amount to future war crimes.
When the supposed relative “moderate” foreign minister, Eli Cohen, declares that Gaza’s territory will shrink thanks to Israeli annexation, he is simply stating a longstanding open Israeli commitment. After all, when Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, declares her support for Israel’s territory compromising the biblical territory of Judea and Samaria – that is, the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip – she merely echoes Netanyahu’s promoting a map of “Greater Israel” before the UN.
From collective punishment – by depriving innocent people of water, food, energy and medicine – to indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas, there are no excuses. The UN is warning of “mass ethnic cleansing”, has denounced “crimes against humanity” and is even arguing that “there is a risk of genocide” against the Palestinians. A ground invasion has not even begun, but what will happen next is clear. So here is a prediction. As it is, just 3% of Britons say there “definitely should not be an immediate ceasefire”, the same proportion as those who believe the Earth is flat. As the atrocities mount, the public mood will be a mixture of horror and fury at those complicit in one of the great crimes of our time.
Last week, the former foreign secretary Jack Straw conceded the Iraq war was “in retrospect, a mistake – I mean there’s no question about that”, with a casual tone more befitting someone who took the wrong turn off a motorway than someone who played a leading role in a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Expect the same tone from those who justify this ongoing massacre. “If I knew then what I know now”, or words to that effect, will accompany their statements of regret. But they do know now: there are no grounds for ignorance, and those complicit deserve nothing but contempt and moral disgrace.
Owen Jones
Last Tuesday, some of the world’s most prominent news organizations spread word about a terrible tragedy unfolding in the Gaza Strip. Images of a blast at a hospital were beginning to circulate on social media. The Palestinian health authorities claimed that Israel was responsible for the death of some 500 civilians. Because the details were extremely murky, it was impossible to tell who had caused the explosion or how many people had died. And yet some of the most reputable names in news media sent push alerts that broadcast Hamas’s claims far and wide.
“Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli air strike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say,” wrote the BBC. “At least 500 people were killed by an Israeli airstrike at a Gaza hospital, the Palestinian Health Ministry said,” wrote The New York Times.
Along with others, these news outlets ascribed these details to Palestinian authorities, thereby doing the minimum to ensure that their readers would understand where the claims originated. But both push alerts would have led reasonable readers to conclude that these statements must basically be true. Both talked about “Israeli” air strikes. Both uncritically reported that many hundreds had died. Neither explained in their push alerts that the health authorities—and all other authorities—in Gaza are controlled by Hamas, the Islamist organization that had brutally killed more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, in a recent surprise attack on Israel.
ews of the supposed Israeli strike quickly had huge real-world consequences. The king of Jordan canceled a planned meeting with President Joe Biden. Mass protests broke out in cities across the Middle East, some culminating in attacks on foreign embassies. In Germany, two unknown assailants threw Molotov cocktails at a synagogue in Berlin. A wider regional war seemed to inch closer.
But as more details about the blast emerged, the initial claims so credulously repeated by the world’s leading news outlets came to look untenable. Israel released what it said were recordings of Hamas operatives discussing the blast as the misfire of a rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. (The group has denied this version of events.) A live video transmission from Al Jazeera appeared to show that a projectile rose from inside Gaza before changing course and exploding in the vicinity of the hospital; the Israel Defense Forces have claimed that this was one of several rockets fired from Palestinian territory. Subsequent analysis by the Associated Press has substantially corroborated this. In addition, pictures of the site taken by Reuters showed a small crater that, according to independent analysts using open-source intelligence, is inconsistent with the effect of munitions typically used by Israel. It came to look doubtful that the missile had directly hit the hospital; as a BBC team investigating the blast reported, “Images of the ground after the blast do not show significant damage to surrounding hospital buildings.” Even the death toll itself has come to be in doubt: U.S. intelligence agencies now estimate that 100 to 300 people died—a horrific loss but one that is inconsistent with the claims made by Hamas.
