Defining Tyranny Down

Henry’s give ’em enough rope approach to this remarkable McArdle post is a sound one. As an alternative, I’ll try isolating a couple particularly instructive sentences:

One cannot help but admire Nancy Pelosi’s skill as a legislator. But it’s also pretty worrying. Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority?

So, to review, a party won an election, including a convincing popular vote win by the president and solid majorities in both houses of the legislature. It attempted to pass a central plank of its platform, a very moderate health care reform package. Its passage was still in doubt a few hours before the final vote, and the bill’s opponents (and wets among the bill’s eventual supporters) were able to further water down the bill and extract some repugnant compromises. And this is evidence of…the tyranny of the majority? If I understand the underlying democratic theory* correctly, no matter how many veto points you have, if a policy that Megan McArdle doesn’t like can somehow pass, there aren’t enough.

*Especially coming from a libertarian, I’m not going to take the subsequent ad hoc embrace of plebiscitary democracy seriously — does McArdle now believe that Congress is obligated to pass the very popular public option? I will note, however, that even on its own terms the argument is probably wrong. At a minimum, one has to take account of the fact that a significant portion of the narrow anti-bill plurality opposed the bill from the left. Once confronted with an up-or-down vote between the bill and the status quo, it is very likely that most of these opponents would ultimately vote yes — as happened in Congress.

And then, we have this:

We’re not a parliamentary democracy, and we don’t have the mechanisms, like votes of no confidence, that parliamentary democracies use to provide a check on their politicians. The check that we have is that politicians care what the voters think.

Unless there’s some nuance I’m missing, someone who is paid a very healthy sum to write about politics for a living has asserted that parliamentary democracies have more checks on majority rule than the Madisonian separation-of-powers system. I can only respond that McArdle may wish to investigate how often majority governments in Canada or the UK have been felled by no-confidence motions. Or if that’s too much work, perhaps she may want to consider how likely it is that any members of the Democratic majority who voted for the bill would vote to remove Barack Obama from office…