Democracy is a beautiful practice

I’m flying back from New York on New Year’s Day. Two years ago, I was prepping for a trip to D.C. to join the Women’s March. How discouraged and angry many of us were that a majority vote for the first and highly qualified woman president fell to the flaws in our mostly excellent democratic system! After two years of suffering endless blows and embarrassments perpetrated by our newly elected president, I’m hopeful again. Did I say this is an opinion column? Yes, it is.

I’ve always valued democracy. The nuns in our Minneapolis grade school taught us the basic principles: one adult, one vote; frequent elections at every level of government, including courts and special districts; the right to run for office, join a party and/or remain independent. I don’t think I’ve ever missed a vote. The most memorable was the morning of 9/11, the news blasting over the radio as we drove to our Minneapolis neighborhood polling place for the state’s primary.

My parents were Lincoln Republicans, voting as their parents had. But in the ’60s, living in a college dorm in Washington D.C., the Vietnam anti-war movement, the Poor People’s March, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy drove me into the Democratic fold. For many years, I kept well-informed about issues and candidates and voted. But in 2008, weary of eight Bush Jr. years with their endless entanglement in Iraq and failure to impose discipline on Wall Street, I began participating in our local and Carlton County Democratic caucuses.

Although we are formally a democracy, the 1787 U.S. Constitution was a compromise that still produced less than majoritarian outcomes. Over the centuries, we’ve corrected some of its deepest flaws. It took time: eliminating the property requirement for voting, abolishing slavery, and extending the right to vote to black men and, later, all women.

But we’re still dealing with constitutional features that produce congressional, presidential and Supreme Court outcomes diverging from the stated will of the electorate. The Senate, for instance, is composed of two senators from each state, regardless of population size or voting public. Wyoming, with a population of 573,000, elects two U.S. Senators, and California, with a population of 39.8 million, elects two as well. It’s not democratic, but it’s in our Constitution, fashioned as a compromise between the fast-growing and largely slave-free Northern colonies and the smaller, slower-growing slave-powered Southern colonies.

Gerrymandered voting districts are additional deformers of voters’ will. State Supreme Courts may disallow lopsided redistricting and impose balanced district lines. In 2018, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court rejected a Republic-dominated redistricting and redrew the lines more reasonably. As a result, Democrats gained considerably in both Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation and that state’s legislature. But most states still allow the dominant party to draw district lines every 10 years, concentrating their opponents’ members in a few, often ludicrously-shaped districts and greatly enhancing their party’s wins in the rest.

In addition to gerrymandering, there are other channels for undermining fair elections. An elected secretary of state may adopt state voter registration practices that heavily discriminate against those likely to support an opposing party. In Georgia last year, the state’s Republican secretary of state, who was running for governor against a very popular African American woman, ruthlessly implemented a procedure that deregistered people, selectively and without notification, who had not voted in the last election or two. Investigative journalists found that his decertifications were heavily concentrated in African American communities traditionally supporting Democrats. Many were turned away when they showed up to vote.

A truly robust electoral system would reflect the collective will of voters. I leave aside the electoral college and its composition, which has more than once placed a supreme commander in the White House who has not won the popular vote. And if it weren’t a pipedream, I’d reflect on the superiority of a parliamentary system, where the top executive is chosen from (and serves at the will of) a majority among the elected representatives. In these countries, the head of state is someone who has worked his or her way up through the legislative process, a major asset in partnership with members of congress. And much easier to replace if out of line or worse.

Still, I am so grateful to be living in a country that professes democracy and respects freedom of the press. Where the average citizen can be engaged at many levels — putting out a yard sign, joining party caucuses, writing opinion pieces, talking to family members and neighbors, writing our representatives and senators, and contributing to candidates’ platforms and expenses. Another democracy-undermining topic — money in politics — I’ll save that for another column!

Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. She lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell with her husband Rod Walli.