This essay does not argue that America is becoming an authoritarian state, though that argument is available and being made elsewhere. It argues something narrower and in some ways more unsettling: that the formal mechanisms of American democracy, the ones we were taught in school, the ones the civics textbooks described as the model the world should follow, already produce minority rule as a routine output, and have been doing so for decades, and that the current administration is not the cause of this condition but rather its beneficiary, the thing the broken math was always going to eventually produce if left uncorrected long enough.
The math is not complicated. Let us do it together.
