Most Americans support using the popular vote to decide U.S. presidents, data
npr.org
npr.org
House of Representatives is suppose to be 1 Rep per a fixed number of people. But Congress put a hard limit of 435, that means Small States have more people per Rep than Large States.
For example, Wyoming has 1 Rep for 480900 people.
California has 1 rep per 736000 people. To be fair and agree with the original intent of the US Constitution, California should have about 82 Reps instead of 53.
Texas for that matter should really have 52 Reps instead of 36 has it as now. The way it is now it has one rep per 700279 people.
Fixing that limit should solve a lot of problems
Fixing this would solve 0 problems anyway from what I see. Please name a single issue that would be solved if there were, idk, 470 reps instead of 435?
Overall, I bet adding more people to the house would actually make the political process much worse. If you actually cared about this, getting a better census estimate would be the first step since that's currently helping democrats quite a bit.
Wait, what? Is there a constitutional cap on the total number of lobbyists that I wasn't aware of?
Maine, Alaska, Hawaii... what's the point of being a far-off-forgotten small population state to a superpower if the other neighboring nation is offering better protection of my interests?
The Senate was designed to ensure that even small states had their interests represented and not drowned out in the tyranny of the majority.
The Senate was specifically designed to prevent the challenges faced by the late Roman empire which was constantly putting down far-off remote provincial rebellions. They had to constantly move whole armies from one side of the empire to another putting down one rebellion after another - often supported by the neighboring unfriendly nation.
Without the Senate, Russia would have had a much easier time starting "independence" movements in Alaska during the Cold War.
It doesn't make sense to compare the USA as a whole to other, much smaller countries. Federalism doesn't make sense on a small scale.
You mention Maine and Alaska which I imagine you believe would join Canada? Canada doesn’t give each territory equal representation. They’ve also not suffered a territory leaving despite the various secession campaigns (US has those too even with the Senate, strange).
I think there’s just very little evidence the Senate is some magic fairy dust that keeps our country together when many, many other countries don’t have such a similar body and they’re not all falling to pieces.
Individual states do not have the resources to oppose our military. They may be larger than European countries, but they don’t have the military power of those European countries and our country’s military is stronger than the entire EU. Even if a state like Texas were to revolt, it would be notably less successful than Ukraine is versus Russia. Also never mind that this revolting state wouldn’t be receiving foreign aid (I don’t think even hostile countries like China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea would even attempt to get involved in an internal conflict). It is pure fantasy to believe an individual state could succeed in seceding from the US.
Now could a large enough coalition of states succeed? Sure. But I was responding to the parent’s idea that Maine or Alaska or Hawaii would just randomly decide to up and go because they didn’t have the Senate.
This is all on top of a technological society very very fragile.(https://www.wsj.com/articles/assault-on-california-power-sta...) It only takes very few trained operators to take out grids/city networks and cause millions in damage.
I think you very much underestimate the reality of succession in America.
It is a bit funny that you mentioned Canada - given that Quebec barely voted down independence by a 0.2% margin in 1995. Something that would have been a disaster for Canada to be literally split in THREE pieces.
..and it may very well have led to armed conflict as violence in separatist violence in Quebec was not uncommon.
Separatist movements are very very often superstitiously supported by foreign rivals and it is worth quite a bit of political power to physically keep you nation together.
> Individual states do not have the resources to oppose our military.
They do not need to. When independence movements are militarily squashed, that is when foreign rivals step in officially to fund and supply weapons to them. It happened in Kosovo, Taiwan, Donbass, South Ossentia, etc..
> I don’t think even hostile countries like China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea would even attempt to get involved in an internal conflict
I hesitate to even reply to this comment. I think you know, reading it, how wrong it is.
The examples given are a far cry from a situation like a US state leaving. A couple are Russian-armed separatists from neighboring countries. No state’s relationship to the US at all resembles Taiwan’s to China. And Kosovo is in a region that has dealt with strife since the early 1990’s.
A state seceding from the US would look very different than these.
Perhaps they would try to give aid covertly, but they wouldn’t risk a hot war. Intervening in a state seceding would be seen as a direct attack on US soil, very different than us aiding Ukraine or Russia aiding Syria.
Why is the US as culturally-homogeneous as it is?
Because small states' population's interests are represented. How are they represented...?
American culture is only homogeneous in their terms because they reject every American cultural framework but their own as illegitimate, a cancer to be burned out, a corruption of the true ideals which they believe they alone uphold. Talk to me about cultural unity when they stop talking about killing liberals for sport or calling LGBT people "groomers" or passing laws forcing women to flee from their states for fear of their own safety.
