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Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

"Truly" is doing a lot of work here, and creating an is/ought problem.

Representatives do reflect the will of the people who elected them. The real problem is, on an individual level, your vote is statistically irrelevant, so it's easy to disassociate, and to blame "the others" who, collectively, have a vastly more powerful say over who represents you than you do. "They ought to vote more like how I want them to." you can say, "They don't vote correctly and I can't stop them, so it's the system's fault for giving them power over me!" This, of course, completely undermines the entire point of democracy, that it represents the collective will of the people, not any individual's arbitrary will.

A representative democracy works even if you don't believe it does. It stops working if everyone doesn't believe it does, which is certainly not even close to the case in the US.

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> Representatives do reflect the will of the people who elected them.

First, this is false. Policy in the US is dictated by campaign contributions, not voter sentiment.

Take a wildly popular idea, like universal background checks for firearm purchases. This enjoys something like 80-90% support among both Republican and Democratic voters, but it will never get through Congress, because of the NRA.

Second, "the people who elected them" is not itself representative of society as a whole. The US Senate and the US Presidency are decided by mechanisms that intentionally award oversized representation to certain geographical areas. There are only ten states with a population higher than Los Angeles County, but those states still get two Senators.

So American democracy is built to reflect the will of the monied, and the will of small population centers. Most of us are not rich, and most of us live in dense population centers. This means our system of government is giving us the exact opposite outcome we should be looking for.

It's not "false" in the sense that 1+1=3 is false, though you may disagree with it.

American democracy does not reflect the will of the monied, it reflects the will of the people, you just don't like what that aggregate will represents because it's not your will. No matter how much money gets dumped into elections, people actually have to vote in them, and you cannot serve in any elected capacity without first being elected.

Maybe the will of the people can be changed with money, and maybe it can be changed to reflect views that are ultimately harmful to the very people who hold those views, but it is the will of the people.

Wealth doesn't actually, literally, buy votes, and it is "1+1=3" kind of false to claim it does.

You may not like what your system of government produces as its outcomes, but it's exactly what it should be producing; a reflection of what its people want. I'm sorry it's not what you want, and I'm sorry that individual issue polling doesn't reflect reality, but when the polling actually matters, people vote differently than when a single issue is up for a non-binding, theoretical discussion.

> You may not like what your system of government produces as its outcomes, but it's exactly what it should be producing; a reflection of what its people want.

This is absolutely untrue, because representation is intentionally not proportional to population. Our electoral system produces a reflection of what some people want, and those people are typically from smaller, more conservative, less populated, less economically viable areas.

Because of this, US policy does not reflect the will of the majority on most major issues.

Most people support taxing the ultra-wealthy at a higher percentage of their income, but this is not US policy.

Most people support background checks on all firearms sales, but this is not US policy.

Most voters support campaign finance reform, but this is not US policy.

Most voters support a ban on Representatives actively trading stocks, but this is not US policy.

More than half of voters support at least some form of student loan forgiveness, but this is not US policy.

You can basically walk the link of current important issues, and find that the will of the people is not represented at the Federal level. I don't like what our system of government produces, not because it goes against what I want, but because it goes against what most people want. It is a majority held hostage by the tyranny of a minority, and that is becoming less and less tenable as time goes on.

Again, nothing I'm saying is "absolutely untrue" in any objective sense; you're saying you disagree with it sure, but it's not objectively false.

You claim "most people support" a bunch of things here, but how do you know? A poll conducted on one specific issue, without discussing tradeoffs? "If you could snap your fingers and get this for free with zero downside?" style polling options? They're not realistic and don't give people any stake, which means people will answer in ways they wouldn't otherwise if actually given the choice (and all its downsides).

These things you list aren't US policy because people don't actually want those things to be US policy. They trust their selected representative to dive into the details of those issues, and when those representatives do, those reps tend not to support them to the degree that you claim the people do.

You're upset your favorite things don't get the attention you want them to get, but that's the point; one person doesn't wholly determine anything in the US government. It's built to keep one group of people from crushing other groups of people, and it's working.

