Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

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Now they notice? Voter efficiency (the number of voters needed to get a legislative seat) has an all-time high partisan divide, especially thanks to gerrymandering designed to ensure the party in power in 2010 can just win everything this whole decade. The two "political parties" have effectively become regional groupings that set rural against urban.

The term "working class" has been racialized and regionalized to somehow refer exclusively to white people in rural states, even while non-white and/or non-rural people work most of the low-wage jobs in the country. Meanwhile, actual class politics is regularly preempted from above, preventing localities and states from improving their labor laws, health-care programs, or the like.

Norms around the Senate filibuster broke down years ago when it was changed into a mere procedural maneuver that allows for blocking literally anything without a supermajority. The bargaining process of nominating Supreme Court (and federal court) justices has turned into a stonewall.

Oh, and most so-called ballots in the United States don't actually have more than one candidate for each office, which contributes heavily to the >90% re-election rates for incumbents.

In short: we live in a de facto one-party state, with the only real variation being whether the Blue neoliberal capitalist party or the Red authoritarian nationalist/identitarian capitalist party has one-party control where you live.

And now the New York Times call it a threat to democracy?

The NY Times has been discussing gerrymandering for years. (Here's an opinion piece back from 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/opinion/12thu1.html) The topic has also been routinely discussed in all kinds of political rags for years as well.

The problem with the topic of gerrymandering is that it's always been a discussion relegated to the political rags, wonks and Sunday morning policy discussion shows. Your average voter flipping through the channels looking for sports and weather isn't going to stop and listen in on an in-depth conversation about gerrymandering. Even if they do, they most likely will say "well, what can I do about it?" and move on with their day.

That last bit is truly unfortunate, because the answer is mostly easy: vote in every election you can, not just the ones that come up every four years.

For an example I'm familiar with, here in Virginia we have 5.5 million registered voters, and 3.9 million of them voted in the 2016 election. Yay! However, in the 2015 election, when the entire state legislature was chosen, as well as many local offices, only 1.5 million people voted. And then people are shocked, shocked, when the state government doesn't represent them very well.

If people would stop thinking that President is the only office that really matters and start voting at every opportunity, a lot of these problems would just go away.

the big cities will tend to steamroll over the priorities of the rural voter, and urban voter priorities differ from rural voter priorities.

in a way, it seems natural that rural voters will lean a little toward whatever party is out of power in the cities.

e.g. urban voters are happy to add more land to parks and monuments, while rural voters might be happy to leave the land open to hunting, cattle grazing, logging, etc because that's their livelihood.

urban voters may be happy to rearrange water rights so that water flows into cities more easily. rural voters probably prefer to use the water locally for farming.

in rural California, a voter who perceives that Los Angeles wants to take water away (hurting farms), might start supporting whatever political party pushes back on Los Angeles even if the voter disagrees with some of that party's positions on other issues

>the big cities will tend to steamroll over the priorities of the rural voter

Only if there are more urban voters than rural voters, with little spread of suburbia between them. For almost all of American history, this wasn't true.

The original reason to over-enfranchise rural areas was because in the Colonial period, rural areas were wealthy and urban areas were perpetually in debt. The Founders didn't want the urban areas, which held pluralities but not majorities of the population, to vote away their debts to the rural landholders.

Of course, nowadays it's the opposite way around: the cities hold the wealth and the rural areas are in perpetual debt, as well as constantly receiving net transfer payments from urban America even when rural citizens are not actually poor at all. If we had a one person, one vote system, I would be happy to discuss the cultural and economic divides between urban and rural voters. As it is, we have a system in which rural voters just count for more seats than urban ones, so the particular parties and policy positions don't matter nearly as much as that foundational issue.

Interesting. It seems that the same underlying dynamic would quite possibly have been present at a lot of other times in American history too. But it would have run in the opposite direction: rural voters steamrolling the priorities of the urban voter, causing urban voters to lean a bit toward whatever political party opposed the rural voters (if there was such a party).

Calling out Republicans specifically over identity politics seems kind of silly, given how much of the Democratic Party's politics is based on race and gender.

There's a difference between saying "Group X is pretty neat" and "Group Y are the only real Americans and should have an exclusive grip on political power."

So for instance, the Democrats run on, "We need equal pay for women." The actual size of the wage gap can be debated as a factual matter (once you factor out different professions and hours-worked, it's usually about 5-10%). Then the Republicans run on, "Real Americans need to take our country back!", despite their "real Americans" (as a conjunction of features) composing a minority group that's only 20% of the country[1].

