How Anti-Majoritarianism Became the Global Language of Legitimacy

We are accustomed to thinking of political power as a binary: you either have it or you don’t. But in his 1945 masterpiece On Power, Bertrand de Jouvenel imagined it as an organism. Power is like a creature in a nature documentary, adapting, sensing opportunity, and slipping into the cracks. And it grows not because tyrants seize it but because people invite it. “Power is continually being summoned by the weak to save them from the strong who are close at hand,” de Jouvenel wrote. It expands not through violence but through promises. If one has heard the phrase “high-low vs. the middle,” this is how power operates. A higher power uses the low, whether for bodies, justifications, or clients, to attack the middle.

Here is where de Jouvenel’s argument becomes truly interesting. Power does not grow randomly: it grows toward legitimacy, toward righteousness, toward whatever moral vocabulary the age supplies. In medieval France, that vocabulary was justice. In the 20th century, it was security. But in the 21st century, the moral vocabulary of legitimacy is something different. Today’s most potent political ideal is anti-majoritarianism.

Anti-majoritarianism is a simple idea with complicated consequences. It is the belief that the majority (its customs, preferences, cultural norms, and electoral power) poses a potential threat to minorities, and therefore must be contained, supervised, and counterbalanced by institutions. Courts, bureaucracies, nonprofits, international bodies, HR departments, accreditation boards, and media organizations must work to restrain the whims of the many for the safety of the few.

It is a belief, in other words, that legitimacy flows not from the people to their representatives but from vulnerable groups to the institutions that protect them. When analyzing who donates to nonprofits and how neoliberal economic policy is electorally married to marginalized communities, it becomes clear that anti-majoritarianism functions as a top-down scheme, protecting the interests of the high from usurpation by the middle.

But this is not how most of the Western world thought even 60 years ago. It feels natural today for the burden of proof to rest on the majority. No matter how it’s defined, the majority always has sinister motives assigned to it. For example, immigration restrictionists always have to justify themselves no matter the consequences of open borders. In contrast, the identity, sensitivities, and perspectives of minorities are the central organizing principle of political morality.

What is striking, and brings de Jouvenel roaring back into relevance, is how perfectly anti-majoritarianism fits the growth instinct of power. If power expands through benevolence, anti-majoritarianism offers infinite opportunities for benevolence. There is always another group to uplift, another imbalance to correct, another form of exclusion to repair. This shift from the concrete to hard-to-define, abstract ideas is the secret fuel to the power of anti-majoritarianism. Because these imbalances can be moralized rather than measured, the work is never complete.

Who defines when racism, sexism, or homophobia are fully eradicated? Who defines those terms themselves? In contemporary America, it is those who hold power and have many marginalized clients.

De Jouvenel thought of power as a vine. Anti-majoritarianism is the perfect trellis.

McGovern’s World

There is a reason this worldview took hold first in the United States. To understand it, we must return to George McGovern’s disastrous presidential campaign in 1972. Rick Perlstein’s book Nixonland covers the battle Nixon waged as the head of the outsiders (the Silent Majority) against the elite within a WASP framework, yet that elite party was taking on a new form. McGovern’s campaign was the transition of the street fights of the ‘68 convention in Chicago to the convention floor debates in ‘72. It was an election remembered not just for who won (Nixon’s 49-state landslide), but also as the high point before Nixon’s downfall. But it should also be remembered for the new—and strange for the time—political coalition McGovern assembled.

Before 1972, the Democratic Party was a fractious collection of urban labor, Southern whites, Catholics, Jews, intellectuals, and Midwestern union families. It was the coalition of the New Deal: a broad alliance held together by economic populism and the shared hardship of the Great Depression and war rationing. By the late 1960s, that coalition was cracking. Civil rights made the Solid South the swing vote. Vietnam split the Democrats generationally. Suburbanization diluted urban machines. The riots of 1967–68 frightened many of its older members who watched it all on television. Nixon was assembling a GOP coalition that included the Sun Belt and hard hats in a realignment that would carry the GOP for the next 20 years.