I agree with your comment about representatives catering to special interests, bribes, etc. Their constituents aren't usually first or second in priority. Public corruption is a serious problem.

But as for the Senate and Presidency being decided by mechanisms that aren't directly tied to population—that's by design. The United States is comprised of 50 States that jointly gave up some of their sovereignty to become a republic. They're more than just administrative districts of a national government. Aforementioned issues aside, the House of Representatives is supposed to represent the will of the _people_ while the Senate is supposed to represent the will of the _States_. The Senate is the States' representation at the Federal level. (Indeed, before the 17th Amendment US Senators were elected by State legislatures, not popular vote. Part of the motivation for the 17th Amendment was—wait for it—corruption in the state legislatures!)

It may be that moving to more population-based representation scheme would alleviate some issues. It also brings a downside: less populated states would get steamrolled by the more populated ones. (This was the Virginia Plan at the Constitutional Convention.) The 10th Amendment explicitly states that any power not expressly granted to the Federal government by the Constitution is retained by the States (States' rights/sovereignty), so basing Senate representation on population rather than giving each State equal representation would disenfranchise some States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Plan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_...

edit: formatting

In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton received far more campaign contributions than her opponents but she still lost. Campaign contributions aren't sufficient to overcome negative voter sentiment.

https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16

US states are free to impose universal background checks on firearm purchases, and several have. It doesn't need to be done at the federal level.

Does the NRA not represent the will of a group of people? If a group of people get together, put their money together and tell that group of people to sway politicians with that money, then you can reasonably say that that is the will of people, albeit, people with a specific issue on their mind.

I don't think it is the best system, but you can't say that PACs aren't working toward the will of the people that put the money behind them.

If you didn't realize we have the senate and the house of representatives, one is proportional to population and one is based on state-hood. I think it creates a reasonable balance, especially because small states would otherwise have almost no voice in the federal government. The densely populated cities in the US already have a lot of sway in general elections and especially in state-wide elections, which have a greater influence on their lives anyway. Making sure less-densely populated regions, which are vital for the country in their own way, is not a terrible thing, as much as that irks Democrats that would like more control.

This is trivially refutable by anybody who has voted for a compromise candidate, which is effectively everyone. 60% of Americans think that marijuana should be legal for recreational use [0], yet it remains illegal at the federal level. You cannot claim plausibly claim this situation reflects the will of the voters. Rather, the voters' will is herded into a few bundled choices, who differentiate themselves on hot button topics while safely ignoring consensus on less divisive ones.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/16/americans-o...

Several serious candidates in the 2020 presidential election explicitly supported federal marijuana legalization (or at least decriminalization). They didn't get many votes in the primaries, so apparently voters don't consider that an important issue.

You demonstrated my exact critique - voters were made to express their preferences in an extremely limiting fashion. Having to prioritize issues directly implies not being able to express your will on some issues.

"America" is not the jurisdiction, it's the 435 districts and the 50 states. It's the will of each of those constituencies that decide who is sent to congress, rather than a straight popular vote.

National issues do not impact the nation equally, and the US's legislative body represents that fact.

Deciding how we, as a group of people, live together is much more complex than, "Let's just vote on each thing!" A system like that is rife with all kinds of "wolves vote to eat the sheep" problems, to a degree much worse than any system we might have right now in the US.

If 60% of voters are in favor of legalizing marijuana, then legalizing marijuana is the will of the voters, period. The voting system limits the way the voters' will can be expressed, thereby making the outcome not reflect the will of the voters.

If you'd like to make an argument that our national representative system weighs voters from different states unequally, I'm open to that. But that's the kind of thing that will generally get you a few percentage points, not 10%. Or translate the argument to medical marijuana which per that link is supported by 91% of Americans. That magnitude can't be explained away with weighting or quantization error.