I don't want to fulminate - I'm getting angry just thinking about this - but if there's been a running theme in American politics in the last decade, it's been the destruction of the facade of cultural homogeneity by right-wing rural culture, and that's with a system designed to pander to them as much as possible, because apparently 245 years of shared history and heritage and citizenship in the world's last superpower isn't incentive enough to keep them in the union. At this point I almost welcome civil war just so we can just get it over with already.
Rant over. I need a break from this place before I get a talking to.
O_o Looking at it from the perspective of rural culture might be useful.
The idea that "global free trade made us all richer, but poor and middle income rural America by cents and upper class and tech by millions, while leaving the former un- or under-employed" isn't without basis.
And specifically, explains lived experience over the past few decades in rural America.
At some point, you have to stop being angry at people for thinking the way they do... and start being curious about why those ideas are attractive to them.
In the lead up to WW2, Nazis in Germany appealed to the ailing rural population by telling them the Jews, Marxists, social democrats, feminists, and intellectuals were the reason they struggled.
I suppose I don't have to draw the modern US connections. I don't have to say replace Jews with globalists or George Soros or the media or Hollywood. Like we all see the similarities, right?
Yes, rural America is suffering. I grew up in rural America. The people are being misled into focusing their ire on immigrants, BLM, CRT, and transpeople. Sometimes I wish I could shake them and tell them while they're fuming over an imaginary culture war, their politicians are grifting them out of their donations and using the levers of government to make their suffering worse. But that ever growing suffering just provides a hotter fire to feed more grievances to.
Don't get me wrong, Democrats have been pro-corporation and offshored jobs just as much, but they've certainly done more for lower income people than Republicans. If you look at the extremes of both parties, Bernie's or AOC's policies would do far more for them than MTG or Matt Gaetz's. Sadly, contesting the 2020 election is more important to their 2022 vote than actual tangible plans to improve their economic conditions. Oh sure they'll give lip service to the grievances of soaring fuel prices or inflation, but not a one will give a tangible plan to do anything about it.
And that's where I'm at. I know rural people have real grievances. I just haven't seen a way to connect them to electing people who instead focus on improving those real grievances rather than feeding them imaginary grievances to get outraged over.
That's like asking, what's the point of Truckee being a far-off-forgotten small population city of California if the neighboring state of Nevada is offering better protection of their interests?
Well, for starters, Truckee leaving CA and joining NV would require an awful amount of paperwork (and good luck convincing even half of the population that it's worth the hassle), and what would NV offer that CA doesn't? Instead of being a forgotten small population city of California, now it gets to be a forgotten small population city of Nevada.
Other than, say, the absolutely immense advantage of belonging to the most prosperous, most powerful country in the world.
But, yes, undoubtedly thee are quite a few states that are narcissistic enough to think they’re better off going it alone, their tiny population of a few hundred thousand and their easily corruptible political goofs versus the economic, political, and media forces of major world powers.
California and Texas, the obvious examples, would be the ~37th (around Ukraine and Canada) and ~51st (around Nepal and Venezuela) largest countries by population in the world.
I would argue a person in Wyoming's vote being worth 65x that of person's in California has no benefit.
I wonder if 435 is already too high.
Putting aside the other issues with the US Senate - they do seem to have more effective discourse in the chamber and on the sub-committees.
Logistically, each party would choose its leadership, and the House as a whole would choose a Speaker. They would handle the nuts and bolts of when and what legislation would come up for a vote.
It would be interesting to have a lot more granularity in representation -- you'd certainly have reps from the Greens and the Libertarians, along with any number of other parties that were suddenly viable.
> I guess you’ve never been to a super bowl.
Superbowl attendees are spectators, not participants. The issue isn't collecting together a large number of people in one area, but having all those people participate in a meeting together.
Right now it's all for show.
I wonder if having 2 per state like the Senate would work, but then you could weigh each of those votes in proportion to the representative's state population.
I think this is a clever way to keep a cap on a parliamentary body’s size while allowing for more egalitarian representation.
Wouldn’t help combat the other problems of a capped body size (worsening gerrymandering, for example), but it’d be a step in the right direction.
Then maybe they can work from home.
Massive guilds in WoW are broken up by roles to play. So, indeed, the sub-committees are where the action occurs.