One of them plays the identity politics of inclusion, often duplicitously. The other plays the identity politics of exclusion and minority rule, often honestly.

There's a vast difference between obnoxious campaign rhetoric along the lines of Clinton and an organized decades-long campaign to disenfranchise people who don't vote the way you want or don't share your conjunction of identity features.

[1] -- http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/only-20-percent-of-voter...

Stubbornly insisting that your party of choice holds the moral high ground and the other side is morally reprehensible is only going to get you President Trump. You'd do much better to assume that your political opponents voted the way they did in spite of those issues you consider immoral rather than because of them and then see where you can find common ground to work with them.

You should notice how I didn't refer to either party as mine, and specifically called them both "capitalist parties", which for me is a term of insult.

My objection is that if I work outside the two-party electoral system I am labelled a lunatic and potentially even criminal, while if I work inside it, my voice is diluted for partisan advantage.

> One of them plays the identity politics of inclusion, often duplicitously. The other plays the identity politics of exclusion and minority rule, often honestly.

I don't think that's really fair: the difference is regarding whom they exclude & whom the include. Democrats, for example, appear to be quite glad to exclude Christians.

In what sense have Democrats acted to legally disenfranchise Christian voters, ie: to keep them from the polls, override their voices, or reduce their voter efficiency? I don't even like the Dems, but the simple fact is that they're on the defensive with regards to voter efficiency right now, so they haven't had the opportunity and power to disenfranchise people in the same way as the Republicans have.

Well they failed to do it but given the opportunity they would have used immigration and amnesty to shift demographics in order to dilute these people's votes (and make money for their donors by holding labor costs down)

Which is largely a reaction to the discriminatory policies of the Republican Party that either endorses discrimination (ex: sexual orientation) or pretends it doesn't exist (ex: racism in the criminal justice system).

It's all pretty gross and cyclical. Identity politics in general is often a shiny thing waved around to distract people from difficult or politically costly work, usually regarding how much rich people and corporations have to pay for things.

"don't actually have more than one candidate for each office"

Huh. You just now made me realize that I (we) have been using the wrong rhetoric (framing) about redistricting (gerrymandering).

For future, I'll talk about voter choice, instead of maximal fairness.

Thank you.

> supermajority

I suspect the country does better when the government isn't passing all sorts of new laws. Remember when Congress spent the whole year investigating Clinton rather than "getting things done"? The country had a very prosperous year.

When one party controls Congress and the other controls the Executive it tends to be good for the country.

>I suspect the country does better when the government isn't passing all sorts of new laws.

You're entitled to that opinion. You're not entitled to rewrite the rules to enforce it on everyone -- that's supposed to require a Constitutional amendment.

>When one party controls Congress and the other controls the Executive tends to be good for the country.

Right now we have one party controlling the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, despite the fact that they got strictly fewer votes for both the Senate and the Presidency. In fact, they only control the House because it hasn't been readjusted for population size since 1910: actually restoring the original ratios of voters to Representatives would create hundreds of new seats in the more urbanized states.

This is undemocratic, and no amount of whining about the procedural finery of the American regional-federal system changes that. The majority of Americans are disenfranchised by our existing system, which no longer operates according to anything like nonpartisan rules, but instead operates to ensure perpetual Republican government.

Do you also disagree with the Senate, where each state gets 2 votes regardless of its population?

Well of course, since it's so blatantly hypocritical. When talking about the Senate, people claim the states are sovereign and separate, but when legislating regarding the drinking age, civil liberties, or even just how schools work, all of a sudden every state is compelled to play along as if the United States was a unitary nation-state.

Besides, if we really wanted to equalize things, even within a federal system, we could just split up some of the larger states, which would instantly increase the voter efficiency of people living there.

Whether power rests at the federal level or the state level, people deserve control over the decisions that affect our lives.

Why would the New York Times complain when Team Blue was winning?

The NYT isn't nearly as biased as everyone makes it out to be.

I believe it was Noam Chomsky who described the NYT in the following way: It's an establishment paper, but there's a range of political opinions within the establishment, and the NYT is on the left side of that range. That range is narrower than the range of opinions for the population as a whole. Thus the NYT could be described as "liberal establishment," but not extreme left.

NYT's only concern is access to power. Which they just lost.

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