Into that delicate realignment stepped a new Democratic coalition: minorities, feminists, college-educated professionals, young activists, public-sector unions, academics, journalists, and the new class of managerial workers who saw expertise as the proper basis for governance. This was the McGovern Coalition. Although McGovern himself lost spectacularly, the coalition did not. It moved into institutions: universities, federal agencies, foundation boards, newsrooms, and HR departments. Because its members were concentrated in the parts of American life responsible for rulemaking in all forms (cultural, bureaucratic, administrative), they came to define the moral horizon of American politics. More importantly, they controlled the allocation of money via nonprofits, foundations, universities, and government budgets.

Their worldview centered on the uplift of minorities as the central moral mission of modern governance. With each policy innovation—affirmative action, expanded civil rights enforcement, bilingual education, diversity mandates, new grounds for anti-discrimination claims—the client blocs of the McGovern coalition grew. Despite labor’s objections, open borders slowly became a de facto human right. Freedom of association died. All hiring and firing decisions became a lawsuit threat. Social messaging softly encouraged divorce and illegitimacy. These liberations were actions by the central power to destroy the middle, lesser power that had supposedly the oppressed masses. Because of this, more Americans developed a direct, protective relationship with the administrative state.

International Uniformity

In de Jouvenel’s language, the central power found new reasons to intervene, new groups to represent, and new justifications for its expansion. Economic benefits create dependents. Moral benefits create loyalists. Anti-majoritarianism became not merely a viewpoint but an identity. Preeminence of the minority in any form was the main driver of political and social action. As evident throughout modern American history, identities spread no matter how small.

This helps explain the most peculiar political phenomenon of our time: the extraordinary uniformity of Western governance. Why does Canada sound like Sweden, which sounds like New Zealand, which sounds like Spain, which sounds like the American press? Why does a scandal in one country produce eerily similar debates in another? Why do universities across the West pursue the same policies, adopt the same terms, and enforce the same norms? Because the American operating system (anti-majoritarianism) spread. It was too useful a tool for the existing power cliques to resist.

Any Western ruling clique (high) can assist some new imported group or identity group spotted by American academics (low) to keep their out-of-power natives at bay (middle). Just as English became the global language of commerce, anti-majoritarianism became the global language of legitimacy and the means of power.

Consider the moral framework through which the West lectures China. The Uyghur crisis, which was real and verifiable, became not just a foreign policy issue but a morality play. Western governments condemned Beijing’s re-education programs, surveillance, and restrictions on religious life in Xinjiang. Before the Uyghurs, the same framework had been applied to Tibet. The victim was different, the religion different, and the cultural history different, but the narrative template was identical. The West did not ask whether China viewed separatism differently or whether Beijing saw its task as managing a vast, multiethnic empire rather than a nation-state. It did not ask how other non-Western governments manage internal dissent. It simply applied the anti-majoritarian framework; the minority is sacred, the majority is suspect.

Anti-majoritarianism does not require context. The identity categories are enough. When every conflict is mapped onto a single moral schema, foreign policy becomes a form of domestic theology.

This worldview simplifies the world by moralizing it, creating a simplistic dichotomy between good and evil. It transforms power struggles, territorial disputes, and cultural conflicts into stories of innocence and guilt. Minority protection is infinite, because there is always another group, another claim, or another micro-injustice that needs rectified. This worldview is the perfect environment for power to grow since it provides an endless mandate for Western institutions to moralize, intervene, condemn, or manage.

The medieval king expanded his authority by offering justice to peasants oppressed by local lords. The modern Western state expands its authority by offering protection to groups oppressed by majorities. Different centuries, same mechanism.

OS DEI

This brings us to the idea that now serves as the administrative heart of anti-majoritarianism: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

Most people think of DEI as a workplace trend, a corporate fad, or a campus phenomenon that spread during the cultural high tide of 2020 and is now receding. This misunderstands the structure of power. Fads disappear when the purposes they serve disappear. But the purposes DEI serves are simple, tangible, and needed. DEI is useful for managing, rewarding, and expanding the client blocs of the McGovern Coalition, the current Democratic coalition that shows no signs of significant cracking. Hispanic voter trends in the Trump era aside, the coalition has consolidated.

