The Tyranny of the Minority

 

When you read or hear that it is the Left that wants to hold onto power by fundamentally changing America, look at reality. The facts do not support that, and the facts show that it is the Right.

Jacob Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, argues in his 2022 book, “Laboratories Against Democracy”: 

"When it comes to democratic backsliding in the states, the results couldn’t be clearer: over the past two decades, the Republican Party has eroded democracy in states under its control. 

Republican governments have gerrymandered districts, made it more difficult to vote and restricted civil liberties to a degree unprecedented since the civil rights era. It is not local changes in state-level polarization, competition or demographics driving these major changes in the rules of American democracy. Instead, it is the groups that make up the national coalition of the modern G.O.P. — the very wealthy on the one hand and those motivated by white identity politics and cultural resentment on the other."

[skip]

"Grumbach elaborated...observing that the two major elements of the Republican Party — “extremely wealthy individuals in an era of high economic inequality” and “a voter base motivated by cultural and demographic threat” — have a “hard time winning electoral majorities on the basis of their policy agendas (a high-end tax cut agenda for the elite base and a culturally reactionary agenda for the electoral base), which increases their incentive to tweak the rules of the game to their advantage.” 

Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, argued in an email that contemporary cultural conservatism depends on support from declining constituencies — non-college whites (as pollsters put it), evangelical Christians and other ideologues on the right — which places these groups in an increasingly threatened position, especially in the American two-party system."