> The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative
The founding fathers didn’t want the masses to be given proper voting. There were 2 million land owners. 7-9 million non land owners. So founding fathers like John Adams did not want a real democracy. They wanted their power. Their 2 senator decision was done without info about the future and well, they aren’t amazing people anyway.
The concept of the Federalist society is primarily originalist, is it not? They attempt to ascertain exactly what the founders meant when drafting the original documents and interpret our current law based on that.
I'm saying we probably shouldn't do that.
In fact, it sounds so ludicrous that one might think I'm exaggerating, but that is the actual position of originalism.
The piece I left out, the piece that makes that crazy statement not seem so crazy to those who follow it, is God. Supporters of originalism would say they were "a special group of wise people ordained by God who set down words..."
And yet they still didn't think much of women or Black people, lived in a world in which every farmer had munitions capable of holding off the world dominant power, ands had only seen what they had seen up to that point in history.
I wouldn't want any one group of people today, in 2022, deciding the details of government for a group of people in 2257, and I don't think we should be bound quite so firmly by people from 235 years ago, either.
We can--and have--corrected the most obviously egregious errors with some early amendments, but at the same time we've left most of the structural choices based on the same attitudes in place, or even made them worse with artificial limits.
First, if you took a trip in a time machine back to then, I'm fairly sure you'd come off as a raving lunatic. Second, you're completely glazin over the fact that what we ended up with was a hard fought for and won compromise, which is half of why we venerate the people who actually locked themselves in and reached it in the first place, and also stick to some of their guiding wisdom on things. We haven't changed much but the most obvious deficits, because the action potential hasn't been able to be reached, which is exactly what you're looking for in your founding Constitution. You want law to come and go, and not to be all enshrined at the highest level.
Whenever anyone suggests direct democracy at the Federal level, it's just a low key "I want cities/population centers/large States to dictate how small states do things."
Absolutely! Which is WHY acting as if every rule and guideline from more than 200 years is holy and must not be changed is terrible.
I'm definitely not in favor of pure direct democracy, nor of changing things on a whim. However, we have had more than 200 years more of experience around the world with variations on democratic systems, and I think we can do better than we've done.
It is possible, even common, to look at a situation, see that all solutions tried so far have been bad for various reasons, and so to choose a new solution that avoids all of those pitfalls, only to run into new pitfalls that hadn't been seen before. That's no knock on the latest attempt! It's progress, it's just not the last attempt that should ever be made.
I think the founders were reacting to the world at the time, and their reaction was maybe the best possible one given the time and the need for compromise. They saw the dangers of the unchecked power of royalty, but underestimated the power that comes with concentrating wealth. They saw some of the economic dangers that had been revealed in countries around the world at that time, but completely missed the economic power unlocked by enabling women to enter the workforce. I could go on and on and on, and I don't think it's speaking overly-negatively about those men and their accomplishments to say that they should not be venerated as all-wise, all-knowing, or god-like, which is definitely how some political figures--including US Supreme Court justices--describe them.
I was implying that we should rebalance the structure away from purely wealthy land owners to make it more equal, not exclude them entirely.
But what was "less-populous" when this was initially configured? What was the disparity between the lowest- and highest-population states/colonies back then?
Los Angeles county has a higher population than 40 states:
* https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2022-05-12/los...
It has a population of 9.8M:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County,_California
That's more than New Jersey:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
It's not like the vote for President is something where people from cities are going to have an opportunity to vote to harvest the blood and organs from people from rural areas or something (as if that's something they even would vote for if that were on the table). It's literally only about electing the President. That's all the electoral college affects.
It's become somewhat of a meme that there's this big divide between rural dwellers and city dwellers, and that somehow if city dwellers were allowed to have genuine proportional representation, somehow they would screw over the rural dwellers, but I have never heard anyone articulate any specific thing they think would go toward that. Let alone how they think getting proportional representation purely for Presidential elections would let them do so.
It is unfortunate how many people did not pay attention in civics class when they went over every compromise made in the formation of the Constitution, especially the ones about population proportionality as it relates to the legislative and executive branches. If you want the particular arguments for how large states would screw over small ones, the records of the Constitutional Convention are a good place to start.
It’s unfortunate how much people pay attention to civics classes and never learn what the status quo has no interest in teaching them.
There are many, many other divides than high population vs low population territories that we conveniently ignore in this debate. If you want to argue in favor of the population of smaller states deserving greater representation, can I get you on board for giving black people, Muslims, LGBTQ members, and communists vote multipliers as well?
