All the arguments about rural/“urban” (we know what you really mean) are completely irrelevant. It pure idiocy to say that issues that affect rural voters are completely different from urban voters. It is a very calculated message that pretends we are still in the 19th century and there are actual valid differences between farm and town, as if universal healthcare is equivalent to being able to walk your cow down a street. We all need food, we all need shelter, public services need to be maintained, the destitute must cared for, the sick must be healed, global warming is real and must be dealt with sooner rather than later, employees must be protected from abuse by businesses.
If a minority, and it is a minority as given the popular vote, decide that those things are not true whether by malice or lack of knowledge and nothing should be done about them, then they should rightfully be ignored and disregarded. If you choose to wallow in ignorance and bigotry, then you should be refused consideration. Instead, we have a system that rewards their stupidity, that allows a minority of dunces undue weight over the governing of hundreds of millions of people.
And it is very telling the farther the general population creeps to the left, the more republicans cry about the “tyranny of the majority”. Almost as if you know your ideology is a failed broken mess that only benefits the few.
Or, to any extent they are relevant, those concerns should logically apply to all kinds of elections instead of just the Presidency.
States don’t structure gubernatorial elections so voters in sparsely populated rural counties get a bigger proportional influence on the outcome than voters in densely populated urban counties.
Why bother to vote when the Electoral College and gerrymandering make our votes irrelevant? Our elections are just a sham. This is the type of sentiment which starts revolutions and rebellions.
The electoral college was created to induce slaveholders to become part of the system. Doesn’t seem relevant today.
Also another reason was to give the electors responsibility for preventing a mob electing a demagogue or an agent under foreign influence for taking control of our country. In the regard, the electoral college failed spectacularly.
And then there is the issue of whether it is wise to have a system where a candidate wins by 3 million votes, but the system installs the other guy as president. People might wonder why be part of the sham and even vote, if it is really the electoral college that chooses our president. If the people have no say, many might decide that rebellion and revolution might be the way to go.
The report from fantasyland…
Lessig is correct that the Electoral College per se is contrary to the concept of one person, one vote. But with SCOTUS on the cusp of eliminating that concept by declaring gerrymandering acceptable*, I don’t know what solution there is other than bottom up efforts to vote anti-democratic pols out of office and replaced by people who would draw proper districts.
Oh yes. I mean, the electoral college is a problem, but the much, much larger problem of the US political system is the rampaging voter disenfranchisement, when large parts of the population are effectively denied the right to vote. Blatantly put, this is why the USA is not a democracy (anymore).
It never really was. By the time universal women’s suffrage came around, Jim Crow was in full swing. And the system was designed to disempower the working class from day one.
The con has certainly lost its subtlety of late, though. The USA had been downgraded to semi-democratic status before the Trumpists took power. It’s well over the border now; fascists are counting the votes.
On top of that, I sometimes wonder whether there exists any proper democracy at all, since there is no country that I know of that allows under-age citizens to vote. I guess most of you can agree that most 14 year olds are more mature than the current president.
This is also not true. Even if women had been able to vote from the beginning, and even if all men were free and able to vote from the beginning, and even if voting wasn’t tied to ownership of real property, then the U.S. would have still never have been a democracy. It’s always been a Republic, which is a term from pretty much anything where the governed have rights and a say in government, but not a direct vote.
The U.S. under the Articles of Confederation was a Republic governed as a unicameral house on the principle of one state, one vote, unanimity required for all votes. That was totally unworkable in practice, even for people who like the notion of a government that literally does nothing, ever.
Under the Constitution of 1789, it became a republic based on a bicameral system where the House of Representatives were directly elected, were roughly allotted according to population, and had all the power to propose legislation, while the Senate was based on the classic notion of one state, one vote (well, two votes, but the same ratio). And for the first hundred years of this, Senator were appointed by state legislatures, not chosen by a vote.
At no point in the Federal theory, nor in the founder’s intent as the documented it, nor in practice has the U.S. ever come close to being a democracy. Even if instant communication had been available and made it possible to govern a continent that way, it wouldn’t have been. It was built deliberately to avoid many of the pitfalls of democracy, what Jefferson termed “the tyranny of the majority”.
The notion that the U.S. should be democratic is both novel, and not universal.
Of course you know what we mean… because we said it. There are city dwellers that have few social services and there are urban dwellers which have many that make them care about how they are run. It’s a real distinction. There are also northern states that care about snowfall and the price of heating oil and southern states that don’t. There are manufacturing states that care about tariffs and states without manufacturing that probably care more about getting cheap imports.
God does not distribute his blessings evenly. Everybody has their own advantages and problems, and their own priorities for problems that you think would be common. This is the basic fact of geography that gives rise to every economic, cultural, and value difference humans have.
And yet, somehow as a nation we manage to find ways not to agree on the priority of those things, or what we’re willing to give up to make it happen. We could assume one of two things: 1) most people are idiots, or 2) maybe people just have different goals
So get people you agree with to turn out and vote… Voter turnout is around 10%, so for pretty much any platform you put forth, there’s a lot of untapped potential.
