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this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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People act like this is new...
It's the same reason they keep ranting about "cities want to tell you how to live" and defending the electoral college.
They've never wanted democracy, because they're out numbered. They only have that power they do through disproportionate representation.
... and cheating, gerrymandering, and outright lying. They know they arent representing the majority and are trying to delay the inevitable demise of their power in every way possible.
They don't even have to cheat when it comes to the Senate. It was purpose made to provide disproportionate power to lower population areas. It is an explicitly anti-democratic chamber.
Which is a good thing...to a degree. A check against pure populism is necessary for any healthy Democracy.
But the ratio is completely out of wack nowadays, and doesn't align with how the country exists now. Democrats have to work much harder to get control of it, but Republicans have to do very little to keep it.
It's a structural flaw that is continually getting more destructive and Republicans become more brazen. The chamber that elects our Judges doesn't even have rules in the Constitution for how it must operate. That's such an incredible oversight I don't get how it took until now for it to be abused.
Cribbage players are massively underrepresented in Congress, so we need a third chamber that's designed to give equal representation to cribbage and non-cribbage playing Americans. It's only fair, and we all know that fair and equal are good. Maybe we should have a fourth chamber where trans people have equal representation too, to keep Republicans from continuing to try to trample their rights.
Land shouldn't vote, people should vote. No, I don't think rural Podunk should have equal representation to Metropolis. One person, one vote. That has absolutely nothing to do with "populism" by the way.
Reductio ad absurdum. The conversation at hand has nothing to do with classes of people or their specific interests.
I do agree that our current Senate structure was specifically designed to give more political power to states with lower populations. That may have made more sense when the country was being established. The senate isn't exactly about land having a vote though. It's about states themselves voting. The geographical size and the population of the state are both irrelevant.
It probably made sense in the 1700s. States needed that level of autonomy, and someone to speak on behalf of the state so that a federal policy that made sense to some states wasn't forced upon other independent states.
In the year 2023 I'm not so sure but I think there is still an argument to be had for states to have their own votes. For example, if the federal government wanted to levy taxes based on geographic size of the state, or the amount of land owned by individuals. Such a policy probably sounds great to people living in eastern states which are smaller but more densely populated compared to western states. If it came down to a vote based on population, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, the Dakotas are now stuck with a decision that negatively impacts their citizens unfairly.
The problem has to do with the way the two houses are combined. Both houses have to agree even though they have different representation needs and goals. It was a lazy compromise to just say "both houses must agree", but drawing a line between whether an issue is about a state or individuals on a national basis is very hard to do.
My example of cribbage players is indeed absurd, but it's no less absurd than the reality we have learned to accept through conditioning. That's not reductio ad absurdum, it's legitimate use of unfamiliar absurdity to make familiar absurdity visible.
The distribution of power to the states instead of the people was a political necessity to keep some states from leaving the table, not a visionary principal of anyone's ideal democracy. It never "made sense" at all, but was made necessary by the political realities of the time. No, it was not intended to give the vote to land, but that was it's effect.
Your example of taxation by land mass is a far better example of reductio ad absurdum. If democracy is to be viewed as tyranny of the majority, then any alternative is, by the same exact logic, a tyranny of the minority. Any power caries with it the risk of tyranny, no matter how it's distributed. Generally speaking, the less centralized power is, the less likely it is to be abused, but the risk is never zero.
Distributing power to the states instead of the people sounds like a step in the right direction from putting it in the hands of the federal government, but it's actually the opposite. There are countless examples where states get trapped in a race to the bottom. For instance, a state that raises the minimum wage has to risk jobs shifting to another state, or failing to find a privately owned business could move it to another state. Much of the power states have only exists until they try to use it. Since states can't control their borders and regulate trade with other states, the whole system just becomes an obstacle to reform.
It's also the reason they always say "We're a republic, not a democracy," despite the fact that a republic is a type of democracy. They abuse language to justify the fact that they don't want everyone to vote, only the people who vote for them. They also don't govern for all of their constituents, only those that contribute to their power. It's definitely not new.
A republic is simply a state without a king or other hereditary monarch. Often the leader is chosen democratically, but not always.
For example, China is a republic but not a democracy. The US is a democratic republic, which makes the claim "this is a republic not a democracy" even sillier.
--Jean-Paul Sartre
What I always like to do is point out that Republicans are about "picking our bosses who will make hard decisions we might not like" vs "doing what the majority wants".