DEI is the bureaucratic interface for anti-majoritarianism. It is how institutions operationalize the logic that minorities are morally primary and that majorities require supervision. It determines hiring, sets speech norms, and distributes resources. It defines harm and allocates legitimacy—and, even more critical for clients, it hands out jobs. Because its mission is moral rather than functional, it cannot declare victory. If the purpose were simply representation, DEI might end once representation was achieved. But its purpose is “justice,” which is infinitely expandable.

A hiring disparity becomes a lawsuit. A salary gap becomes a structural legacy to address. A difference in outcomes becomes evidence of hidden bias. A cultural conflict becomes an existential threat to inclusion. The problem space expands as the institution expands. In de Jouvenel’s terms, the vine grows because it finds new branches to cling to.

DEI will never go away because it is not a program. It is a constituency. A lifestyle. A bureaucracy. A justification. It serves the moral needs of the anti-majoritarian worldview and the political needs of the Democratic coalition. Power must reward its clients who provide the votes that express consent to its reign. The old method of government sinecures only goes so far, and is subject to the opposing party’s machinations to slow government growth. Applying it to the private sector expanded the goodies basket as these voter blocs have expanded. It is not merely entrenched—it is the logic of the system itself.

The Post-War Consensus

To return to de Jouvenel, his warning was not about tyranny. Nor was it about ideology. It was about the natural tendency of power to expand through the moral language of the day. In an age of kings, that language was justice. In an age of revolutions, it was freedom. In an age of terrorism, it was security. And in our age, it is anti-majoritarianism.

What he understood, well ahead of his time, is that power does not grow strongest when it speaks of obedience. It grows strongest when it speaks of protection. A tyrant makes demands. A protector makes promises. But promises that speak to one’s core identity are far harder to resist.

We imagine that the modern bureaucracy is bloodless and rational. In reality, it is simply today’s version of the magistrate in the medieval village. It arrives promising fairness, kindness, dignity, and inclusion. “Hate Has No Home Here,” as the slogan goes, is a marker of the Left’s insatiable need to micromanage all interactions in life. Once it arrives, it stays. It expands. It discovers new injustices. It articulates new moral imperatives. It acquires new clients. And it is always watching.

Just as the king never leaves the village, the bureaucrat never leaves the institution, nor does the DEI office leave the university. We are seeing this as DEI departments are renamed to skirt regulations and President Trump’s executive orders. The anti-majoritarian framework will never leave America as currently constructed. Power, in all cases, behaves like an organism pursuing the nutrient it needs most. In modern America, the most abundant nutrient is the promise to protect anyone who appears vulnerable.

This is why the Western world, despite its diversity of nations and histories, increasingly governs itself the same way. This is America’s post-war empire, even if it looks wobbly at present. This is why foreign policy begins to resemble domestic activism, because any group can be a lever against a foreign opponent. It is the fuel of bureaucratic growth. It’s why all institutions converge on the same goals. The political grammar of 1972 is still shaping the moral vocabulary of 2026. Like an echo of Nixon, the entire Trump era can be summarized as a rebellion by the middle because it has caught on to the story that justifies the high’s reckless rule.

It all comes back to the vine, the trellis, and the instinct de Jouvenel discerned long before any of us could see it. Power grows and needs a story to destroy potential rivals. Today, that story and that moral legitimacy flow not from representing the majority, but from restraining it. That is the secret language of the modern West. Like any great, old secret, we all know it but cannot talk about it.

Yet we must talk about it. This coalition’s current narrative is the rationale for not just holding onto power but for daily governance. Spoils and patronage have always existed, but DEI is the lens through which every political problem is now viewed, which means that all proposed solutions must address it in some manner. It’s a herculean task to discard or pivot from a generation-long story. But it must be done.

Currently, there is a weekly news item from the federal government or a blue state government revealing how programs, grants, or hiring decisions have shifted what should be basic governing solutions into DEI patronage money fountains. The Left must be made to recognize that turning all of government into mafia-style patronage networks is a long-term losing strategy for the civilization upon which the governing clique rests.