Parchment Barriers
The Tyranny of the Majority and the Balance of Political Power in the Republic
. . . what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. [Federalist No. 51, James Madison, 1788]
In the formation of a new government for the American people, the founder’s paramount objective was to protect the liberties of the people. At the time, the primary threat to American individual liberty was thought to be the concentration of power in the hands of an all-powerful legislature. James Madison did not believe that the “parchment barriers” of the Bill of Rights were sufficient to protect liberty from the encroachments of government. He believed instead that the best way to make freedom safe from government was to divide it against itself. As he put it, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Accordingly, he and his associates at the Constitutional Convention drew up a document which divided power between the states and the national government, while simultaneously setting up a three-cornered tug of war between the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches. In this way, they thought, power would be divided, and liberty would be preserved.
In our day the primary threat to the liberty of the American people lies not in the action of the legislature, which has ceded a great deal of its power to the executive branch, but in the action of unaccountable administrative functionaries in the executive branches of both the federal and the state governments. Owing to the unforeseen congressional abdication of its own power, it is now clear that the famous “checks and balances,” no longer function as anticipated, giving rise to a problem identified by Alexis de Tocqueville as the “tyranny of the majority.” How to preserve the rights and liberties of a minority when a hostile majority, or even an aggressive and powerful minority, controls all, or most of the levers of government and disregards minority rights. What happens when the stakes of politics rise and a desperate majority no longer exercises the restraint republics require? What happens when the parchment barriers fail?
In a republic, peace is usually maintained by law and custom which channel disagreements into beneficial compromise. This is routine when the stakes of politics are low, but much more difficult when the stakes rise in intensity. But, unnoticed by most, just beneath that level of domestic politics lurks a balance of power between competing factions. It serves to discourage conflict and encourage compromise through deterrence which functions through the threat of escalation to the level of riot, insurrection, civil war, and tyranny. Just as an international balance of power can break down, as Europe’s did in 1914, a domestic balance can likewise breakdown. That’s what happened in the United States in 1861. Many seem to think that we are on the brink of such a catastrophe once again.
Although political parties often disagree over relatively trivial issues such as tax rates and agriculture policy, there are times when they battle over very serious issues—indeed, issues often grounded in very different visions of the good society. At such times, each side may view defeat as such a threat to its core identity, or even its existence, that it may be unwilling to compromise in order to maintain domestic peace. This is the point at which wise political leaders attempt to defuse the conflict. The norms of republican government require the party in power to restrain its exercise in accordance with due respect for the rights of the minority. If the majority insists on pressing its advantage, it threatens to become tyrannical. So, what happens when the party in power concludes that its rival is temporarily weak and vulnerable, yet so dangerous in the longer term, that it no longer qualifies for the toleration traditionally granted to the minority? We are seeing the answer right now.
Left-wing radicals have seized control of the Democratic Party, and through it the executive branch of the government with power over the armed forces and the nation’s national security apparatus and police power. They didn’t do it through a violent revolutionary upheaval as Karl Marx envisioned. They didn’t even do it via a coup d’état such as that carried out by the bolsheviks in Russia They seized power quietly and gradually over the course of twenty or thirty years. The party captured government through elections, and the radical left captured most of the nation’s most powerful institutions through personnel policy while nobody noticed. The result is an asymmetry of power in which the minority is at the mercy of the majority.
Exploiting public hopes for racial reconciliation, discontent with the housing crisis induced recession, and widespread disenchantment with the Bush Administration’s “forever wars” in the Middle East, the American public elected in 2008, Barack Obama, its first black president—a man who vowed to engineer the “radical transformation of America.” By 2016, after eight years in power, Democrats believed that there was no turning back, that their “radical transformation” was well underway, and that Hillary Clinton was set to extend Obama’s reforms for at least another eight years, making them permanent. But then, the impossible happened. The American people elected Donald Trump—a political outsider who threatened to undo all that the left had accomplished. This was unacceptable.
In response to the election of Donald Trump and the threat he and the “deplorables” he represented appeared to pose, the radical left used their power within the administrative state and the “commanding heights” of society to wage political and legal guerrilla warfare against the new administration. Anticipating that it would obliterate all the “progress” they had made during the preceding eight years, permanent bureaucrats within the national security state launched a covert scorched earth campaign of “resistance” that bordered on mutiny. Meanwhile, blue state America informally withdrew its consent to be governed by the newly elected administration. “Not my president,” people chanted. It was a twenty-first century equivalent of Confederate secession in 1861—a sequence of events the historian James MacPherson described as a “preemptive counterrevolution.”
