Several years ago, I had an interesting discussion with a member at my tennis club about the result of the 2002 mid-term US elections, where the Republican Party consolidated its control of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Our debate turned on the statements being made by Republicans to the effect that "we have a mandate".
Now, one thing that I have learned from listening to politicians over the years in the UK and the US is that whenever a politician stands up and announces "we have a mandate", they are talking in code, or to put it another way, there is a sub-text that is not spoken. The sub-text is "we just won the election and now we're going to damn well do what we like because we can win all of the votes".
In other words, what they are really saying is that they intend to govern by the principles of majoritarianism.
The debate with my tennis colleague was about exactly what a majority of the votes entitled the Republicans to do. My argument was that it appears to be a fundamental rule of representative democracy that an elected representative represents all of the electors in their district, not just the ones that voted for them at the last election (at least that is what they say - I will extend the principle of charity and take them at their word).
If you extend that logic, the majority has to take into consideration the views of minorities. My tennis colleague did not agree with this; he argued that the Republicans could do what they liked irrespective of what their opponents thought, since they had a majority of the seats.
I tried to counter this statement by pointing out that a number of countries where this type of "winner takes all" politics is normal practice are deeply dysfunctional. A good example is Pakistan, where until recently the first thing that a political party did on winning office was to try and have its opponents/predecessors jailed or otherwise politically neutralised. Pakistan, as a result, has real problems with democratic governance to the point where it is currently under quasi-military rule, with democracy stifled.
My tennis colleague and I ended up agreeing to disagree on this issue.
The reason I am raising this point is that I believe that a lot of recent events in the USA bear all of the stamp of attempts by political or religious groupings to invoke the practice of majoritarianism. In my opinion, majoritarianism is a distortion of representative democracy which, if unchecked, leads to deeply dysfunctional behaviours, usually comprising intolerance and ultimately resulting in overt oppression.
The recent example of East Waynesville Baptist Church, where church members who voted Democrat at the last election have been asked to leave the church, is an excellent example of majoritarianism gone dysfunctional. This is barely one step down from mob rule, especially when the Republican members of the congregation apparently cheered when the Democrat members left the church. All I can say is that based on my knowledge of the Bible, the church members who cheered need to be taking a very good look at their own behaviours and attitudes, and then asking themselves; what sort of tyrannical nonsense have they just allowed themselves to participate in?
Folks, the US is heading down a very dangerous path right now. If majoritarianism had always been the preferred operating model in the US political system, none of the advances in minority rights and levels of respect would ever have occurred. The majority could simply have said "you're a minority, go away and shut up". Bringing us up-to-date, it is easy to see that the current attempts to amend state constitutions to define marriage as being between a woman and a man are a classic example of majoritarianism - the heterosexual majority attempting to circumscribe the rights of a homosexual minority.
Such attempts are highly dangerous for the future of the United States. In my opinion, given the many ways in which the founders of the USA were seeking to escape majoritarian persecution in other parts of the world, and to build a functioning democracy based on equal opportunities, I would go so far as to state that in my opinion, such majoritarianism is deeply un-American. It is antithetical to everything that America has stood for in the world, is another example of America setting a lousy behavioural example for other societies, and is likely to lead to arbitrary oppression of minorities, and tit-for-tat oppressions as voting preferences change.
Those of us who believe in inclusive representational democracy need to be out in the wider world arguing against this sort of nonsense.