Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority:
The Tyranny of the Majority is an apt title for this work. This reading appears to be the introduction to a collection of law review articles. In it Guinier defines the difference between a majority rule and a majority tyranny. She argues that in our society, the minority groups are not given a voice when the majority group feels secure in it's position. As soon as defectors transition to the minority, the majority must give the minority a voice because sooner or later the minority will turn into the majority, and if the majority does not apply the Golden Rule, neither will the minority when it is their turn for power. As soon as the majority becomes a permanent majority, and doesn't have to worry about a constantly shifting majority, the minority voice goes out the window.
To solve this problem Guinier suggests a procedural rule for voting in which the minority is still given rights. I agree with this idea. It is called cumulative voting. Each person is given the same number of votes as the number of issues they are to vote on. They are then free to "stack" their votes all on one item, or to spread them out however they wish. By forming coalitions, minority groups can stack votes and win at least one of the items on the ballet. By doing this they sacrifice the other items, which are then won by the majority. The majority of the items is won by the majority, which is as it should be, in my opinion. However, she has a valid point. The minority is often overrun in a society like ours, where our strict majoritarianism viewpoint is dominated by a winner-take-all attitude.
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite:
Mills begins this excerpt by declaring that the majority of individuals living in the United States today has doubts as the efficacy of their lives, their work, and their effect on the government. The government is ruled instead by a "power elite", who occupy such pivotal positions such that their inaction has far more drastic consequences then what they actually decide. He doesn't actually place Congress in the power elite. They are the second sub level of the elite, controlled by their heads. He writes much about hierarchies of power and of institutions that compose the elite. One would think that institutions of learning or powerful families compose the elite, but Mills names "the big three": the economic, the political, and the military domains. These three areas effectively influence all of the other sidelined institutions because their decisions have immediate, powerful consequences. As Mills puts it, "religious, educational, and family institutions are not autonomous centers of national power; on the contrary, these decentralized areas are increasingly shaped by the big three, in which developments of decisive and immediate consequence now occur."
Every thing has become centralized. I tend to agree with this pronouncement. Mills seems to be describing a process in this paper, more so than a state of things as they are currently. He would have to be describing this process in order for his ideas to bear any relevance to our world today (the book was written in the 1950s). If what Mills says is true about how the larger corporations are increasingly affecting the political system and the political system acts to intervene in the economy, the triangle of power becomes an unchangeable matrix that are so intertwined one cannot be disavowed without huge ramifications. I don't like it. I would rather have a system where each component of the government was as autonomous as it could be, either succeeding or failing without too much of an impact on the government. I can foresee problems arising from this type of a system.
Mills goes on to say that the power elite of America is formed from the "warlords, the corporation chieftains, [and] the political directorate". Mills remarks that these power elite are not part of a conspiracy, not part of any plan, but are just part of the system which has grown up and they continue to use their positions to consolidate them even more.
Richard Zweigenhaft/G. William Domhoff, Diversity in the Power Elite:
Building on Mills's thesis, Zweigenhaft and Domhoff talk about the non-traditional power elite (Jews, women, blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, etc). Their main point is how centuries of multiculturalism has affected the power elite and what effect it has had on the power elite's relation to the rest of society. Side note: They called Mills iconoclastic. The authors go on to examine how the chances of minorities getting past the "glass ceiling" in the corporate world has been examined by several big wigs and even been examined by sociologists studying how sports has affected development of skills deemed essential in the business world. I just came across one of the most humorous lines I have read today: "Many women managers are convinced that their careers suffer because of discrimination against them by golf clubs". I think that's a bit extreme! A lady named Sally was applying to be a manager at Microsoft. She thought she did well in the interview, had an excellent resume, and had impeccable references. Unfortunately, she was contacted a week later by a harried executive apologizing for her failure to be hired. "Those awful golf clubs!" She exploded. "They're the entire reason I wasn't hired!" As you can see, this situation seems a bit ludicrous to me at the moment. Maybe I'll read on and see what the authors mean!
The authors then begin to talk about African Americans in the power elite. It is their opinion, and I agree, that multicultural diversity has strengthened the power elite.
In conclusion, the authors say that the diversification of the power elite has not changed the nation's economic differences a bit.
Robert Dahl, Who Governs? and A Preface to Democratic Theory:
Dahl begins by talking about political inequalities, and how in a patrician oligarchy the inequalities were all collected into a single group. If you were better than somebody else politically, you were also better then them socially, materially, etc. However, now, it is more diversified, lending our government to be a plurally governed society. He is essentially refuting Mills's argument that there is a power elite by saying many groups rule the government because of their dispersed inequalities.
There are two strata. A political stratum and a apolitical stratum. The ideas and skills of those in the political stratum are diffused into the general population. To me, if the political stratum were removed, and those from the apolitical stratum had to step in and fill their place, then if there was a difference in the major decisions and procedures of the time I would consider the rule to be based in the political stratum, as responsible as those politicians might be to their constituents. However, if there was little or no difference, the power would seem to me to be in the apolitical stratum, and the political ideas are diffused into the political stratum the same way in which the ideas from the politicians are diffused into the hoi polloi. As I read through some of the differences in here between the two strata, I cannot help but want to be included in the political stratum, as time-consuming as it sounds. Dahl gives some of his own ideas on the subject: he believes that "when movement into the political stratum is easy, the stratum embodies many of the most widely shared values and goals in the society". I agree, and contend that in this case, due to the nature of the system, the government is run more by the people than most would assume. Dahl also says, "the political stratum does not constitute a homogeneous class with well-defined class interests". It is this split, this heterogeneity, that allows the paradoxes that Hartz and Kammen talked about. It is these paradoxes that allows our government to be such a compromising nation. I imagine a tug-of-war rope with both sides walking horizontally as well as pulling. You notice that the middle of the rope, the measure of our nation's public policy, slowly moves in the direction of the majority. It is these paradoxes, combined with Guinier's tyranny of the majority, that defines our government.
In the excerpt from A Preface to Democratic Theory, Dahl alleges that "the making of governmental decisions is not a majestic march of great majorities united upon certain matters of basic policy. It is the steady appeasement of relatively small groups".
I really like this quote about our country from Dahl:
It is not a static system. The normal American system has evolved, and by evolving it has survived. It has evolved and survived from aristocracy to mass democracy, through slavery, civil war, the tentative uneasy reconciliation of North and South, the repression of Negroes and their halting liberation; through two great wars of worldwide scope, mobilization, far-flung military enterprise, and return to hazardous peace; through numerous periods of economic instability and one prolonged depression with mass unemployment, farm "holidays," veterans' marches, tear gas, and even bullets; through two periods of postwar cynicism, demagogic excesses, invasions of traditional liberties, and the groping, awkward, often savage, attempt to cope with problems of subversion, fear, and civil tension.
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