By Wednesday morning, a fresh consensus started to emerge among experts. “The evidence this morning, though NOT conclusive by any means, points more towards a failed rocket launch than an Israeli air strike,” Shashank Joshi, the defense editor of The Economist, posted on X (formerly Twitter). By evening, U.S. security agencies had analyzed the available evidence and come to an even more certain verdict: “We feel confident that the explosion was the result of a failed rocket launch by militant terrorists and not the result of an Israeli airstrike,” Mark Warner, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on X. Officials in France and in Canada concurred. A number of observers who are critical of Israel and had at first condemned the attack subsequently acknowledged that initial reports had likely been mistaken.
Finally, this morning, The New York Times acknowledged the extent of its error in an editors’ note. “The early versions of the coverage—and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels—relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified,” the newspaper admitted. “The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.” And it concluded: “Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation.” (CNN and other news outlets have not yet followed suit in apologizing for their own, very similar, missteps; a BBC statement on the topic applied only to a correspondent’s words, and not its push alerts or the initial reporting on its website.)
The cause of the tragedy, it appears, is the opposite of what news outlets around the world first reported. Rather than having been an Israeli attack on civilians, the balance of evidence suggests that it was a result of terrorists’ disregard for the lives of the people on whose behalf they claim to be fighting.
In the absence of major new facts pointing to a different conclusion, this means that the Palestinians who died at the hospital in Gaza should be added to the already grim death toll for which Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad bear responsibility since the surprise attack on Israeli civilians. That judgment also makes the misleading reporting by the world’s most influential journalistic outlets one of the most consequential media failures in recent history. As Ted Lieu, a progressive member of the House of Representatives, posted on X, the “news organizations not only got it wrong” in spectacular fashion, but in “their rush to judgment caused other nations to wrongly interpret the hospital blast.”
Such a glaring example of major outlets messing up on a very consequential event helps explain why trust in traditional news media has been falling fast. As recently as 2003, eight out of 10 British respondents said that they “trust BBC journalists to tell the truth.” By 2020, the share of respondents who said that they trust the BBC had fallen to fewer than one in two. Americans have been mistrustful of media for longer, but here, too, the share of respondents who say that they trust mass media to report “the news fully, accurately, and fairly” has fallen to a near-record low.
Journalists and media executives understandably tend to apportion blame for their failings elsewhere. If people no longer trust quality outlets, the fault must lie with the “misinformation” they encounter on social media. But such an easy allocation of responsibility won’t work when, marching in unison, major news organizations seem to have fouled up in as blatant a way as they have over this past week.
Donald Trump caught academics off guard. Historians and social scientists had long studied the American right, amassing a vast library on its relationship to race, gender, sex, the media, the Cold War, religion, and big and small business. Less explored was the role of the Constitution, which has always been more friend than foe to the American way of repression. This gap in the literature left the field wide open for experts in authoritarianism abroad and scholars of authoritarianism past.
The most important contribution to this genre was “How Democracies Die,” by the Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Studying how democracy was undermined elsewhere, Levitsky and Ziblatt defined the threat of Trumpism as an attack on the Constitution, the rule of law, and institutions. They also claimed that these pillars were less sturdy than people supposed. The Constitution was riddled with holes. Restrictions on Presidential prerogatives were not written down. Institutions designed to check extremists, whether specified in the text (a bicameral legislature) or not (political parties), were vulnerable to extremists.
Most worrisome of all, the ligaments joining these parts, what Levitsky and Ziblatt called “norms,” were frayed. Two norms in particular—tolerance of one’s opponents and forbearance in the exercise of power—were foundational to constitutional democracy. But since 1965, 1994, or 2010 (Levitsky and Ziblatt never settled on a date), those norms had been eroding. Traditionally, élite “gatekeepers” had been the custodians of norms, exercising “peer review” over norm eroders such as Charles Lindbergh and George Wallace. But, in the wake of reforms initiated by the Democrats after 1968 (another date), and later copied by the Republicans, ordinary voters, rather than insider élites, were empowered to choose the Presidential ticket of each party. For a while, the establishment held the line against outsiders. Then came 2016, when Republican leaders failed to stop Trump and rallied behind him.
