POLITICS
Is the Majority Always Wrong?
Is a minority always better?
The Majority is always in the wrong. Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform — (or pause and reflect). Quoted in Mark Twain’s Notebook, Compiled and edited by Albert Bigelow Paine
This persistently famous quote from Mark Twain was never published in his lifetime. It appeared posthumously in his published Notebook some 30 years after his death. Twain used the Notebook as an incubator for future essays. It was essentially a chapbook of ideas he was tossing around. You have to wonder if he really believed what he wrote about majorities.
I was interested in finding the context for the quote, but the Notebook isolates it from any further reasoning or argument. It stands toward the end of the Notebook in a miscellany of other quotes, not supportive of any obvious theme.
Earlier in the Notebook, though, he has two other references to the word majority.
There are no standards — of taste in wine, cigars, poetry, prose, etc. Each man’s own taste is the standard and a majority vote cannot decide for him or in any slightest degree affect the supremacy of his own standard.
Our [train] tracks ought to be fenced on the principle that the majority of human beings, being fools, the laws ought to be made in the interest of the majority.
The first of these quotes strikes a libertarian chord, while in the second the tone seems more nurturing, albeit not exactly argued sensitively. He expresses a pretty low regard for half the human race at least. Political correctness hadn’t been invented yet at the turn of the 20th century, obviously. His immediate inspiration for the second quote was a news item relating how a Philadelphia train had severed the foot of an Italian laborer, presumably a pedestrian crossing the track.
So we’ve got two views seemingly competing. On the one hand “man” is savvy, on the other hand “he” is inept. The first view argues for government hands off, the other for government hands on. Maybe this conflict in his position was partly the reason for why he never published the quote. He couldn’t wrap it into a consistent argument. If that’s the case, it might suggest that we liberals and we conservatives both take with a grain of salt the message that the majority is always wrong. Because is it really?
The majority and the rule of the majority is a foundational principle of democracy and it’s something we preach to the world the benefits of, albeit the U.S. doesn’t project a particularly healthy version of it right now. Democracy seems so anemic these days that in our current political universe some bunches of us are actively trying to defend the country against anti-democratic forces (you know who they are!) These forces deny that they are democratic anarchists, of course. They see themselves as saviors of democracy, in fact. But it’s a watered down view, one that openly mistrusts and ignores majority views. It’s the shitty version of democracy that Hungary is now enacting into laws that criminalize speaking ill of the country.
Destroying our democracy would presumably be a tough slog, since it would require dissolving the union. We tried that once in our history and it didn’t go well for the separatists.
So foreswearing another revolution and secession, there are two well practiced pathways to the goal of making the country less democratic. One is to stifle or submerge voices that don’t agree with you. This we do through gerrymandering and voting suppression, the resurrection of Jim Crow laws.
The other is to restructure the majority, to retune it. This is why we see so many efforts to change school and university curricula, to do away with public education, to kick mud on such democratic notions as diversity, equity, and inclusion. (Aside: How can you be against inclusion and equity and rationalize it with “liberty and justice for all” and “all men are created equal”?) What’s the difference between treating someone equitably and treating them equally? Twain would have been stumped by this little bit of linguistic hypocrisy.
The problem the mistrusters of democracy and majority rule have with the concept seems tied to the need Twain saw of having to fence people off from the train tracks. The argument would presumably be that the trains won’t run on time, if they’re cutting off people’s limbs. They’d be impeding commerce and by extension progress.
But another reason is likely that the folks advocating for ditching democracy want to subsume command themselves. This would be Twain’s wine and cigar gourmets, those not inclined to settle for rotgut and stogies. You can’t be for Châteauneuf-du-Pape in every glass, they might say, because there’s not enough to go around. Better leave it to those with refined palates, fat wallets, and good breeding. And since these folks prefer expensive wine and have money, they are obviously competent to rule over those who prefer beer. The logic of the oligarch.
It’s currently not popular to come right out as an American to say you oppose democracy. You have to kind of skirt the issue by pointing out for starters that the word democracy does not occur in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, our founding documents.
In fact, right-wing organizations, such as the Cato Institute, point out the framers mistrust of democracy, in particular citing the “tyranny of the majority,” is the reason why the Founders devised a complicated governmental structure — electoral college, California’s two senators representing 67 times more people that Wyoming's two senators, and broad states’ rights. This majority threat avoidance strategy of the Founders has led, of course, to the tyranny of the minority that we have today.
The Founders intent is something our historians are divided about, but with the originalists ascendants on the country’s court, it’s lately become more heated. In any event, the historians defended democracy against the anti-democracy arguments of say the Cato Institute have a well-reasoned set of arguments in the book Democracy in America by Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens.
We as a majority of citizens want a livable wage, we want abortion health care for women, we want cheaper medicines, we want dark money out of politics, we want affordable housing, we want social security, we want border security, we want climate to go back being friendlier, we want a brake on white supremacy, we want civil liberties, we want affordable childcare. (CBS News published a list of 50 such positions, including these that a majority of Americans agree on.) The stumbling blocks that stand in the way of we the majority getting any of these things are businesses, billionaires, individual state governments, racists, and, I’m sad to say, many religions.
These are all minorities within the full aggregate of United States citizens. They are groups and individuals who actively fight compromise, contributing to the severity of polarization, the disease of democracy. But they the minorities have the legislative and judicial power to burn down the house rather than concede anything to the majority. And they increasingly have the will to do so.
Heather Cox Williamson, an applied historian, who writes a daily (most days) column called Letters From an American for Substack, aligned the so-called nullification crisis the state of South Carolina precipitated before the Civil War with the similarly inspired nullification crisis that the state of Texas is precipitating today with regard to border security.
South Carolina went into a minority snit because the Federal government was threatening its slave based economy. Texas is in a snit because it wants to usurp the Federal government’s Constitutional authority to manage immigration. At the conclusion of Williamson’s column, she wrote:
It is a sign of a political minority that recognizes it cannot win control of the national government through democratic means.
I have in this essay likely exposed my preferences in the contention between democrats and oligarchs. If it isn’t obvious, I’m on the side of democracy. By that I mean real democracy, not the watered down, imitation of it taking hold mainly in our southern states. With that admission, though, I’m probably just as leery as Twain was about majorities.
I am, though, in principle more trusting that wisdom inheres in groups than it does in billionaires, say. But the membership of any trust-worthy group needs to be Golden Rule inclined. That doesn’t mean that everyone in the group has to think alike or reach the same conclusions, but that they need to have a perspective wider than their own self interests.
The proof of that would be their willingness to believe that there are some good people on the other side of an issue and to win humbly and lose gracefully, in the belief that whatever emerges is demonstrably good for the perpetuation of democracy. If we do believe in the inherent good of democratic government, then let’s not do stuff that puts it in jeopardy. Give a little, take a little. But for God’s sake don’t put your trust in people who tell you they want to get rid of it, who only see enemies on the other side, who demonize whole swaths of people, and, above all, who say they know the will of God for this country of ours.
