Yeah no, maybe I wasn’t clear; how many examples do you have of an issue where (2) is false, and therefore we shouldn’t put matters up to majority rule? Like I said, maybe you have a case with environmental regulation, but most examples I’m aware of involve local people wanting to extract value from the environment, rather than the other way around.
Again, it goes back to my previous comments: the concept of democracy is so easy a small child can understand it. Republicanism requires a civic class to understand. Federalism is complicated enough that it requires the Supreme Court to understand and practice it.
“Democracy!” makes a much better slogan than “some culturally-appropriate system of Popular Sovereignty as mediated through reasonable institutions!” Democracy is the ideal, and the reality can never hope to live up to the ideal.
Or to use another country as an example: you notice the Soviets worked to promote the rather appealing tenets of “Communism!” and not the obscure tenets of “a hierarchical system of progressively removed representative councils (soviets)!”, even though the latter had a much greater impact on the course of Russian history than the former. Communism was the ideal, and everyone in the USSR was pretty clear that they weren’t getting that yet.
If (2) in my post is false then it seems extremely likely that (1) would also be false: Or two bring it back without the now tedious enumeration: If the policy or platform at hand does NOT need to affect the entire nation equally, then it is likely that a simple majority vote of every person throughout the nation would probably NOT the best way to go. Not even close.
You can find examples by looking at pretty much very issue that the state governments choose to get into that the federal government generally stays out of. Theoretically, education and healthcare are still withheld to the states, despite some… creative hacking by the feds to influence it on a national scale. A whole lot of commerce and taxation. A whole lot of infrastructure, public works, and public transportation.
And there’s no reason that the city or state where these are happening couldn’t themselves choose simple majority rule among their own citizens if they chose too. In fact, true democracy becomes more workable the smaller a group is (and practically unworkable at a national scale). But it still wouldn’t make sense for, say, people in California to have equally-valued opinions about a rail line from Houston to Dallas.
Some topics clearly don’t need the feds. Some – like immigration and imports – can only work if you involve the feds. Some, such as employment law, are a hodgepodge of local and federal “thous shalts” and “thou shalt nots”. And the more complicated those issues are – the higher the stakes, the more specialized the insights, and the more stakeholders there are – the less a simple system like a popular majority votes makes sense.
The principle idea is that most things don’t need the federal government, and so it’s most reasonable to leave that to the states to sort out as they like, so long as those schemes don’t impinge on certain fundamental rights. Other things only work if the feds are involved – some enumerated, some because that’s just the sort of thing that defines a nation acting on the international scale – and that’s when they get involved.
We’ve gotten kind of far afield here, well away from the specific and into the very general. But I would sum up things thusly:
- the U.S. is not a democracy. Being a true democracy would be very hard. And we’re not even sure that true democracy would be the way to go.
- The U.S. was never built as a democracy. It gets more democratic over time, because forces of history mean it can or it must. But thinking of it as a flawed democracy misses the point that it is an increasingly effective republic.
- People disproportionately like easy but vague words (or even words that are easy because of their vaguery) like “democracy” and “freedom” in rhetoric.
- What the U.S. is is a Republic based fundamentally on states as entities, attempting to strike a balance between two different kinds of “equality”: one based on equality between states as members of this union, and one based on the equality of the citizens that each state represents.
- The proposal to abolish the electoral college and go to a national majority popular vote is totally feasible. It also completely alters the way campaigning and voting would be handled in America in a way that makes us ask “but would it be for the better…?”
- I believe it would not. It would help candidates further ignore the special interests of individual states in preference to a pre-determined national party line. It would help those parties get the vote while addressing a minimum number of citizen interests in a few select cities. It might help some large cities squeeze some federal money out of those parties in exchange for delivering and continuing to deliver a reliable stronghold of votes for those parties.
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Could you point at exactly which bit isn’t true?
I am fully aware that the USA was intended to be undemocratic from day one. That’s why I said “designed to disempower the working class”.
Unpacking that, you appear to be saying that if an issue is of broad national importance, then it is unlikely that a true national democratic decision would provide a fair and fruitful outcome in that situation.
Is that a correct reading?
If that is what you intended: why? And who or what should substitute for majority rule in that case?
If your answer to that is “the judgement of elected representatives”, why should those people not be elected in a truly representative manner?
For some reason, when the dems briefly had senate control in that period, they chose to spend their political efforts on obamacare and gay marriage and so on, instead of a constitutional amendment that will never pass. I guess that means they don’t care to you.
And no, electoral reform cannot happen unilaterally. Partial reform - for example making specific states proportional - would make the situation even more unfair than the present.
Make election day a public holiday.
As far as I’m aware, Obama could have done that at essentially zero cost in political capital as soon as he was elected. That alone would have done much to re-enfranchise the working class.
The gerrymander and other forms of voter suppresion/nullification are harder to deal with, but it would have been a good start.
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