PLSC 118 - Lecture 22 - Democracy and Majority Rule (I)

Chapter 1. Introduction, Recap and Class Agenda [00:00:00]

Professor Ian Shapiro: Where we ended with last Wednesday was the tail end of our discussion of the anti-Enlightenment. And I think some of you discussed in section the difficulties that arise when you think about the complete rejection of the Enlightenment project.

For instance, I think a very dramatic example that fixes our intuitions very quickly is the example that I know some of you discussed which is, that in the 1950s in the United States there was no such thing as marital rape. You can remember this from our discussion of Mill. The wife was the chattel of the husband and her legal identity was suspended for the course of the marriage. Not only could a husband not be prosecuted for raping his wife, he could not be prosecuted for assault. He could not be prosecuted for doing all kinds of things to her that if he did it to some unrelated person on the street would land him in jail or worse.

Now if you think about MacIntyre’s discussion of practices, in the 1950s this was an accepted norm of the prevailing practice, and the argument that this should be seen as unjust or unacceptable wouldn’t get any purchase from an ethic that was based on the idea that we must accept inherited traditions, and norms, and practices.

And so the one important takeaway point from that is, however difficult the Enlightenment ideas of individual rights and trying to make objective statements about what goes on within systems of human association is, however difficult that Enlightenment project is, giving up on it completely presents even more insuperable problems, because very few people are really going to want to go all the way with abandoning the idea that the individual should be subordinated to community norms and practices, and abandoning the notion that we can appeal only to tradition in thinking about whether or not traditions as we’ve inherited them are acceptable.

Chapter 2. Democracy and Fear of Majority Tyranny [00:02:39]

And so, enter democracy, the last section of the course in which we’re going to talk about a tradition which I think does a better job than any that we have considered hitherto in delivering on the promise of the mature Enlightenment, the promise to recognize individual rights as the most important normative ideal, and to base politics on some commitment to objective knowledge about human society that goes beyond the beliefs, commitments and practices of whoever happens to be around and whatever values they happen to have.

Now one thing about democracy that distinguishes it from all of the traditions we’ve considered thus far is that it’s a tradition that was made famous by its critics. If you think about the ones we’ve considered thus far; the social contract was made famous by Hobbes and Locke. Utilitarianism was made famous by Bentham. Marxism obviously made famous by Marx. These were all ways of looking at the world that had their champions, and it was the champions that made the case for why we should behave in accordance with their dictates. And with the anti-Enlightenment as well, it was Burke as the big champion of the anti-Enlightenment. And then we looked at some modern anti-Enlightenment thinkers.

Democracy was made famous by its critics. Who do you think this is? Any guesses? Who’s that on the left, that gent on the left? Nobody know? Nobody want to guess? Who’s that?

Student: Aristotle?

Professor Ian Shapiro: Close. Who?

Student: Plato.

Professor Ian Shapiro: Okay, who’s the gent on the right? Anyone? First one to get it gets a free book. Yeah?

Student: Tocqueville?

Professor Ian Shapiro: You got it. Come and see me later you’ll get your free book. These are both people who were not champions of democracy. They were worried about the potential that democracy has for tyranny. Let’s listen to Plato. I don’t know if you can read that, but I’ll read it to you. And don’t try and write it down. I will put it up on the server.

Plato has two very famous analogies in The Republic which sum up his appalling disdain for democracy. He says, “Imagine then a fleet or a ship in which there is a captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation is not much better (kind of dopey old captain). The sailors are quarrelling with one another about the steering — everyone is of opinion that he has a right to steer, though he has never learned the art of navigation and cannot tell who taught him or when he learned, and will further assert that it cannot be taught, and they are ready to cut in pieces anyone who says the contrary. They throng about the captain, begging and praying him to commit the helm to them; and if at any time they do not prevail, but others are preferred to them, they kill the others or throw them overboard, and having first chained up the noble captain’s senses with drink or some narcotic drug, they mutiny and take possession of the ship and make free with the stores; thus, eating and drinking, they proceed on their voyage in such manner as might be expected of them. Him who is their partisan and cleverly aids them in their plot for getting the ship out of the captain’s hands into their own whether by force or persuasion, they compliment with the name of sailor, pilot, able seaman, and abuse the other sort of man, whom they call a good-for-nothing; but that the true pilot must pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art, if he intends to be really qualified for the command of a ship.”

“Now in vessels which are in a state of mutiny and by sailors who are mutineers, how will the true pilot be regarded? Will he not be called by them a prater, a star-gazer, a good-for-nothing?”

