It’s astonishing, as you look down the list of election results, how often the races are evenly split: 51 to 48, 49 to 47, 48.3 to 48.1, and so on.
Stop for a moment to think about what this means. What such races do is maximize the number of people who will end up being unrepresented. Or misrepresented. Or disrepresented. However you prefer to think about it.
That is, they guarantee that the largest possible number of people (up to just less than half) will have views that they disagree with, and even abhor, forced upon them.
This is practically the opposite of government by consent.
And, short of requiring the winners of elections to get at least 95% of the votes cast, it’s not something that can be fixed by tweaking election laws, or fiddling with the two-party system, or trying to reduce the influence of money, or any of the other things we keep trying to do to ‘save our democracy’.
The whole point of elections is to perform an end-run around the founding principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, by letting the majority dispense with the need to obtain the consent of the minority.¹
What Ronald Reagan said about government is also true of democracy: It’s not the solution. It’s the problem. And it’s a problem because it replaces consent with majority rule. And that encourages competition instead of cooperation.
That is, if you need to govern by consent, then you need to find solutions that work for everyone, or nearly everyone. But if you can govern by majority rule, you just have to assemble a big enough gang that you can ignore, and even oppress, all the smaller gangs.
And so, elections give us exactly what we should expect from them: Contests that resemble gang wars, where anything goes, and victory is the only thing that matters, because to victors go the spoils.
The problem isn’t that the wrong people are victorious. The problem is that there are spoils for them to claim.
Which is why trying to ‘improve’ elections is like trying to ‘improve’ armed robbery. If you’re trying to do it, it means you don’t understand the problem.
¹ In case you’re thinking that majority rule ‘expresses the consent of the people’, a quick look at Article V of the federal constitution makes it clear that our founders knew the difference between majority rule and consent.
