The Tyranny of the Majorityby Lani Guinier Book review by Alan Hirsch
Lani Guinier's nomination as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights was doomed by her portrayal as an antidemocratic "Quota Queen." Her book, The Tyranny of the Majority, enables us to assess whether she was treated fairly. It consists primarily of republication of the essays that plagued her nomination, albeit with slight reworking. The tyranny of the majority referred to in the title is straightforward. Democracy means rule by all (demos crasis), but if a person or group always finds itself on the losing side of the vote, it rules nothing. Blacks are essentially a permanent minority in America. If whites and blacks each vote as a bloc, the whites will almost invariably win. Indeed, racial bloc voting has historically made it difficult for blacks to attain office. In the 1980s, Congress and the courts responded by creating "majority-black" districts. Where bloc voting makes it impossible to elect a black, the jurisdiction is divided into districts drawn so that in at least one district blacks constitute a majority. This approach succeeded in producing the election of many blacks. Lani Guinier argues that this achievement merely removes the effect of racial prejudice from the voting booth to the process of government-elected blacks experience the same tyranny of the majority in the governing process that voters used to experience in elections. She proposes several remedies, especially "cumulative voting." Suppose a city elects three Council members. Normally, each voter gets one vote and the top three vote-getters win. Under majority black districts, the city is divided into three districts, one of which is majority black. Under cumulative voting, each voter is allotted three votes to use any way she wants. She can give all her votes to one candidate. If black voters pool their votes, they can elect the candidate of their choice to one of the seats. Guinier prefers cumulative voting to majority black districts because it doesn't shunt blacks into one district, instead encouraging whites and blacks to campaign together and build coalitions. Therefore, she believes, cumulative voting would leave elected black officials less isolated in the government. She would buttress it with various proposals governing the actual legislative process. Guinier calls the vision animating her proposals "taking turns," and illustrates it with a real-life example from a high school. To select music for the prom, each senior was to vote for his favorite songs. In this majority white school, the foreseeable result was that no songs favored by the blacks would be chosen. Faced with this prospect, the blacks held their own prom. Under cumulative voting, the blacks could have pooled their votes and gotten some of their songs selected. Whites and blacks would have "taken turns" at the integrated prom. As this summary of Guinier's views suggests, there is little evidence that she supports quotas. And right or wrong, her views are not anti-democratic. (Cumulative voting preserves the one person/one vote principle, since all voters get the same number of votes.) However, her scholarship suffers from a fatal flaw: the assumption that all black people think alike. Her analysis depends on blacks' "group perspective" and "distinctive voice." She complains that the current voting rights regime gets blacks elected but doesn't produce desirable "substantive policies" or reform the "substance of political decisions." But whose substantive views need enacting, Guinier's or that of a black conservative like Clarence Thomas? Guinier doesn't address that question because she posits that all blacks share a common agenda. She identifies that agenda as "greater civil rights enforcement, social welfare expenditures, and government intervention in domestic affairs." She also formulates the latter as "government intervention on behalf of the poor." In fact, this agenda is not shared by all blacks. Many prominent black intellectuals believe government assistance creates a dependency that only hurts the poor. Likewise, some influential blacks oppose the kind of "civil rights enforcement" favored by Guinier. There's no reason to doubt that less prominent blacks disagree with Guinier as well. The absence of a black consensus undercuts her vision. The goal of "taking turns" loses steam if not all blacks desire the same turn. In her example of the high school prom, she plausibly posits that most blacks desired the same music. In this context, the case can be made for a voting system that accommodates the minority preference. But while blacks may share certain cultural affinities such as musical taste, there's less reason to believe they share substantive political views. More importantly, the notion of homogeneous black political views threatens the very idea of rational, individualistic thought. People choose their own moral and political views. Racial identity and historical experience do not determine (though they may influence) one's belief system. Lani Guinier's implicit view to the contrary may be even more malignant than her imagined sins. The Tyranny of the Majority by Lani Guinier.ISBN: 0-02-913172-3, p. 324 (191 text) hard cover, $24.95, ©1994, published by Free Press (Div. Simon & Schuster), 866 3rd Ave., New York, NY 10022. (212) 702-2102.
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