Winning an election with 50% plus a few (or many) voters does not imply the normative conclusion that the winner is justified in imposing policies that significantly harm the remaining 49% (or fewer).
In a free society, political majority rule has three main justifications. First, it makes it possible to change the rulers when their exercise of power is rejected by a significant part of the population – to throw out the bad guys. Second, it represents an approach to unanimity, which is ultimately the only normative justification of democracy. (See William Riker’s respectively Liberalism versus populism And my review of the book Regulation; and James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The calculation of consent (as well as my Econlib review.) Third, as argued by Buchanan and Tullock, a unanimity approach is only necessary to prevent bad-faith holdouts from blocking broadly desired change.
One implication of this approach is that a president who is elected with 50.1% of the vote (the result of the November 5 election) as of November 14) is not given a license to kill or even to do anything he has promised. It strains credibility to believe that Americans could, in a virtual social contract a la Buchanan, unanimously agree to a constitutional rule granting such power to the president or even to an elected assembly. As Milton Friedman wrote of majoritarian democracy, “the believer in freedom has never counted noses” (see Chapter 1 of his classic Capitalism and freedom). The president is not an elected king or dictator.
A credible argument along these lines is that a president or an elected assembly has no mandate to significantly harm anyone in their lifestyle or in the net benefit they derive from living in the relevant society and under its government. The “significant” covers an area of disagreement that ranges from classical liberalism to various shades of minimal state and anarcho-capitalism.
If the above is anything close to the truth, politicians and pundits who believe in the omnipotence of a numerical majority are wrong. Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson stated (“Republican euphoria interrupted by difficult math in the House of Representatives,” Wall Street JournalNovember 12, 2024 [from two earlier versions]):
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) said at a news conference Tuesday that Republicans “are ready to deliver on America’s mandate in the next Congress.”
[He] said the Republican Party’s control of Washington “could result in the most consequential Congress of modern times,” and that lawmakers “must start delivering results for the people on day one.”
This idea seems to be widespread in political circles. Karoline Leavitt, spokeswoman for Trump-Vance Transition, said: “The Trump draft executive order would create an administration to purge generals,” Wall Street JournalNovember 12, 2024):
The American people re-elected President Trump by a wide margin, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made during his campaign. He will deliver.
An ally of the president-elect and former government official called it “a seismic mandate” (“Trump sends shockwaves through Washington with Gaetz Pick,” Wall Street JournalNovember 14, 2024).
Fifty percent plus a few dozen percentage points (a few days ago the count was 50.3%) doesn’t seem like a “landslide” or a “sounding margin,” and even a resounding margin wouldn’t give an elected official the license to follow through on any promise or whim. The 58% of the Electoral College that the president-elect won (312 out of 538 voters) partly reflects the federalist ideal and the American founding fathers’ distrust of numerical democracy: it does not matter carte blanche or. No rational individual would give 58% of voters unlimited power over him. I speak not as a constitutional lawyer, which I am not, but from the point of view of constitutional political economy (see Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan, The reason for rules: constitutional political economyas well as my Econlib review). Friedrich Hayek would undoubtedly agree with these broad conclusions (see his Law, legislation and freedomand my Econlib review of Part 3 of this book).
In this perspective, a mandate to the president or Congress is less grandiose: it does not come from ‘America’, nor from ‘the people’, but from a majority of the voters. The two halves of the electorate are made up of individuals who often strongly disagree with the other side. Furthermore, these two halves of voters make up two-thirds of the electorate, as one-third do not vote. Also note that “deliver” does not mean what it means in the marketplace. In politics, this mainly means that the preferential interventions of some come at the expense of others, which is negative for the latter. Customs tariffs that benefit shareholders, managers and employees of some companies, to the detriment of all consumers who will pay higher prices, provide a paradigmatic example.
Deciding which third of the electorate (or which half of voters) will impose their wishes and lifestyle on the other two-thirds is not the only alternative. The other alternative is to allow all individuals to live as they wish, except for some specifically justified limits. Equal individual freedom is economically and morally superior to collective choices, that is, to the collectivism of the left or the right. There is no moral or economic equivalence between the freeing of individuals and the domination of some by others. Or at least, this is what the liberal tradition somehow argues.