And then Plato’s other famous analogy, which looks at the masses rather than how they would manipulate the government he says, ” Suppose a man was in charge of a large and powerful animal, and made a study of its moods and wants; he would learn when to approach and handle it, when and why it was especially savage or gentle, what the different noises it made meant, and what tone of voice to use to soothe or annoy it. All this he might learn by long experience an familiarity, and then call it a science, and reduce it to a system and set up to teach it. But he would not really know which of the creature’s tastes and desires was admirable or shameful, good or bad, right or wrong; he would simply use the terms on the basis of its reactions, calling what pleased it good what annoyed it bad.”

So Plato didn’t have much regard for democracy. Not surprisingly, because in 399 BC the democracy in Athens had executed his hero and teacher Socrates precisely for pointing out the sorts of lack of knowledge that he is alluding to here both in the ship’s captain analogy and playing to the mob sentiments that he’s alluding to with this analogy of the people in a democratic system as being a powerful animal. And so Plato was very unimpressed with democracy as a potential system of rule. He thought it would quickly collapse into tyranny.

The phrase “the tyranny of the majority,” though, was made popular by Alexis de Tocqueville. You’ve already run into this when we talked about Mill’s harm principle. Tocqueville was a nineteenth-century French aristocrat who went to America to try and understand how American democracy worked because it seemed to him less destructive of freedom and individual liberties than what was coming down the pike in Europe. He thought the French aristocracy and the French monarchy was way too shortsighted in not seeing that they had to understand the egalitarian trends of modern history and to create institutions that could lasso them, and control them, and domesticate them.

So people think of Tocqueville often as a great defender of democracy, and in a certain sense he was, but he was also a critic of democracy, and I’ll go into that in a little bit more detail shortly, but his main reason for thinking that American democracy was a relatively good system was its propensity to limit egalitarian impulses that he thought were breaking out all over Europe. And so Tocqueville’s summation of his fear of the tyranny of the majority comes in Democracy in America. He says, “When I see that the right and the means of absolute command are conferred on a people or upon a king, upon an aristocracy or a democracy, a monarchy or a republic, I recognize the germ of tyranny, and I journey onward to a land of more hopeful institutions.

“In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their overpowering strength; and I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the very inadequate securities which exist against tyranny.

“When an individual or a party is wronged in the United States, to whom can he apply for redress? If to public opinion, public opinion constitutes the majority; if to the legislature, it represents the majority, and implicitly obeys its injunctions; if to the executive power, it is appointed by the majority, and remains a passive tool in its hands; the public troops consist of the majority under arms; the jury is the majority invested with the right of hearing judicial cases; and in certain States even the judges are elected by the majority. However iniquitous or absurd the evil of which you complain may be, you must submit to it as well as you can.”

So democracy brings with it this problem of the tyranny of the majority and it was, after all, we saw earlier in this course, against that that John Stuart Mill erected his harm principle. He too had this great fear of tyranny of the majority. And so, as I said, democracy was made famous first by its critics, and they point out that it has this propensity to pander to mass opinion without regard to whether it’s true or false, and to ride roughshod over the individual rights, again, without regard to whether this produces domination or worse.

So that being the case, it seems like prima facie not very encouraging to think that democracy can deliver on the Enlightenment where we’re talking about politics that’s based on science and politics that respects individual rights. And so you might, given reading Mill as you have, given what the little bit of Plato and Rousseau that I’ve just shown to you, and your own thinking about politics as you confront it day to day, you might well be skeptical of the proposition that democracy is going to deliver very well on the mature Enlightenment. And so just how that might be the case is what’s going to concern us for this and then the next three lectures.

And we’re going to start our consideration of democracy with The Federalist Papers. The Federalist Papers are probably, along with Rawls, the two most important pieces of political theory ever to come out of America. They were a series of articles published in the newspapers of New York State, as I’m sure most of you know, in order to try and help get the Constitution ratified.  Although authored by these three gentlemen, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, they were signed with the pseudonym Publius, which was short for Publius Valerius Publicola who was reputed to be the consul who had restored the Roman Republic in 509 BC; whether he in fact did is a matter that’s debated by historians.

Chapter 3. Madison and the Constitution: Majority Tyranny and Factions [00:16:19]

The Constitution, by the time they wrote these the vast majority of these papers, these letters to the people of New York, had already been approved by the majority of the thirteen states, but few people believed that it would survive if it wasn’t adopted in New York. The Confederate Constitution had required unanimity for the adoption of the Constitution, but in the actual Constitution itself they had said, “Well, nine out of the thirteen states will be enough,” but nobody really thought it could survive if it was not adopted in New York. And so the Federalists took upon themselves the task, Hamilton, Madison and Jay, of persuading the people of New York to support the adoption of The Constitution and indeed they were successful in that endeavor.