Within a month of its publication, in January, 2018, “How Democracies Die” hit the Times best-seller list. It’s easy to see why. The book gave voice to liberals who felt betrayed not by their country but by its voters, the gate-crashers who put Trump into power. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s readers believed in norms, trusted élites, and valued institutions, particularly the Supreme Court. They revered the Constitution. The problem was the half of the country that didn’t.
But spring came, as it does, and a new wind began to blow on the left. After the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, progressives started seeing the Court less as a counter to Trumpism than as its conduit. “Defend institutions” may have made sense at the beginning of Trump’s reign. By the end, it sounded like a call to protect the Electoral College and other struts of the right. In 2018, Levitsky and Ziblatt had recommended building coalitions with “red-state Republicans,” abandoning abortion as a litmus test for candidates, and making unnamed but “tough” concessions to moderate voters. Now liberals were ready to play hardball: abolish the filibuster, pack the Court, admit new states to increase Democratic votes in the Senate, and stop all coöperation with the G.O.P.
None of this agenda has been enacted, but its pressures are felt throughout “Tyranny of the Minority,” Levitsky and Ziblatt’s follow-up to “How Democracies Die.” There’s little talk of norms in the new volume. Instead, Levitsky and Ziblatt reaffirm the call to end the filibuster and remake the Court, norm-eroding measures they previously cautioned against. More surprising is their revised view of democracy itself. The primary threat to the system is no longer demagogues; it’s the very institutions that Levitsky and Ziblatt once rallied readers to protect. If the United States is to remain—really, become—a democracy, Americans must stop treating its founding text “as if it were a sacred document.” The Constitution, the deepest norm in American politics, must be eroded.
In 1857, the British historian and statesman Thomas Macaulay set out a grim forecast for the United States. In Britain, political power was safely tucked away in the pockets of élites, who were “deeply interested in the security of property.” America had foolishly handed power to the “discontented” masses. For now, there was land for them to settle in the West. But, when that safety valve failed, the working classes, “none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner,” would vote to strip the minority of their wealth. The Constitution wouldn’t stop them. It was “all sail and no anchor.”
For much of American history, it’s been the reverse: all anchor, no sail. The most influential authors of the Constitution were terrified of democratic majorities. They devised a government with a sluice of filters—at least six, which Levitsky and Ziblatt note is “an unusually large number”—to push majorities to the side. More than two centuries later, we still have this “uniquely counter-majoritarian democracy,” which is hardly a democracy at all.
Congress has two of the filters. A bicameral legislature is one; the Senate is the other. Many countries have learned that, in a real democracy, upper chambers either don’t exist or have highly limited powers. The U.S. Senate doesn’t just have power equal to (and, in some cases, greater than) the House; it also represents states rather than individuals. Wyoming, with a population of about five hundred and eighty thousand, has as many votes as California, which has nearly forty million people. There’s a reason that most democracies don’t operate in this way: it’s undemocratic. This has been apparent for centuries. All of the antislavery bills that passed the House between 1800 and 1860 were killed by the minoritarian Senate.
If the House and the Senate agree on a bill, they still need the approval of the President, who’s elected not by the voters but by the Electoral College. That’s the third filter. With a bias toward smaller states and a winner-take-all structure, the Electoral College can send the loser of the popular vote to the White House. In this century alone, that’s happened twice.
Even if the elected branches agree on a bill, the Supreme Court can strike it down. Justices are put on the bench by the Senate and the President, so we can have a Supreme Court majority, like the one we have now, created by a combination of Presidents who lost the popular vote and senators who represent a minority of the voters. That’s the fourth filter, a creature of the preceding three.
Meanwhile, another course runs parallel to the national one. Our federal system, the fifth filter, grants states tremendous power, including the right to design electoral rules—how district lines are drawn, who can access the ballot, how elections are conducted, and so on—that privilege minorities over majorities. Between 1968 and 2016, the party with fewer votes has won a state house a hundred and twenty-one times and a state senate a hundred and forty-six times. Those legislatures, in turn, can gerrymander federal election districts, turning the putatively majoritarian House into another counter-majoritarian chamber. They also can pass laws, such as bans on abortion, that abridge the most basic freedoms of the people.