I'm very aware of the tyranny of the majority ("wolves vote to eat the sheep"), and would have included such a caveat that following the will of the voters is not always just and that it's an assertion to judge by simple majority, but that is not what we're discussing. Also on the topic of marijuana deillegalization, this isn't a majority wanting to aggress onto a minority and take away their rights, but rather a majority wanting to end such aggression - tyranny of the majority does not apply.

> If 60% of voters are in favor of legalizing marijuana, then legalizing marijuana is the will of the voters, period.

How do you know this? I'm sure polls have been conducted, but without stakes, and understanding of the consequences, of the downsides, of the costs, there's no way a random voter would be capable of executing a policy decision as complex as legalizing a drug.

That's why they elect representatives, and at a national level the people have not chosen to elect representatives who have made this an important enough priority to create and pass legislation making this view into law. At a state level, some voters have chosen to prioritize this, by picking representatives who value this view over other views, and prioritize passing legislation. The system worked, for those people.

The point here is that if your favorite poll were accurate, and did indeed reflect the will of the people, they'd prioritize it highly enough to vote accordingly. However, it isn't important enough to supercede other issues, so it remains not the will of the people.

It's a lot more complex, figuring out what people want, than just asking them.

> at a national level the people have not chosen to elect representatives who have made this an important enough priority

> The point here is that if your favorite poll were accurate, and did indeed reflect the will of the people, they'd prioritize it highly enough to vote accordingly. However, it isn't important enough to supercede other issues, so it remains not the will of the people.

You're essentially falling back to a simple tautology, shoehorning the "will of the people" to simply mean how they voted, even though a vote is an extremely limiting expression of a voter's overall will. This is utterly useless when discussing the effectiveness of our specific voting/representational system.

How is, "A poll on a single issue is not the same as electing an entire person." a tautology?

The will of the people is (usually, always federally) expressed in selecting a representative, not in any single issue, and that's by design. "The will of the people" isn't, "Legalize marijuana" it's, "My representative figures out a way to sanely legalize marijuana while balancing thousands of other initiatives and objectives according to their urgency and importance in a way I would, overall, approve of."

Very few people want chaos, so very few people are voting simply on, "I just want this done, regardless of the cost."

I don't think you're interpreting these single issue polls in a way that's applicable to how Americans want the US as a whole governed, instead you're interpreting those polls to just mean what you want them to mean, because it's a useful thing to point out as a mismatch between expectation and reality.

It is not, however, a mismatch at all.

> How is, "A poll on a single issue is not the same as electing an entire person." a tautology?

The problem isn't that you're saying they're different. The problem is that you're defining "will of the voters" narrowly, being equivalent to the result of an election. This makes your argument itself a tautology - if the "will of the voters" consists purely of how they voted, then of course the currently elected representatives are always the will of the voters. But if we're discussing how effective our representational system is, then your tautological definition is completely uninteresting.

> The will of the people is (usually, always federally) expressed in selecting a representative, not in any single issue, and that's by design. "The will of the people" isn't, "Legalize marijuana" it's, "My representative figures out a way to sanely legalize marijuana while balancing thousands of other initiatives and objectives according to their urgency and importance in a way I would, overall, approve of."

You're doing it again here, presupposing that a "voter's will" can only consist of what they can express through the current voting system, as opposed to what they would like to express when voting but cannot.

My reference to a single issue opinion pole is precisely to show how voters' desires differ from their representatives' actions (with the assumption that pollees are representative of voters). If we use your definition, then the obvious "will of the voters" is to keep marijuana illegal, but this isn't saying much. Whereas using the broader definition, then we can talk about how the representative and plurality systems thwart the will of the voters by making them express their will in terms of constrained choices.

Of course I'm presupposing that voting on individual issues for a country as large and diverse as the US is a terrible idea, because it's a terrible idea. That is, definitionally, anarchy, and does not create a stable or fair government for anyone.

I did presuppose that you understood that. Maybe that was not appropriate, but I'm not willing to discuss it, because I find it, a priori, a non-starter.