I think a good government could use a little of both. But "majority wants" should be 99% of the laws, with only 1% being "hard, unpopular decisions". Republicans prefer 100% "unpopular decisions"
Majority of white hetero Christians in the 30s through 60s wanted to outlaw gay people, cannabis and harmless psychedelic mushrooms, and imprison black people for protesting with guns.
Fuck you and majority rule. Minorities also deserve voices.
Ok...
But now the majority want civil rights and the minority are openly saying we should get rid of democracy to prevent that, so I'm not sure how what you said is relevant at all
Perfect! Now it's the old bastards that grew up from that era as a minority in power making the choice to try to keep things like they were in the 30s through 60s!
I know you're trying to say "majority rule isn't always a good thing", but the alternative of "let a small group of people make decisions for everyone else" is just as bad and often times worse. It's though the changing of minds of the majority that societal changes happen.
This is not an open question in liberal representative democracies.
You set the basic rules of the game and the minimun set of universal rights down at the constitutional level so they're not accessible to change without massive consensus, then let the rest be subject to political legislative action under majority rule. People get the ability to express themselves under equal treatment from the law protected by consitutional rights while majority consensus sets the short-term decision-making.
If you want to actually have a functional one of those you also set a proportional electoral system, which makes smaller parties have a say through the frequent need to aggregate coalitions. This mostly works.
I swear, Americans have a fantastic knack for pretending it is physically impossible to resolve basic problems. "Sensible measurement units? If only we had the technology".
The problem is that the US system is old and outdated, buggy as fuck, and was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to change because that was what was necessary in order to get the slave states to join the union.
As for our measurements, we actually use a mix. In the military, science and engineering where it matters, we use metric. In everything else we use a kind of hybrid imperial system that in a lot of ways (not all) is much more intuitive than metric because it tends to be based on a human scale.
Cool.
So fix it.
That seems like a good case for voting primarily on the basis of reform. Your Constitution is barely functional and barely contains hard rules on lawmaking. Individual states have a ton of power. You can change a ton of things, from the size of the Supreme Court to how elections are structured.
You're doing the thing that I'm talking about right now. There is nothing in the US Constitution enforcing lifetime Supreme Court appointments or the current majorities. Fix that crap, then proceed to lock it in by constitutionalizing it ASAP. Why was that barely a blip after Trump effectively broke the Court and you spent the next few years learning about how corrupt the current batch of pseudo-aristocratic unaccountable magic people with power over the entire legislative corpus?
But nope, nobody knows how to properly set up a Constitutional Court (terms longer than a President's set to renew partially so that every term you get some drift towards the current leading party but not a complete reversal-- it-s literally on every other liberal democracy), and it'd be impossible to accomplish anyway despite just taking a normal law, somehow. You should also change that part, by the way. Ideally before Trump wins again and gets any ideas.
You seem to have missed the part where I pointed out that the US system was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to change.
What part about this do you not understand?
There is no magic "so fix it" switch.
This is a part of our system because it was what was necessary to account for slavery.
We can wish that this wasn't the case, but wishes aren't worth shit when it comes to facing hard political reality.
If it helps you to make sense of it, think of US democracy as a very old and buggy operating system that's almost impossible to update because it's full of ancient proprietary software that doesn't play nice with contemporary applications and that is supported by a large number of citizens who dislike the very idea of updating because they fear that it will somehow result in a net loss for them.
No, I didn't miss that part. I just happen to know what that part applies to, and there is plenty of readily available reform that only needs a normal law to enact that is not being enacted. The obviously broken major... "bug", as per your metaphor, of the Supreme Court being fundamentally broken does not need any of that legacy code, just a functional majority in the legislative. It's not the only example.
The fatalistic notion that the system is fossilized in place and has no room for reform is my point. Sure, there are some fundamental issues that require near-universal control of every state's legislature and that's become incredibly hard politically, but there are also massive issues that don't.
And for the fossilized part, you need to start with educational reform and have a century-long plan to de-lobotomize about half of your population. Because I'm not sure that if you can't hope to reach a widespread consensus you can expect to enforce that reform in any other way, either.
Yeeeeeah, I'm gonna ask you to stand way over there instead, if you don't mind.
I may poke fun at Americans going straight from extreme conformism to violent revolution, but you and I are very much not in the same wavelength here. Even if you weren't being obnoxious and rude I am clearly closer to them than you, politically.
Also, modern IP and copyright systems were profoundly broken before, but are entirely nonfunctional after the Internet happened, so... yeah, thinking you're barking up the wrong socialdemocrat tree, friend.