Anticipating hostile action by the new administration, the left took preemptive action to forestall it. The Trump/Russia collusion hoax was the first episode in a concerted effort to overthrow the administration. When this effort failed, the first impeachment was launched, triggered by efforts to investigate potential Biden family corruption in Ukraine—the eventual locus of a brutal war that may yet culminate in a direct great power confrontation. When that failed, local Democratic officials hijacked the COVID pandemic panic to destroy the administration and subvert the traditional election process to their advantage. Then they exploited the death of George Floyd by encouraging widespread rioting that culminated in an assault on the White House grounds by a violent mob.
With the successful elevation of Joe Biden to the White House in a corrupt election, the majority began to use their new power not just to resist, but to destroy their domestic enemies, Donald Trump in particular, along with all his associates, and use their temporary power to stack the political deck against their opponents in such a manner as to ensure that the minority are never able to challenge their power again. They prosecute the president’s attorneys such as John Eastman, and advisors such as Peter Navarro, for the crime of giving advice they disagree with to the president of the United States. They propose to pack the Supreme Court to ensure a permanent left-wing majority. They condone violence in the streets to intimidate Supreme Court justices. They threaten to admit two new Democratic states to the union to ensure a permanent Senate majority. They open the border in defiance of federal law they are sworn to enforce, to let in millions of foreign nationals they intend to enfranchise, and to shift the political balance of power in many states through redistricting, in hopes of ensuring political victories into the indefinite future. Because they don’t like the way the people voted in 2016, they attempt to change the electorate itself. They work with social media companies to censor the expression of views they don’t approve. In short, they enact a regime of censorship in blatant violation of the First Amendment. The list goes on. Parchment barriers have failed, and checks and balances no longer check the power of the administrative state allied with the executive branch. Domestic political deterrence has broken down, and the balance of political power no longer holds, clearing the way for intense political warfare against the populist opponents of the regime.
Democratic strategists appear to believe that during the Biden administration they have obtained sufficient power to destroy their political opposition permanently and that the populist movement is, for the moment, powerless to resist effectively. The only time even remotely like this was in the aftermath of the Civil War when the rebellious states were prostrate beneath the boots of federal troops. If they succeed in this desperate power grab, the freedom of the minority will be crushed in the United States and “the last best hope of man,” as Lincoln put will be extinguished. We will be living in a one-party dictatorship of Orwellian censorship and propaganda.
If this is an accurate depiction of the political developments of the past couple of decades, what does it mean for the currently scattered opposition?
The radical left seized power throughout society while a complacent people were lulled to sleep by a mendacious media, and a soporific entertainment and social media industry that supplies endless “bread and circuses” to divert the masses. But now that the people are finally awake and aware of the peril, the “correlation of forces,” a favorite phrase of the Marxist left, has changed, making it at least possible for the populist right to recapture power—assuming elections are reasonably honest.
Government power, if wielded properly, can overwhelm the soft, cultural power of the left, at least in the short term. The populist right, led by Donald Trump held power nominally between 2017 and 2021. But Trump had no idea what he was facing when he took over and had little idea how to fight effectively against the bureaucracy. He didn’t even understand the nature of the fight or who the enemy was. He was blindsided. His party was deeply divided. But now scores of millions are thoroughly aroused. The American left has shown the people who they really are. Now, they need to learn how to organize and how to fight. The target is clear, and the battle lines are being formed. We are in a liberation struggle. After four years of mounting chaos the majority is now on the side of liberty and sanity.
The prerequisite for victory is to regain control of the White House and Congress. With it the balance of power can be restored, and a “new birth of freedom” is possible. Without it we are doomed. The battle is only just begun. The tyrants are terrified of an outraged people who will take it no longer. We are starting to win victories. The more victories we have, the more the people will rally to the side of freedom and the more desperate the radicals of the left will become.
The American people need a renaissance of liberty and a reformation of government. The elections of 2024 constitute the nation’s last chance. Should that fail, as many on the left advise, “become ungovernable!” They simply cannot control us all.