But they had the fear of this problem of majority tyranny that I’ve already alluded to with respect to Plato, and Mill, and Tocqueville, front and center in their considerations. And you shouldn’t be surprised that they would worry about that, because if you imagine yourself back into the eighteenth century thinking about democracy the ancient ideal of democracy, the ancient Athenian ideal of democracy had basically been a notion of ruling and being ruled in turn.

So if you have an academic department, let’s say. Let’s set aside the issue of untenured faculty. Just imagine a department of tenured faculty. We have a circulating chair. Somebody’s chair for three years, then somebody else, then somebody else, that’s the notion of ruling and being ruled in turn, and the reason you can do that is that everybody basically has the same interest. You don’t have to worry about monitoring or controlling the current ruler, because basically they have the same interest as you do, and they’re not, therefore, going to do anything with the collective that you wouldn’t do yourself.

So that’s the ancient ideal of democracy as ruling and being ruled in turn. It obviously, in the case of Ancient Greece it excluded women, it excluded slaves, so it was a certain truncated conception of a democratic community about which people have discoursed at great length. But given that the model was the idea that you could have ruling and being ruled in turn without loss because everyone was assumed, basically, to have the same interest.

Now as soon as you get a diversity of interests that mechanism of government goes off the table as a way of doing things because then you might have subgroups who see that they — let’s suppose you introduce non-tenured faculty. They’re going to have a very different interest than the tenured faculty. And so the idea of ruling and being ruled in turn wouldn’t work anymore. Once you have a serious division of interest within the polity you have this problem.

And this is the problem Madison articulates in Federalist No. 10 when he says, “By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” So once you have factions you have this problem. If you’re the majority faction it doesn’t matter to you, but it does if you’re the minority faction because things are going to happen that you don’t like.

So the first thing Madison says to himself is, “Well, could we get rid of factions?” and if you read Federalist No. 10 carefully you’ll see that he thinks that the costs of doing that would be so great in terms of lost human freedom and the kind of repression you would have to engage in, it would look like the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution which, of course, he didn’t know about, but which he didn’t know about either of those things, but he wouldn’t have been surprised by them when he wrote this.

So you can’t get rid of factions. “The causes of factions can’t be removed, and therefore you have to look at their effects.” He says, “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.”

Managing factions so that they don’t destroy the common interest is the basic business of politics. Now how do you do that? Well, how do you manage the effects of faction? He goes on and he says, ” The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. Besides other impediments, it may be remarked that, where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary.”

“Hence, it clearly appears, that the same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic — is enjoyed by the Union over the States composing it. ” I will talk in a little while about what advantages Madison thinks a republic has over a democracy, but right now I want to focus on this other point which is that a large republic has an advantage over a small republic.

A society that has no factions at all presents no problems for democratic theory as we have already talked about in connection with the stylized idea of ancient Greece as one in which everybody has the same interests, and you can have ruling and being ruled in turn.

What Madison is most afraid of is a single faction, a majority faction, because if you have a society in which there’s a majority that agrees all the time or most of the time, the problem is what about these people? They’re going to be on the losing end. So if you have a society in which race, and class, and religion all tend to fall along the same division these people are either going to have to knuckle down to tyranny or they’re going to reach for their guns. They’ll overthrow the system if they can; and if they cannot, they might as well become criminals. They’re not going to have an incentive to participate in the democratic order. And so from Madison’s point of view this is the ideal society. We think modern Poland ninety-nine percent Catholic or something like that, but even there, there are other divisions. So even there it doesn’t work.

But if you’re going to have factions the worst thing to have is one or a small number. What you really want is lots of factions, crosscutting cleavages as we talk about them in modern political science. The notion here is if you’re in a majority on one question, but you know you might be in a different majority or in the minority on the next question then you have both the reason to temper your own behavior when you’re in the majority and not tyrannize over the minority, and if you’re in the minority you have reasons to accept your loss this time around. As people always say, when their team loses the World Series, “There’s always next year, there’s always next time.” So next time you might be part of some different coalition and you might be able to prevail.

So the best we could have would be a world with no factions as all, but that’s unrealistic in modern times, particularly once you have an economic division of labor, class divisions, as Tocqueville would point out forty years later. And so then what you need is lots of factions, and that’s why Madison argued you need a big republic because the larger the republic, the more likely it is that you’re going to have multiple crosscutting cleavages, and then the system — we sometimes define democracy as institutionalized uncertainty of outcomes. You don’t know.

