So, you’re talking about the Tyranny Of Majority problem, something all democracies need to be wary of. However, that’s not what the electoral college is solving for. The judiciary in the American system is supposed to be set up to protect the minority.
Furthermore, one must be wary of going too far the other way and ending up with minority rule. That is 100% unambiguously where America is. 20000 people in a handful of counties in swing states create the entire structure of the federal government. It’s a travesty.
Hand wringing about the small states getting sad if the EC goes away is misplaced at best, in poor taste and even racist at worst. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on that.
I could not agree more. An oligarchy is no better to the people who are being crushed by said tyrany. I just don’t believe that jumping from the frying pan into the fire while describing the fire as a cool soothing brook is very useful if the point is finding a real solution.
We literally live in an oligarchy that has gotten more extreme with time, and your earlier points regarding things like “food producing states” or states leaving the union are also false.
So who is actually pitching the unrealistic solution here? The ones attempting to improve it with simple robust systems other democracies have, or the ones saying we cannot change anything because we are risking the same tyrannies we are currently living with?
You seem to be trying to make the point that the electoral college has any value in preventing a tyranny of majority. There is no evidence for that. Again, that is not its role in the American system, either as designed or in practice. Even if it was, the notion of being so afraid of Californians making some of the rules and disrupting the iron grip of Ohio and Pennsylvania that we shouldn’t touch the EC, is comical to the point of disingenuous. No populous states have had any real say in the affairs of this country for decades. Not since the country was agrarian has the EC been the least bit just or representative.
You’re working hard to make a “throwing the baby out with the bath water” argument, but that only applies if there’s a baby and the bath water isn’t raw sewage.
Right now it’s very clear what people are not being represented properly in American politics. For instance, Hispanic, black, and native people are all routinely marginalized. To ensure proper representation, should we maybe change to a system where their votes count for more than other people’s?
And if no, why the heck is “lives in state without many other people in it” so much more important?
The US isn’t the only federation of states. There are others that you can look to and they almost all solve the problem of representation of states’ interests at the federal level in the same way: representatives of the state governments form one of the two chambers of the parliament.
Turns out the US has that system, too, it’s called the Senate. That’s the mechanism that makes sure states get their say. Every state gets two senators, regardless of population and that’s where they make their case, they don’t need to additionally decide the election of the executive through an undemocratic weighting of votes.
Republics are countries without monarchies, nothing more. Democracies are countries with various forms of voting, most often it is representative democracy.
You can have both, either or neither. The Republican party seems to favour neither.
That’s one way to do it. You can also PM me, if you like, though please don’t be upset if I don’t get it right away. I’m really not here all the time, even if it looks like it some days.
I think maybe leaders as a group can be @summoned, but I’m not going to try it out in this thread.
So much about the US constitution and early political systems were created out of pure pragmatic considerations. They had to hammer a whole government system out of whole cloth with little time to do it in and several factions (apart from the British…) that might use violence to upset things for their own means.
There was no grand plan, no god-inspired vision, not even any special intention. They just rigged something up that worked well enough until congress and state assemblies got some solid ground under their feet and then, then things stuck, and the idea of deified “founding fathers” got root and nothing could be changed after.
Confusingly, a Senator, within his or her own state, may be more democratically representative than the house delegation. That’s because the 17th amendment made Senators independent of state legislatures.
The constitution is a series of bugfixes and patches to a codebase that needs to be rewritten from scratch.
There’s also the time zone thing. Washington, Oregon, and California have less say than the East Coast because the presidency is usually determined before polls close in Pacific Time. Not to mention Alaska and Hawaii.
Then there’s the stupid primary timing. Iowa gets a ridiculous amount of pork due to their early place in the primary system. There should be a rotation of states getting the early slots to avoid that bias.