So far, this thread has been about democracy – whether or not it’s the ideal, and how we surely aren’t living up to that ideal. But that is also contrary to the notion that we single out any group of people to systematically ignore, because they keep showing up and we don’t. If that’s what you want, it sure isn’t democracy.
I voted for Hillary. She was the superior conservative choice to the Grand Cheetoh. But no part of Trump’s victory undermined my internal model or any other model of basic American civics. He got the vote out. Clinton did not. People who never pay attention to politics in any meaningful way found out that they should have read the manual. Next time, vote.
The margin between Trump and Clinton was arguably 2%, based on how you choose to count a very tiny portion of the vote (as opposed to, say, recounting the vote everywhere rather than just battleground states). That’s what most people would call “rounding error”. I personally feel that approving any major decision based on which way the wind blows 2% of voters is just insane, and that’s a much more real problem than the granularity of the Electoral College. (And if we want to talk about some sort of reasonable safeguard on that, such as narrowing run-off’s until some candidate gets at least 60%, two-thirds, etc., then I’d be in favor of that.)
Tariffs affect everyone in a country equally (seriously that is the dumbest point in this whole post), and to pretend that manufacturing going overseas is the result of tariffs or taxes or whatever else Fox News makes up and not greed by the 1% is one of the biggest lies that continues to be pushed. How snow fall is a rural/urban issue is confusing to me, because that is the point I was making; the differences between rural and urban are negligible and trivial to the point of irrelevancy, but I guess making some distinction about how much you need to shovel your driveway is a pretty good example of the irrelevant bullshit people make up to try and say there’s a difference.
Yes, exactly one subset, a minority of the population, chooses to ignore reality, which is each of the things I listed. Choosing to ignore global warming, refusing universal healthcare, and employee abuse by business are real things that must be dealt with. To pretend they are not is taking the side of ignorance, not “different goals”.
Reminder that Trump lost by three million votes, no matter how “small” a margin you want to want to pretend that was. When I say a minority, I mean a minority.
Well, since a simple majority is usually defined as consensus given that unending debate is a good way for nothing to be accomplished, and is in fact the margin the electoral college itself relies on, I’d say this whole paragraph is worthless.
I’m just sick and tired of a bunch of racist hicks deciding the fate of the country because a bunch of slaveowners from the 18th century wanted more votes. Cry about the tyranny of the majority all you want, I’ll take it over kids being denied learning about history because a bunch of oil state dipshits want to rewrite textbooks, or over-spending on the military because flag-worshiping idiots want to jerk off to another war, or not being able to afford to go to the doctor because poor people just need to use their bootstraps to cure cancer.
You’ve said this twice now, and it is an inaccurate portrayal of the origin of the EC. While it is true that Madison (and probably Hamilton) are on record that the EC would be an easier sell to the southern states than the popular vote alternative, that was not the reason for the EC. The problem they were trying to solve was they didn’t want the president elected by the Senate only, a kind of superdelegate system that is still alive in parliamentary systems (eg, Theresa May was not elected by general popular vote).
There are also different people within each state that care about different things; people on the coast may care about different things than people inland, people in the foothills care about different stuff than people on the prairies, so on and so forth. The idea that states are some proper and ideal measure of regional sentiment was half-baked at the outset, and makes no sense now.
No doubt. But treating states as being a fair representation of several minority opinions is still less-terrible than treating the country of 50 states taken as a unified whole as being a fair representation of those same minorities.
I disagree. Let’s say you have a platform that appeals to the vast majority (say 80%) of voters in 24 states and a significant minority (say 40%) of voters in the remaining 26 states.* Even though this minority of states actually supports the platform favored by the majority of Americans, it’s still a losing proposition in the winner-take-all electoral college system.
(*Hypothetical example assumes all states have equal electoral power for the sake of simplicity)
True. And whether that situationbis fundamentally wrong or simply unfortunate depends on 1) whether you feel like policy should be a matter of simple majority rule or not, and 2) whether the policy covers somethig that rightly ahould effect the entire nation (every single state) uniformly. If (2) is false, then it probably should not be a matter for Congress. The more (2) is true, the less likely it seems that (1) is a fair and fruitful way to proceed.
How many examples of (2) do you really have though? The only example I can think of is something like environmental policy, which in my own personal experience, actually confounds this idea; people in rural areas are actually less likely to support conservation, as they live spaced out far enough from their neighbors that they rarely experience environmental externalities, and thus are reluctant to impose any regulations on extraction. So, sure, Federalism is a good argument for land conservation, if the people being given extra votes actually cared about land conservation…
Immigration, trade and tariffs, military policy, fiscal policy, voting, income tax,… all the defining qualities of the federal government as opposed to a state government. All of them fields where letting the states handling it basically mean it wouldn’t work. All of them complex trade-offs between a ton of stakeholders.
Hm, interesting, I hadn’t seen it laid out like this before. But hasn’t it been the explicit claim of the U.S. for quite a long time that it is a democracy and a model for the rest of the world? How novel is “Make the world safe for democracy…”?
