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One of the things that makes me hopeful, longterm, is that this analysis, which several of us were pushing from the beginning of Trump's regime (and before that, in fact), is increasingly becoming mainstream common sense. https://twitter.com/CoreyRobin/status/1323093631713054720
Instead of hand-wringing about American political culture or the voters, and thinking the institutions and the Constitution are our friend, there are signs that political analysts are increasingly realizing that the problem is the institutions and the Constitution. This is good!
Just to give you a sense of the shift. Back in the 1990s or the aughts, whenever you tried to defend majoritarianism and popular sovereignty, the specter of the tyrannical masses was always raised in response. Believe it or not, people would defend not just the Supreme Court but
also the Senate as somehow institutions that protected unpopular dissenting minorities or marginalized groups. When you would point out that the House of Representatives repeatedly passed civil rights bills, only to be shot down by the Senate and the filibuster, it's as if you
were speaking Greek. It just didn't register; it couldn't register, so engrained was this idea that the majority is always tyrannical and that we need the Supreme Court and the Senate to defend us against it. People are beginning to realize that the real problem today is not
the tyranny of the majority—that trope so beloved of intro poli sci classes (the Federalist Papers! Tocqueville!)—but the tyranny of the minority, and that the greatest protection of that tyranny lies in the Constitution. Again, progress!
