Let me start of by saying that if you do a search for “tyranny of minorities” you’ll quickly find several scholarly studies on how this affects politics in parliamentary systems. So in what follows is partly based on their work (as translated into the version of English spoken by normal humans).

The Obvious Tendency

So bear with me as I go over familiar ground, but it’s necessary to grasp the key point, which is this: multi-party states are inherently unstable. Whether they’re in theory more so than other forms, practically speaking, is irrelevant. That doesn’t mean they can’t be made to work, and I’m by no means suggesting that they’re doomed to fail, but looking around casually, it’s hard to be optimistic.

But before getting into that, let me explain the how the system works.

As everyone is aware in the “parliamentary” system, the nation’s effective leader, who in the English speaking world is called the Prime Minister, assumes that power supposedly because his party controls the main chamber of elected representatives. Assuming that party received a majority of the votes, so far so good.

The difficulty arises when his party doesn’t have a majority (that is fifty percent plus of the votes). But when we look at the history of actual elections, what we find is that in the majority of cases, (a) no party manages to get a majority, that (b) even getting over forty percent is relatively rare, and (c), typically, the party that manages to form an actual government is in the thirties

That’s because the countries involved all have multiple political parties. So almost the only way an actual government can be formed is by some sort of alliance with one or more of the minority parties. So if you have an election in which the two largest parties have split about ninety percent of the vote with neither getting a majority, a third party that has ten percent of the vote, assumes a power out of all proportion to its success in attracting voters—and hence the phrase involving “tyranny.”

I should add here for the sake of accuracy that most of the countries using this system have rules that require a party to get a certain percentage of the popular vote in order to have representation. Unfortunately, one of the unforeseen results of this is that (a) a percentage of the population ends up being disenfranchised, and (b) the actual procedures sometimes result with a party that represents as little as a fifth of the electorate being able to form the government.

Now this claim isn’t just theoretical. In the UK’s last election, the Labour Party got 19 percent, the Tories got 14, the Liberal Democrats got seven, and Reform got eight. So none of the parties got anywhere close to even a third of the almost fifty million votes. But the way the allocation rules worked, Labour was able to form the government.

Or consider the recent Canadian election, in which the Liberals ended up with about 160 representatives, the Conservatives 119, the Quebec party with 32, and the Greens with two. So although the Conservatives actually picked up 24 seats, the Liberal share (at over 40 percent of the representatives) was large enough to enable them to form a government in an alliance with the Quebecois.

The situation Germany is the most extreme, as the current chancellor, like his predecessor as only been able to form a government by cobbling together a coalition of minority parties.

Although every nation has different parties and different rules, the result is mostly along the lines of the three examples I’ve given. A minority government.

The First Complication: Regionalism

Now one of the unintended consequences of the multiparty parliamentary system is that in a good many countries, the result tends to give undue weight to parties primarily based on regions. The recent Canadian election is an excellent example. In order to form a functioning government, the Liberal Party needs an alliance with the regional party whose strength is cultural/geographical.

From one point of view that makes sense, because Quebec is the largest province by area, and its population is between a fifth and a forth of Canada’s total population. However, given the long and complicated history of Quebec’s relationship with the national government, the logical result is that the policies of the Québécoise are dictated not by national concerns, but by their concerns, which are exclusively regional.

Historically, the national government has fended off the logical urge of the Québécoise to form their own state by all sorts of compromises. The situation is by definition unstable. Nor is it unique, of which more below. But in this case the result is that for the Liberal Party to dominate the national government through a series of minority governments, Quebec is increasingly able to shape policies that are at odds with the needs and desires of other sections of the country, and has been doing so for a long time.

There’s a lot more of this going on than we Americans understand. For example Catalonia in Spain, Alsace in France, and Scotland in the UK. And in more complex fashion, there are roughly similar problems in Germany and Italy. But before going further, it’s important to grasp the power of the proverbial elephant in the living room.

Nationalism: Real and Imagined

When Benedict Anderson wrote his important study on nationalism (Imagined Communities) he pointed out that the issue had historically been ignored by the majority of thinkers, regardless of their political persuasion. Technically, he’s correct, but the reality was, and still is, that the denial of the power of actual nationalism was not only an integral part of Marxian thought, but post-1945 was baked into the cake, so to speak.

In fact, I would argue that it was behind the concerted attempt to deny the historic reality that Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini were also “socialist” states. Skeptical? Consider the actual name of Hitler’s party—not to mention the explicit pronouncements of the two leaders.

While Anderson’s thesis—about the power of an imagined community—has a great deal of merit, he largely ignored the existence of an equally powerful form of nationalism, which wasn’t imagined at all.