This is well trod intellectual ground, and if you're curious, you can find ample writings debating the topic of a direct democracy vs. a representative democracy elsewhere that'll more accurately frame the discussion than anything I could come up with off the top of my head for free on HN.

Given that a direct democracy results in substantially negative outcomes for the people who participate, therefore a representative democracy is about voting for the person, not the policy, and in that environment, the will of the people is indeed expressed as the selection of their representative, not on any isolated "What if you could magically have something with no downsides?" issue based polling.

Narrowly focusing on one specific issue is naive. the US doesn't exist in a single-issue bubble, it exists in a complex web of political and practical (not to mention entirely unpredictable) needs which all have to be balanced simultaneously. If you want to pretend legislators can snap their fingers and make any individual issue "just happen" that's fine, but it's not reflective of reality on any level. You will continue to be confused and disappointed if you decide to live that way.

I've made no claim to the contrary, and I agree at the very least that any proposal for direct democracy would be quite complicated even if it sounds simple.

But that doesn't really have bearing on what I said. Voter opinion on individual issues is merely one metric we can use to evaluate how well the "will of the voters" is being represented. Another one, more focused on representational government, would be whether most voters are happy with the vote they cast, or whether they feel they had to compromise and vote "strategically".

These questions are important for being able to discuss changes to our system. For example, posing the question of whether RCV/Condorcet would represent the will of the voters better than party-controlled primaries plus first past the post.

Voter opinion on individual issues is not a valid metric for evaluating how well the "will of the voters" is being represented.

Do you care to back up that assertion with some reasoning?

To me, seeing that 91% of people support medical marijuana while representatives continue to do nothing is pretty damning.

Just for context here, I don't have a personal stake in the marijuana question. I just think such a governance failure is galling.

> Do you care to back up that assertion with some reasoning?

I already did.

> Narrowly focusing on one specific issue is naive. the US doesn't exist in a single-issue bubble, it exists in a complex web of political and practical (not to mention entirely unpredictable) needs which all have to be balanced simultaneously. If you want to pretend legislators can snap their fingers and make any individual issue "just happen" that's fine, but it's not reflective of reality on any level. You will continue to be confused and disappointed if you decide to live that way.

What's more interesting is why you'd claim I hadn't, when I very clearly did.

It's almost like you're not even reading what I'm writing...

I was focused on responding to what I perceived to be the core of your argument, and that got lost by the wayside. To me, the core of the argument continues with my Condorcet point.

Specifically about this point, I disagree. You're greatly exaggerating the intrinsic difficulty of change - witness any "emergency" bill that gets passed after a few months with very little debate. I agree there are bureaucratic difficulties in general, but when discussing how well representatives represent the will of the voters, the inefficiency due to those difficulties are still quite relevant! The argument you're making basically lets you write off any outside metrics that aren't the ballot box - deferring to the opaque paternalism of "that's just how the system works" and shutting down any criticism of the representative bureaucracy itself.

Furthermore on the topic of marijuana deillegalization, most of those bureaucratic difficulties simply do not exist. No legal regime needs to be pondered and crafted, rather the laws that criminalized it in the first place simply need to be repealed - strike them by number and name. That we're likely to end up with more complex legislation rather than a straightforward repeal is entirely due to the corruption of the system where all of these incumbent moneyed interests get their says before the will of the voters can become law. That corruption is exactly what you're defending by rejecting basic objective critiques of the system's effectiveness.

“Why don't you just” has plagued the software industry for decades, and now you try to use it on legislation.

It’s funny, how misdeeds can transcend profession.

If you can’t accept that passing national legislation is an incredibly complex, subtle, and nuanced activity that requires delicacy and care, then I simply cannot help you.

And if people believe that politicians are more about self-interest than representative interest and that it doesn't generally matter who is elected?

Some people do believe that, but most don’t in any actionable sense, otherwise they’d do something about it.

It’s easy to pretend we’re collectively helpless just because we individually are, but being individually helpless is by design.

You were never meant to have more of a say than your neighbor, even if practically you may have at one point.

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