The system is designed to prevent a tyranny of the majority, and that happens to be one of Mr. Madison’s best ideas. But the protections that he and the rest of them put into place were always meant to be defensive measures, not offensive weapons. But the genius at the heart of conservative obstructionism always has been the ability to convert those protections from the former to the latter, the way you can re-purpose a semi-automatic weapon to full auto on the workbench in your garage because…FREEEEEDOOOOOMMMMM!!!, and to do so with utter, shameless disregard for either the public good, or the public’s overwhelmingly expressed desires. A fire ladder is a good precaution, but not when the burglar uses it to climb in your upstairs window and steal the good silver.
You would think that, in a democratic republic, a party dedicated to frustrating the expressed will of a huge majority of the people would find itself in deep political peril. But there’s no indication that either the public, or the political elites, see this current state of affairs as anything beyond ordinary politics and business as usual. Who’s up? Who’s down? Will Joe Manchin have a tough re-election fight? When you divorce politics from policy as thoroughly as we have done in this country — whether this has occurred through a feckless courtier media, or through a political class insulated by the power of money, or by the steady, parallel drumbeats of empty centrism and government-as-the-problem, or by all of those combined — then you ask for exactly what we have today — a nation of paralyzed, impotent majorities, speaking a language that the political elites no longer choose to learn. We have majorities that can be safely ignored.
I don’t agree that people think this is business as usual. They just don’t have a clue what to do about it.
When the Constitution was written the majority was in the cities of the north. All this protection of the minority stuff was put in the system to protect slavery in the south. The southern states would not agree if there was any possibility that the northern majority would abolish slavery. They got equal representation in the senate and an extra 3/5 representation in the house for each slave. Then they have taken advantage of the seniority rules to gain control of the senate by being re-elected forever. It is not about protecting any minority; it’s about protecting the power of the confederate states to block any changes against their interests or ideologies.
The only time anything has really changed was when the abuses of the 1% became so egregious that populist movements swept the nation and incumbents out of office. Those changes have been pretty long-lived, but have always been under threat from promises to the suckers that their million dollars is just around the corner and the constant treason of the money lenders. The only thing that will impress the 1% (and I include politicians) is civil disobedience and fear for their survival.