Under normal democratic conditions, the path to political success is fairly clear: You try to assemble a majority in favor of your cause or interest and to rely upon that majority to pass legislation supporting your position. So long as the agreed-upon rules are followed, your win does not vanquish those who stood in opposition to you. It is never nice to lose, but in a normal democracy the losers know that if they react by carrying out the sufficient work of renewed mobilization, they just might be able to win the next time around. Democracy is (at least in theory) a form of protection against winner-take-all politics.
There is, however, another direction that politics, especially at times of democratic crisis, can take: the attempt not only to win, but to prevent your opponents from their chance at a victory in the future. This is what the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr, in his exceptionally insightful new book, calls “entrenchment.” Entrenchment does not imply merely following the rules; it means changing them. A party or interest, for example, may win a majority vote but then alter the rules to make a two-thirds vote necessary for any future legislation, including the repeal of what it just passed. Or a legislature may delegate future decision-making to an undemocratically elected body such as a central bank or a court. Or a constitutional amendment can prohibit “tampering” with a particular area of public policy, say, for example, by making it illegal for any future legislative body to approve of same-sex marriage. (Such an amendment was proposed in the United States after the Supreme Court, in the 2015 decision Obergefell v. Hodges, gave same-sex couples the right to marry.) Entrenchment is one of the primary means by which wealthy and powerful interests protect their wealth and their power. They hope to win not just a contest or two but, insofar as it is possible to do so, permanence. “Unlike ordinary politics,” as Starr puts it, “struggles over entrenchment offer a distinct prize – irreversibility, or as close to it as the institutions of a society can come.”
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