Quebec is an excellent example. The Québécoise had a unique identity formed by language (French as opposed to English), religion (Roman Catholic as opposed to Anglican Protestantism) and history: they could fairly lay claim to being the first settlers in Canada, had been subjugated by Great Britain through conquest in the 18^th century. So clearly several hundred years was enough time to allow for those differences to coalesce.

And in the UK and the continent, it wasn’t just a couple of hundred years. Now a central government that concentrates on creating security and the conditions that increase prosperity for all its citizens, can survive, simply because it appeals to common interests, as Bismarck did with the various bits and pieces of the German heartland. Even though historically none of the traditional statelets cared for their cousins, he persuaded them to unite, and since the Kaiserreich rapidly became one of the most prosperous and powerful European states, self interest prevailed.

Although the British had asserted heir power over the inhabitants of the two islands by force, the result—security and prosperity—was the same.

Where Marx and Anderson and a good many other thinkers went wrong is simple. We humans can have multiple allegiances, and those are not necessarily in conflict. The problem only starts when one minority, or an alliance of minorities, starts dictating national policies that disadvantage everyone else. And basic Socialism both exacerbated that and destroyed the nation’s prosperity.

The Triumph of the Imaginary

Anderson was quite right in his argument about the importance of an imagined community, the United States being an example, as was the Reich, and for that matter France and Great Britain. But what he didn’t consider was the growing power of an entirely imaginary community, which manifested itself as Socialism.

It was imaginary, because when it began to take shape in the nineteenth century, it had not only never existed, but its basic ideas, as they related to politics, economics, and human nature, were fantasies. Although many of ideals were were laudable, when put into practice, they proved disastrous.

Yes, I know. If the concept is so stupid, why is there so much of it?

You’re not going to like my answer, but at bottom it’s simple, goes back to Proudhon’s assertion that “property is theft, capitalism is war.” Beliefs that not only turn vices into virtues, and legitimize violence, but destroy the basic mechanisms for prosperity.

Abraham Lincoln saw the results plainly, with his famous observation that you could fool all the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but you couldn’t fool all of them all of the time. He was right, but since he wasn’t given to quantitative thinking, I doubt he realized just how much much of the people his “some” actually embraced. Or maybe he was just an optimist.

So in addition to the basic problem in the multi-party state, there’s an overlay consisting of the allure of the imaginary community. Which translates into the power power of the “some” to force the acceptance of an imaginary world on the many, a power that Stalin transformed into a truly staggering inversion of reality: the idea of the opposition between Socialism and Fascism, which if you think about it was essentially the same as insisting that two and two didn’t equal four.

The Basic Problem>--Finally!

Simply put, it’s this. There’s a reason that a multi-party state, fosters the emergence of parties that only represent the interests of a small percentage of the electorate: they don’t appeal to the majority, are exclusively concerned with the interests. The Canadian example is typical, since the Quebec party only represents the interests of possibly twelve percent of the population, and the situation in Great Britain and Germany is even worse.

So without their support, no one could form a government, which is why the phrase “tyranny of the minority” is relevant.

The Europeans have an additional problem, with the EEU, but the end result is simply a super set of the inherent problem of the multi-party state.

Meanwhile, Back in the Real World

In 1913, Russia was the world’s largest exporter of grain. By 1987—seven decades after the “triumph” of the supposed October Revolution, it was the world’s largest importer. Two years later the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [sic] had imploded. By 1900, Great Britain was one of the three wealthiest countries in the world—the only question being whether its wealthy exceeded that of the United States and Germany.

Today, after decades of Socialism, Great Britain’s economic situation is somewhere around the bottom tier of the poorer of the American states, and Germany is probably even worse.

So if you’re wondering why the Europeans (and the British), can’t defend themselves, sure, they’ve been coasting on the United States, but at bottom it’s because the majority of the minority parties, are so economically illiterate they’ve destroyed the defense capabilities of each nation.

Take Germany, for example. When the Ukrainian War broke out, many of the European nations sent German tanks (the Leopard) to Ukraine. But under battlefield conditions, the Ukrainians discovered it was basically a dud. It was way too complicated, prone to breakdowns, and difficult to keep running. The not surprising result of an emasculated military deprived of the funds necessary to simulate real world battlefield conditions, and with no combat experience for three quarters of a century.

Of course human beings excel at denial and rationalization, but as Thoreau remarked, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

Sadly, like Lincoln, he grossly underestimated the ability of his fellows to stick to their fantasies, to insist that only a fascist would claim that trout existed. Besides, the benefits of trout milk were important. More people should drink it.

See the current Canadian, British, and European governments for how that’s working out. Helpful hint: it isn’t.