Majority Rule

I have said in previous posts that elections and representative government is a necessary condition for democracy, but they are not sufficient. It is time to say what I believe to be the sufficient part of the definition of democracy. For my money, for a government to be democratic it has to be representative with free and fair elections, and it has to make legislative decisions using majority rule as the determinative criterion. In small organizations it may be possible to operate on the basis of consensus, where the majority defers to the greater influence of the leader or leaders, although I am not so sure of even that, but in a larger organization, such as a national government, there has to be an agreed upon rule for decision making, and majority rule is the most fair.

It is in this respect that the US government in particular is most egregiously non-democratic. From its beginning, in designing the constitution an during the ratification process, the supposed virtue of having supermajority rules for decision making was common, and so such rules were built into the design of the US government. It is this part of our constitution that most needs to change.

I wish I had some feedback on this point from those who believe that supermajorities are good, and more generally from those who reject even representative government, so that I could more deeply discuss this point. To me this is just a very simple and straightforward requirement for government, or any large organization, one that is implicit in most discussions, except when it comes to discussing the American government. There must be complications I in my naivete do not understand, or maybe there are some hidden virtues of not being fully democratic that do not get mentioned for fear of upsetting the masses.