Escaping the Memory Hole

By Luke Pickrell

I keep returning to Gabriel Winant’s observations about historical memory: “[T]he work of mobilizing is always in urging people to un-forget, to see how their circumstances came to be, how others responded to similar circumstances in the past, and how they might also — now, today. To engage in political struggle is necessarily to do history.”

But forgetting is easy. Without consistent reminders, even major events fade. George W. Bush’s presidency began with a judicial coup, but that illegitimacy was quickly swept under the rug. Likewise, everything Donald Trump did in office flowed downstream from losing the popular vote. Yet today, with Trump back in office, even the most Left-leaning Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, act like nothing extraordinary happened on November 8, 2016.

Or take the Senate. For over two decades, as Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky have noted, Republicans have consistently won Senate majorities while losing the popular vote. This absurdly undemocratic phenomenon is only possible because the Senate gives each state two senators regardless of population. In 2016, Republicans held a 52-seat majority representing only 45 percent of Americans. In 2018, a 53-seat GOP majority represented just 48 percent. Even when the Senate split 50-50 in 2020, Democratic senators represented 55 percent of the country, over 41 million more people than their Republican counterparts.

Today’s Republican majority of 53 senators represents about 24 million fewer people than the Democratic minority of 45. Everything the Senate does is contaminated by this obvious denial of equal suffrage. Yet there’s only silence from the Democratic Party, the establishment media, and most of the Left. My suspicions about the current Senate were confirmed not by something Sanders said during his Fighting Oligarchy tour or anything in the New York Times, but by a lone user on Reddit who crunched the numbers and concluded, “If my math is correct, the problem is obvious.”

The result of minority rule is that no branch of government accurately represents the democratic will. To expand Thomas Geohegan’s description of the Senate, our entire political system is a giant “funhouse of mirrors” in which up is down, left is right, and minorities rule over majorities.

For nearly a century, the Constitution’s contradictions were largely hidden. The U.S. escaped the wars that scarred the rest of the world, and the Cold War provided an ideological cover for nearly anything, so long as it was done in the name of fighting Communism. American exceptionalism reigned, and as Aziz Rana points out in The Constitutional Bind, the Constitution received much of the credit.

But what once may have seemed like abstract structural flaws or theoretical concerns to many have become concrete political crises. The illusion of a stable, self-correcting system is fading.

Returning to Winant, we must discuss the past and also point toward a necessary future. In place of the existing system, we need a democratic constitution with political power in a unicameral legislature elected by universal and equal suffrage. No more unaccountable judicial systems or strong presidents — and certainly no more senators.

The memory hole is dark, and the push to normalize uproariously undemocratic outcomes is strong. But the desire for change is getting brighter.