Many nations entered the twentieth century saddled with the yoke of counter-majoritarianism. They got rid of it. We haven’t, thanks to our mega-counter-majoritarian requirement for constitutional change, which is the sixth and most important filter. Two-thirds of both houses in Congress propose an amendment, and three-fourths of the states must then ratify it. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, a political scientist has devised something called the Index of Difficulty to measure how hard it is to change a country’s constitution. Ours tops the list, by a wide margin.
This news comes at a bad time. Today’s Republicans—many of them white and living in rural areas—hold fast to the Constitution for protection against Democratic majorities. Those majorities increasingly live in large cities, where the jobs are, and many of those cities are in highly populated, Democratic states. The combination of these factors leaves blue voters vulnerable to malapportionment in the states, where they needlessly pile up their votes in cities, and in the Senate and Electoral College. A minority of voters can now inflict a legislative wallop of racism, sexism, nativism, homophobia, transphobia, and economic misery on the rest of us—and never have to pay for it at the polls.
This is the “tyranny of the minority” that Levitsky and Ziblatt rightly fear. No lawless strongman or populist autocracy, it’s a product of the very Constitution that we have been taught to admire.
Once we set aside the compass of the Constitution, where should we look for our North Star? Levitsky and Ziblatt point to “multiracial democracy.” Either we become a multiracial democracy or we cease to “be a democracy at all.” The battle, in other words, is existential.
Yet Levitsky and Ziblatt aren’t equipped for war. Like many analysts, they believe that today’s right is driven by a primitive fear. Conservative voters fear the simple fact of demographic change. As immigrants, people of color, women, and sexual and gender minorities assume greater visibility, dominant groups—straight, white, cis, native-born men—fear a loss of status. That fear of erasure fuels the G.O.P.’s “turn to authoritarianism.” Holding on to government power is an “existential” imperative for the Party and the groups it represents.
This argument, now ubiquitous on the left, has come to seem like a natural law of the political universe, describing our most elemental drives of identity and anxiety. It makes sense that conservatives would believe it, as they’ve been pushing it since the French Revolution. But it poses a problem for the left, and for Levitsky and Ziblatt, in particular.
If dominant groups can get members of subordinate groups to identify with them, they may not need minoritarian tyranny to stay in power. That scenario is not as far-fetched as it may sound. Until recently, that was the story of the American right, whose foot soldiers created large voting majorities and cultivated explicit support for big business from the ranks of its victims. Whiteness is insidiously capacious, forever incorporating new arrivals into its enveloping fold. Small shifts of nonwhite voters away from Democrats and the rise in the number of Republican candidates of color suggest that this phenomenon remains salient, even in the age of Trump. In today’s environment, where elections are won at the margin, the effects can be lethal.
More important, if the laws of identity and anxiety are as primal and potent as many progressives believe, resisting those laws risks turning the left’s project into a purely moral crusade, an exhortatory ought against the right’s is. Levitsky and Ziblatt call themselves political realists, yet they often resort to an earnest moralism to explain the world. What makes politicians capitulate to authoritarians in their midst? The absence of courage. How will multiracial democracy be advanced? By “loving America with a broken heart.” “History is calling again,” and “future generations will hold us to account.” More than a lapse in style, platitudes like these, stacked one on top of the other, reveal how difficult it has been for progressives, of all stripes, to mount a political argument for democracy.
Levitsky and Ziblatt are refreshingly clear that only a popular movement can create the constitutional reforms that democracy needs. But they define democracy narrowly, as “a political system with regular, free, and fair elections in which adult citizens of all ethnic groups possess the right to vote” and “enjoy equal protection of democratic and civil rights.” Quoting the political scientist Adam Przeworski, they add that it is “a system in which parties lose elections.” Given this straitened sense of what a democracy can do, it’s not clear why any contemporary movement would take on the task of creating it. It’s probably no accident that, thus far, none really has.
