Something has gone wrong in American democracy. Though our diagnoses differ, the entire political spectrum chafes at the widespread dysfunction. Our traditional modes for understanding democratic decline—tyranny of the majority, corruption, erosion of trust, polarization—all of these shed some light onto our current circumstances, but they fail to explain how policies with broad public support don’t materialize.
While reporting on the democratic terrain in state and local government, I’ve become preoccupied with how easily minority interests are able to hijack broadly beneficial policy goals—often through mechanisms we view as democratically legitimate. Tools developed to push against a potential “tyranny of the majority” have allowed majorities to be subjugated to the will of minority interests time and again. Whether it’s by professional associations, police unions, homeowner associations, or wealthy individuals, majority rule has repeatedly been hijacked.
Steve Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has a similar diagnosis. In a new essay titled “Minoritarianism Is Everywhere,” he argues that America’s democratic deficits require a serious rethinking of liberal governance and values.
Jerusalem Demsas: We’re used to thinking about the tyranny of the majority. We don’t have to imagine what happens when majority voices vote to trample on individual rights.
That fear so animated the Founding Fathers that they designed a system to restrain it: a bicameral legislature with one chamber—the Senate—insulated from electoral pressure by staggered six-year terms, and lifetime appointments for judges to shield them from the shifting tides of public opinion.
They spent far less time thinking about the opposite problem: tyranny of the minority.
Demsas: Yet today, much of my own work is thinking through the ways that well-organized interest groups and strategically placed individuals have managed to take hold of the systems of power throughout government and enact their minoritarian preferences.
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Demsas: So you’ve recently written an essay warning us about the tyranny of the minority. Do you think that the Founders were wrong about their assessment, or do you think that something has changed?
Teles: So there’s kind of two stories you can tell about this. One is: The government just does a lot more than it used to. A lot of our system was designed to keep government from doing very much. It was designed to slow the government on the way up.
And one thing I often tell my conservative friends is that separation of powers has, and a lot of the other devices that the framers created, a kind of perverse effect on the way down. Once you’ve already built a large government up, all of those systems are also a brake on trying to reverse it. So it may be that having separation of powers means you have to have a much larger majority in order to create new government programs. But all those same separation-of-power systems also are an obstacle to cutting them later on, which is one of the reasons, for example, that DOGE is having to do all these things that are of, I’ll say, marginal constitutionality—
Demsas: Questionable legality? Yeah.
Teles: —because they can’t actually pass things through the separation-of-power system that the Founders created. So they’re trying to do it through a sort of soft authoritarianism. So that’s one thing, right? One thing is that the Founders didn’t anticipate that we’d have a government as big and as sort of into everybody’s business as we have now.
And the other thing, and this was something that Mancur Olson, the economist from the University of Maryland (go Terps), said a few decades ago, which is that one of the things that Founders didn’t really count on was concentrated interest—that one of the basic problems of democracy is that, in many cases, you actually can dominate government if you have a very concentrated interest, which gives you disproportionate attention, and that democracy is really not a system that lets the majority govern. It’s the system that allows the attentive majority to govern. And the attentive majority is a lot smaller than the actual majority.
And that also is important if what you mostly want to do is to keep things from happening, right? So when we talk about—a lot of the things that you write about in your own work are about people stopping things, obstructing things. And so when you combine the fact that in our system it’s easier to obstruct than it is to create—and again, you go back to all the systems of separation of powers, and we can talk about all the other forms of participation that got layered on top of that—all of those are wired up for obstruction. And when you combine obstruction plus concentrated participation and concentrated attention, you have a formula for allowing often very small minorities to dominate government.
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