The Republican Party As A Faction

I have often argued that people tend to misinterpret the phrase "tyranny of the majority," and the related concept of factionalism. Tyranny of the majority, I insist, is not simply the practice of letting the party that wins an election implement its preferred policy agenda as thoroughly as it sees fit. Rather, it is when the majority enacts policies whose purpose is to benefit the group holding majority-based political power and disadvantage the group currently losing the game of democracy. The most extreme example, of course, would be when a certain Germany government decided to, uh, kill millions of those who weren't in its faction. But you also saw tyranny of the majority in the century between the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, when black voters were enfranchised but a tiny majority and the white majority routinely elected representatives who favored active segregation and discrimination by the government. Other examples would be if, say, a country had a majority of its population who were farmers, and the ruling Farmer's Party enacted a tax on all people who weren't farmers (or something that worked out to the same thing).

I contend that the 2011 Republican Party is acting in a largely factional manner, and making every attempt at various kinds of tyranny of the majority. Here's what I mean by that. I think the Republicans are going after a lot of groups now simply because those groups vote Democratic. The student-disenfranchisement thing is because college students vote Democratic. The anti-union thing is because the unions vote Democratic, and even more importantly spend Democratic. The anti-immigrant thing is because Hispanics vote Democratic. With every ounce of power it has left, the conservative section of our society is doing its damnedest to crush the political influence of Democratic-leaning groups. And it's not just generational snobbery, or anti-labor sentiment, or xenophobia, though to be sure there's a lot of that in the voting bloc that makes it possible and those feelings are exploited like hell by the politicians who are making this play. If you listened to the Wisconsin debate closely enough you heard Republicans admitting that it wasn't about the budget. Hell, it wasn't even about the decades-old battle of labor versus management, one of the most active fronts of the class wars. No, it was about the fact that unions help get Democrats elected. Likewise the New Hampshire anti-student-voting bill is being pushed not because of anything about how it's kind of silly to let college students vote somewhere they don't ever really live, but because they vote Democratic.

These aren't real acts of public policy. These are the acts of a particular faction of America, the non-young, white, Christian, conservative faction, to take the political power it won last year and use it to fend off demographic changes it fears will push it out of power before too long. These are the acts of a political movement that is so terrified of ever losing at democracy again that it wants to just scrap the whole thing, and rule, itself, by virtue of being the "real" Americans. This is tyranny of the majority (or at least attempted tyranny of the majority).