It wasn’t always so. The United States has seen many movements for democracy. The successful ones have treated the Constitution not simply as a document of constraint, weaponized by the courts and politicians, but as a charter of expanding freedom, wielded by and for the people. As Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath detail in their wonderfully counterintuitive book, “The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution,” the very document that Levitsky and Ziblatt are so dissatisfied with is annotated with statements of astonishing democratic vision, penned by the great social movements of the past.
From the earliest days of the Republic, those movements insisted that the greatest threat to democracy is not the tyranny of one man but the oligarchic rule of wealth. Poor citizens, at the mercy of richer ones, could not be full citizens. More than a moral or political argument, this is a foundational claim about the Constitution and the economy, or what we might call the political constitution of the economy. When we think of the Constitution today, our minds drift to civil rights or to the obstacle course described by Levitsky and Ziblatt. Historically, Fishkin and Forbath remind us, Americans have thought of the Constitution as a weapon in the struggle for economic equality, as a real presence in their material lives.
Among the most successful movements against oligarchy were the Populists and Progressives, who used the document to treat the disabling economy of the Gilded Age. At the end of the nineteenth century, land promised to farmers in the West was gobbled up by banks, railroads, speculators, and cattle companies. Suddenly jobless, a new proletariat scuttled back East, praying for work in factories and cities. “Unemployment” appeared as a census category for the first time. Vagrants shattered store windows to get a bed for the night in jail. Meanwhile, the top one per cent owned half of the wealth.
When the United States was an agricultural society, distribution of property seemed like the fount of equality. But, as Macaulay anticipated, industrial capitalism—with its wrenching shift to wage labor, complex production lines, and corporate behemoths—had rendered that vision moot. The Populists and Progressives realized that they needed a new conception of democracy, one tied less to physical notions of land and labor than to the social facts of economic combination and coöperation. Mass parties, labor unions, public schools, strikes and boycotts, social insurance, minimum-wage laws, state banks and currency reform, antitrust regulation, income taxes, even economic planning: these were the new priorities, the material resources of freedom. They deserved all the constitutional fervor and protection that once attached to yeoman land.
In their quest to enact these changes, the Populists and Progressives hit a familiar wall—the Senate and the courts. The Senate was “a paradise of millionaires,” one critic cried. Edgar Lee Masters, the author of “Spoon River Anthology,” wrote that “plutocracy appoints the federal judges.” After Grover Cleveland sent in the troops to crush the Pullman Strike, which was organized by thousands of railroad workers, Illinois’s governor declared that “never before were the United States government and the corporations of the country so blended.”
Instead of accepting oligarchy as the inevitable consequence of the Constitution, the Populists and Progressives looked for alternatives in the text. Through a close reading of James Madison’s notes and papers, they uncovered an argument for the national government’s design and regulation of the economy. In the commerce clause, they found a tool for Congress to “secure the Blessings of Liberty,” which later proved critical to the passage of the Wagner Act—the cornerstone of workers’ right to organize unions—and the Civil Rights Act. The Gold Standard, which enriched bankers and burdened farmers, was deemed a violation of the equal-protection clause. And, in a brilliant marriage of substance and strategy, the Progressives joined forces with the feminist movement, arguing that women voters would help strengthen child-labor laws, health and safety protections, and so on.
By insisting that “the people are the masters of their Constitution,” these armies plowed through Levitsky and Ziblatt’s sixth filter. In rapid succession, the country adopted the Sixteenth Amendment (1913), which gave the government the power to enact an income tax; the Seventeenth Amendment (1913), which established direct election of senators; and the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), which secured for white women the right to vote. The amendments were linked. A democratically elected Senate would lead to income taxes that, by the middle of the twentieth century, were the envy of social democracies across the globe. The right to vote would empower women in the household economy, overturning what Susan B. Anthony had called the most “hateful oligarchy” of all, the “oligarchy of sex.”