You don’t know what the majority’s going to decide. We don’t know if — let’s suppose President Obama nominates Justice Wood for the Court. We don’t know what the outcome will be so everybody will participate and lobby and so on to try and affect the result. People will talk about coalitions. A more dramatic case, I think, when George Bush Senior nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. It split the African American community right down the middle because there were people who were largely democrats who also wanted an African American justice on the court, a good example of crosscutting bases of political affiliation.

And so the Madisonian idea is that that’s actually a good thing. This institutionalized uncertainty of outcomes prevents the tyrannizing of some groups over others and gives everybody an incentive to remain committed to the process. And that is what would subsequently become called the pluralist theory of democracy associated most famously in the twentieth century with Robert Dahl who was on the Yale faculty for decades and decades. And he’s still — he’s about to turn, actually, 95 years old this year and he lives in New Haven. He’s probably the most famous democratic theorist of the second half of the twentieth century. The pluralist theory of democracy builds on this Madisonian idea that what you want is institutionalized uncertainty of outcomes that is a byproduct of crosscutting cleavages, multiple crosscutting cleavages. So that present winners have reason to limit the amount in which they tyrannize over losers, and present losers have incentives to remain committed to the process for the future. There’s always next year. You want people to believe that in order to keep them committed.

But that wasn’t enough for Madison. That was the basis of his argument for an extended union, but it wasn’t enough for Madison. He was worried, just as Tocqueville articulated it in the nineteenth century, that the institutional structure could facilitate tyranny. He says, “But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Maybe the most famous line Madison ever wrote. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.”

Another famous line: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.  If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.  In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” 

So your basic guarantor is the crosscutting cleavages among the people, an extended republic, but that’s not enough because — and this is really a view that most famously associated with the nineteenth-century liberal British thinker Lord Acton when he said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The notion is that you really have to divide up power. You have to have an institutional scheme — this is his auxiliary precautions — an institutional scheme which causes people in the different branches of government to check one another. And so we get what Madison called a non-tyrannical republic rather than a democracy. And in that sense Madison is a critic of democracy just like Tocqueville, and just like Plato. They want to say that pure democracy leads to tyranny and we have to check it with an institutional scheme that limits what can be done.

And so the American system so called checks and balances, which you all learned about in high school civics courses, structures the constitutional system that they created. This is something that you can tell from the passage from Tocqueville that I read you that Tocqueville didn’t fully understand or appreciate because he thought that every branch of the government was ultimately controlled by the majority. And the designers of The Constitution intended, rather, to have them at least controlled in different ways by majority opinion, but more importantly to set up a scheme in which they would control one another. Ambition would be made to counteract ambition.

And so we’ve all been reading in the newspapers this weekend at the moment of the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens that he was one of the people, for instance, who checked the expansion of executive power after 9/11 in the Hamdan case by saying it was unconstitutional to use military tribunals to try the Guantanamo Bay detainees [Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006)]. From the point of view of Madison the specific issue is not what’s important here, but rather that what we saw after 9/11 was this big expansion of executive power, and then you see an assertion of power by a different branch, say to the executive, “No, you can’t do that,” and so a limiting of executive power in this case by the judicial branch.

Chapter 4. Veto Points [00:38:03]

And so what you have in the American scheme, the American constitutional scheme, is a large number of veto points. First of all we have The Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was enacted after The Constitution, but only when undertakings had been made that it would be enacted in most of the state legislatures. So it was basically, even though it came afterwards, there was an informal agreement by the time The Constitution was adopted that there would be a Bill of Rights, what became the first ten amendments, that would limit the power of the central government. And so we have a Bill of Rights.

Then we have supermajority requirements most obviously to change the Constitution, huge supermajority requirements. To amend the Constitution it’s very difficult. You need two-thirds in both Houses of Congress and then three-quarters of the states. Some of your parents were around at the last serious effort to amend the constitution, namely the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment, which failed to pass that threshold, very hard. But then we have other supermajority requirements, the filibuster rule in the Senate which we may see come into play in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings. That’s not in the Constitution, but it’s a supermajority requirement, nonetheless, that we’ve embedded in our institutional scheme. Anytime you add supermajority requirements you make it harder for the current majority to work its will.

Separation of powers, already alluded to: the Court versus the executive, the legislature versus the executive. The notion that ambition of players in one branch will counteract the ambition of players in a different branch. Greatly debated subject, how effective can the branches really be to check one another? After all, the Court does not have an army at its disposal. You guys are young enough to remember the 2000 election when we had a knife-edge result and partisans on both sides were saying their candidate won, and it was being litigated in various ways through the state courts in Florida and we didn’t have a clear result. And finally the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore ruled in a very controversial decision that President Bush was the winner, or then-candidate Bush was the winner and Vice President Gore was the loser.

