And although the DSA’s platform is indeed “chock-full of maniacal proposals,” writes the Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait, “the teardown of the upper chamber would be good for American democracy.”

That’s the problem. Millions of people are under the impression that direct proportional national democratic representation is akin to fascism. Indeed, any time 50.01% of the country isn’t lording over everyone else, we hear complaints from left-wingers about “minority rule.”

But American democracy was never meant to empower New Yorkers to dictate Idaho’s abortion laws or for Texans to compel Massachusetts to adopt its gun laws.

“The Senate is a vestigial deformity upon the Constitution whose elimination,” Chait goes on, “unlikely though it might be, would rank among the great democratic advances in American history.”

The Senate has anchored what turns out to be the longest continuous and, by far, the most stable liberal democracy the world has ever seen. The ability of the Senate to ensure that national laws represent the entire nation’s concerns has been a big part of that success. Surely there’s an abundance of historical evidence that the Founding Fathers, while imperfect, had more wisdom than the socialists who wanted to import Third World banana-republicanism.

Yet, Chait’s piece is grounded in the amusing notion that contemporary anti-Senate leftists are merely adopting the positions of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, both of whom initially objected to a malapportioned Senate.

In Federalist No. 62, Madison grapples with the undemocratic nature of the Senate before coming to the conclusion that it is an advantage that “no law or resolution can now be passed without the concurrence, first, of a majority of the people, and then, of a majority of the States.”

It’s true Madison, who hailed from the nation’s most populous state, acquiesced to the demands of smaller states to reach an agreement. It’s also true that Madison saw a disproportional Senate as a redundancy because he envisioned a federal government with highly limited power. The notion that the father of the Constitution would have supported senators passing federalist-busting trillion-dollar reforms run by a highly centralized, powerful federal government is utterly preposterous.

If Washington operated within its enumerated powers, which would entail shuttering most agencies, a proportional Senate would hardly matter.

Madison, after all, broke with Hamilton over the latter’s push for a national bank. What do you think he’d make of the Department of Health and Human Services or the Department of Homeland Security? 

Of course, even at the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton championed a more aristocratic Senate with lifetime appointments, modeled on the old British House of Lords, which was imbued with even stronger countermajoritarian powers. Hamilton also supported an elected monarch who would serve for life to act as a check on the demagoguery and “the amazing violence & turbulence of the democratic spirit.”

These people were not fans of unfettered democracy.

Prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913, senators were appointed by state legislatures, making elections even more diffused and less democratic. Senators were compelled to focus on local issues rather than national ones. Modern senators may take oaths to uphold the Constitution, but they’ve long abdicated their institutional responsibilities and become partisan cheerleaders for executive abuses, whining when courts hand them back the responsibility of governing.

The only thing constraining their worst impulses right now is the legislative filibuster rule. Once that minority protection is eliminated, partisans will use thin and fleeting majorities to ram through wide-ranging overreaches while overturning the wide-ranging overreaches passed by the other party. Back and forth they’ll go. It will inevitably lead to unprecedented destabilization.

It’s understandable, of course, that voters are frustrated by the Senate’s inability to do very much. Politicians create unrealistic expectations by promising results they do not have the power to deliver. During the Biden years, Democrats couldn’t pass the original Build Back Better Act, and now Republicans are similarly aggravated by the inability of their senators to pass the SAVE America Act.

The failure to find common ground in the Senate is simply a reflection of the electorate’s disposition. We’re constantly being informed that the United States is more divided than it’s ever been. So, we have even more reason to protect the mechanisms and institutions that constrain one side from lording over the other. We don’t have to look further back than the unilateral partisan passage of Obamacare, which broke American politics. For the first time in history, one party took control of a vital chunk of the economy, overturning thousands of existing laws, with the barest of majorities and without any input from half the country.

It’s unlikely Madison would approve.

HIGHLY CREDENTIALED, UNDEREMPLOYED, AND FURIOUS: MEET THE DSA

The chances of amending the Constitution are, thankfully, still infinitesimal. But the normalization of these ideas, mostly promoted by ideologues frustrated by the limits imposed by the Constitution, is meant to delegitimize our institutions and the rule of law. Which is why left-wing partisans now support unwinding the system and democratizing everything: from packing the Supreme Court to getting rid of the Electoral College to creating a proportional Senate. Why even have states, I guess?

The system can only survive if the citizens believe in it, even if they’re not getting their way. And it seems increasingly unlikely ours will.