What Do Iraq, South Africa, Syria and the Republican Party Have in Common?

With the contentious, theatrical, and ultimately predictable confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett unfolding within three weeks of the 2020 general election, Americans are being treated to a display of political hypocrisy that is eye-popping by even our own jaded standards. Yet the palpable sense of dread that is engulfing so many on the American Left seems to extend far beyond either fears of reversals of abortion, voting, and marriage equality rights, or revulsion to the unseemly “Merrick Who?” steamrolling of the nomination process.

For many Democrats and independents as well, the Barrett nomination represents an alternative reality civics lesson that none of them ever recall from their middle school days: the likely prospect that a majority of the Supreme Court (one branch) will have been nominated by two men who lost the popular vote (second branch) and confirmed by Republican Senators representing well under 50% of Americans (third branch).

While James Madison was never memorialized by a Broadway musical, he nevertheless lives on as the “Father of the Constitution” and primary architect of the Bill of Rights. Yet the Barrett nomination may be the tipping point, the final straw that renders Madison’s ultimate legacy as being the purveyor of America’s greatest irony. The Founder who feared and obsessed over the Tyranny of the Majority (as he discussed in Federalist №10) helped to craft perhaps history’s greatest design flaw, delivering us a Tyranny of the Minority.

And history elsewhere informs us that a Tyranny of the Minority never ends well.

While the current state of political, social, and cultural polarization in the U.S. may seem unprecedented, America’s history under two party rule has seen similar periods of division and contentiousness. Yet while voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other obstacles to achieving true representative democracy have always existed, the electoral mechanisms in place for over 200 years generally led to outcomes in which sustained periods of minority rule were neither fathomable nor achievable. But like so many design flaws, our Constitution was the product of framers who not only lacked enough foresight, but also lacked boundless imagination. They just never could’ve seen this coming.

Which is why I have never been more concerned about the durability of our institutions and democracy. There is a buoyant cottage industry today of books, lectures, and Tweets focused on how democratic systems fail and authoritarianism rises. The leading causes are (should be) well known by now: The rejection of facts; undermining legal remedies; disinformation warfare by hostile state actors; delegitimization of elections; and nativism, populism, and “other-ism” that breeds a tribalism that extends far beyond political ideology.

America has battled against these demons before. But we have never battled a Tyranny of the Minority. We have never experienced such a disconnect between the will of the people and public policy. We have never experienced such an emerging chasm between an expanding culture and a reactionary judiciary. And accompanying this, we have never experienced the accumulation of rage, resentment, and retribution that a Tyranny of the Minority often foments.

Just ask Blacks in pre-1990s South Africa (white minority rule), Shiites in Iraq under Sadaam (Sunni minority rule), and Sunnis in Syria under the Assads (Alawite minority rule).

In America, we are living under our first taste of minority rule. If we cannot repair the design flaws that led us here, will the battles be fought in our streets instead?