Fishkin and Forbath also push against the reductive identitarianism of today’s defenders of democracy. Any movement of constitutional reform requires racial and gender equality, and vice versa. But the laws and norms of race and sex are part of the economy, from the distribution and rewards of labor, in the household and the workplace, to the operations of finance and the regulation of marriage and inheritance. To overcome oligarchy—and Levitsky and Ziblatt’s tyranny of the minority—that political economy must be remade.
Reconstruction and the New Deal offer instructive examples. “By building up a ruling and dominant class,” the congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction declared, slavery “produced a spirit of oligarchy averse to republican institutions.” Slaveholders had accumulated vast wealth and power, not just through enslavement but by forcing wage workers, Black and white, in the North and South, to accept harsh conditions on the ground that they weren’t as bad as slavery. The slaveholders also thwarted a much-needed land-grant bill for public colleges and universities, fearing that any exercise of federal power might be turned against them.
Because the slaveholders’ power derived from a racial caste system, labor exploitation, and a privileged position in government, the leaders of Reconstruction vowed to destroy all three. Like the amendments of the Gilded Age, the Reconstruction amendments linked profound changes in political economy (the end of enslaved labor and an extensive expropriation of private property, in the case of the Thirteenth Amendment) to a democratization of the political process (the right to vote for Black men, in the case of the Fifteenth Amendment). The Fourteenth Amendment—which included the citizenship clause, the equal-protection clause, and the due-process clause—transformed the standing of many Americans, and each amendment gave Congress the unprecedented power to take “appropriate” action to insure its enforcement.
Leaders of the New Deal followed a similar course. “A small group,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced in 1936, had “concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives.” Now the enemy was a coalition of pro-business Republicans and white-supremacist Democrats, whose power depended on stifling a multiracial social democracy. Advocates of the New Deal saw it as the continuation of Reconstruction. The Thirteenth Amendment became the rallying cry of organized labor, inspiring half a million Black workers to join the ranks of the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations. New Deal officials, the N.A.A.C.P., labor organizers, and Communist Party activists fanned out across the South to rally Black workers and tenant farmers. Summarizing the movement’s credo in 1945, the Black legal theorist Pauli Murray wrote that the only way to end racial discrimination in the workplace was to create a full-employment economy for all. Civil rights meant social democracy.
We’ve come to think that Reconstruction and the New Deal were defeated by racism and violence in the factories, fields, and streets. But the higher reaches of reaction took a different form: severing race from class and class from race. If overthrowing oligarchy required racial equality in the economy, the oligarchs could best maintain their position by hiving off civil rights from economic issues. Beginning in the eighteen-seventies, reactionary courts and liberal politicians narrowed the meaning of the Reconstruction amendments, applying them to Black Americans only, rather than to workers as a whole. Freedom from economic domination had no friend in the Constitution; with time, neither did Black America.
In the wake of multiple defeats in the late nineteen-forties and early fifties, the New Dealers reached a different settlement. Hoping to end decades of judicial activism on behalf of big business, they agreed that economic questions would be left to Congress and the President. Meanwhile, the Court, assuming sole custody of the Constitution, would tackle racial (and, later, gender and queer) equality. That settlement came to haunt the left, as Republican Presidents appointed more and more conservative Justices.
This is the real story of the Constitution. A document of and for the people has become, for one half of the country, a structural support, and, for the other, an imperiled instrument of the marginalized. The choice seems clear. Return it to the people or scrap the whole damn thing.
Al Jazeera reports that Tamara Alrifai of the UN Palestine refugee relief agency UNRWA has described the aid delivered to the Gaza Strip as a drop in the ocean.
Just 54 trucks with relief supplies are reported to have crossed into Gaza since Saturday. Alrifai said urgently needed fuel was not supplied, and that some of the aid sent in – rice and lentils – is useless because people don’t have clean water or fuel to cook them.
Earlier on social media UNRWA posted that “An unprecedented catastrophe is unfolding before our eyes. Gaza is being strangled and the world seems to have lost its humanity.”