And Gore stood up on national television and he said, “I accept the result. I don’t agree with the result, but I accept the result.” He didn’t have to. You could imagine in many countries at that point, the Clinton Administration would have sent the tanks down Pennsylvania Avenue. What would the Court have been able to do? Nothing. It’s far from obvious in Iraq that the loser of the election is going to accept the result.

So there’s great debate. Madison makes heavy weather in The Federalist Papers of the proposition that just writing something on a parchment doesn’t guarantee that people are going to accept what you write. So what does it really mean to say that there’s separation of powers because the Court, ultimately, is dependent upon people just going along with what it says. And likewise with the legislature, yes, there’s this attempt to separate — Congress votes. In theory only Congress can declare war, and Congress has to fund the military, but in practice it’s very difficult for Congress to resist what the executive branch wants to do on all of those things.

And when we look at cases where the Court faces down either the legislature or the executive branch it’s usually only in cases where what they’re doing is very popular. When they’re telling Nixon to turn over the tapes, 1973-‘74, it’s a unanimous court and it’s a popular action. If Nixon had been at 95% in opinion polls at that time it’s less clear that the Court would have faced down the executive branch, or at least so some scholars claim.

So how much you really get separation of powers is a subject that’s greatly debated by political scientists, because at the end of the day, despite what Madison says separation of powers is just something written on parchment. As Dahl puts it in his critique of Madison in the preface to Democratic Theory, his most important book which was published in 1956 and is still in print. Very few of us can say we wrote a book fifty years ago that’s still in print, but there it is. It is still in print. Dahl says the problem with this famous one-liner of Madison’s is that there’s actually no real mechanism to ensure that ambition will counteract ambition, and it’s rather simply that people accept this scheme. 

But what if they didn’t? What if in 1800 there had not been a turnover of power? We had a knife-edge election in 1800. Maybe that would have made America much more prone to the seizure of power by those who currently controlled the levers of power, the military and so on. The loser gave up in 1800 and we began to create this culture of democratic turnovers, where the government loses an election and gives up power. Very unusual thing, but it happens. So separation of powers, much debated, and I’m going to come back to this, much debated as to how effective and important it really is. More veto points.

We have bicameralism. As you know from reading The Federalist papers, the founders were mostly worried about the power of Congress because it seemed like it was going to be the most powerful branch. The executive was weak and designed to be weak, much weaker than it is today, and so they thought the thing to do is to divide Congress, have a bicameral system, and legislation has to be passed in both houses and have them elected by different rules, so we have Senate seats elected at large in the states, whereas we have small congressional districts and therefore we have very different incentives that the politicians are going to react to, very different factions overlapping with one another in different ways to get back to the basic pluralist ideal.

And then finally, of course, last but by no means least in terms of veto points, federalism. Federalism is another source of veto points in what can actually happen. Think in the last few years of the debates about gay marriage. We have marital law as state law, and for a long time there has been a federal law which says if you get married in one state the marriage will be recognized in every other state. So if people move and then later on they get divorced or one dies it doesn’t matter what state you were in for the purposes of the divorce or for probate law. You’re still going to be governed by — it’s just this sort of utilitarian efficiency thing. Every state can have differences in its marital law, but California’s got to recognize Connecticut’s marriages as valid.

Then along comes a socially divisive issue like gay marriage and unsurprisingly some states want to enact gay marriage and some don’t, but then this federal requirement that all states recognize one another’s marriages suddenly becomes ideologically charged. Whereas it was presented as just a utilitarian efficient thing, now it becomes ideologically charged because if the state of Massachusetts recognizes gay marriage then it implicitly means that the state of Georgia has to recognize it as well. So you get an upsurge of political activism, and finally the Defense of Marriage Act in Congress to preserve the rights of the states to reject or accept gay marriage. And so that’s an example of the veto power of states in play that rears its head in a setting like that.

And so what you have in the US is not a democracy, certainly not a pure democracy. You rather have — what they designed was what they referred to as a non-tyrannical republic. They thought that that was the best they could do. They had misgivings about a lot of it, but they thought that this was the only way they could create the union and head off civil war. Of course they didn’t head off civil war. We had civil war anyway, a subject I’ll come back to on Wednesday. But we created this hybrid between a non-tyrannical republic, if you like, and a democratic system. And many of our arguments about contemporary democracy are really arguments about how much we should preserve this hybrid and how much we should have a thoroughgoing democratic system. And I’ll take that up on Wednesday.

[end of transcript]

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