You see, there’s actual historical precedent for population majorities screwing over these groups.
In comparison, those small population states you fight so valiantly to protect historically receive more tax dollars than they pay in. Seems like a pretty sweet deal.
Before you say hey that’s all thanks to disproportionate representation, Canada and other countries with more proportionate representation see the same thing. You see, small population states are in general beneficiaries of putting their lot in with bigger states. Giving them more vote power on top of that is… silly.
I could be wrong, but I genuinely believe the problem with your line of reasoning is you're rationalizing for a system that benefits you. Your ideology benefits from how things are, and so you find reasons to justify why the way things are is good, actually.
If say states had been divided up differently, would your entire belief system crumble? Assume city-states were the norm and the Senate was overwhelmingly controlled by whichever party controlled urban populations. Like say North Carolina got divided into Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, the Triangle, Wilmington, and the rest of the state as just one big territory. And every state was like this.
Would you suddenly say hey this is a bad system, not because it benefits people I don't agree with, but because of some other silly reason?
What is so magical about lines put on maps by our great-great-great grandfathers?
If there was a magical US with three states, two with only 1 citizen and one with 1,000,000, would you still hold by your principle that they have their own governments that federate with those of states so this is good?
Where in your system do you draw the line and make a distinction between fair and unfair? How do you determine if one arrangement is more fair than another? Why would you not push for the most fair arrangement?
My principle is embarrassingly simple. Political power should be equal to the number of people represented. That's it. Easy to explain, easy to grasp, easy to measure whether something is fair or unfair. It's imperfect--Lord knows population majorities can still be bastards--but it's the best, most egalitarian system created. And, importantly, it's a principle that doesn't change just because it doesn't benefit me. You're right, it's not very nuanced. Simple often works best.
What if 60% of the population wanted to slaughter the other 40%? That's right, I too can come up with wacky hypotheticals that won't happen and presuppose a lot of other important variables don't change.
> What is so magical about lines put on maps by our great-great-great grandfathers?
The governments whose jurisdiction extends to them.
> Where in your system do you draw the line and make a distinction between fair and unfair? How do you determine if one arrangement is more fair than another? Why would you not push for the most fair arrangement?
Why do you presuppose I'm not pushing for the most fair arrangement? Why do you assume that an arrangement where states just as important to the union have two orders of magnitude less representation would be more fair? Probably because, as you keep asserting about me, it benefits you. If a state thinks that the union is a negative for it, and in a way that the union would never agree to change, and it would get a better deal outside of the union, maybe it should just secede. But it's not a net negative, you're just not thinking any further than the culture war; say what you want about the difference between North Dakota and New York, but I'll bet New York really appreciates North Dakota being its breadbasket.
Because, by their (and my) definition of "fair", "Political power should be equal to the number of people represented," and you're pushing for something that is not that. It doesn't take any "presupposing".
This was my point about how the majority can be bastards. There are countless examples where the majority wanted something that punished the minority throughout history and throughout the world. Having said that, humankind hasn't come up with a better system--at least to my knowledge. Yours certainly only introduces the potential to make problems like this worse.
> Why do you presuppose I'm not pushing for the most fair arrangement? Why do you assume that an arrangement where states just as important to the union have two orders of magnitude less representation would be more fair? Probably because, as you keep asserting about me, it benefits you. If a state thinks that the union is a negative for it, and in a way that the union would never agree to change, and it would get a better deal outside of the union, maybe it should just secede. But it's not a net negative, you're just not thinking any further than the culture war; say what you want about the difference between North Dakota and New York, but I'll bet New York really appreciates North Dakota being its breadbasket.
First, the "culture war" is not a real thing. It's just right-wing propaganda to frame any expression or change they disagree with as an attack on them. Framing wanting fair representation as not thinking beyond an imaginary attack on conservatives is sorta funny.
I don't think you're pushing towards a more fair arrangement because you can't even outline what makes a system fair to you. You don't think North Dakota with 0.8m population should have 1/10th the representation of New York with 8m. OK what is fair to you then? What makes it fair or unfair? What knobs could I change in theoretical compositions of the US that would make you say this federation is fair and this federation unfair? Surely you can admit that not all federations are fair, right?
Again, my principle shared before is super simple and easy to represent and I would argue intuitively feels fair to most people. It's not rocket science. Does it benefit my beliefs? Yes. But that doesn't invalidate it as wrong when I think it's also the solution most uninvolved third parties would agree with (also weird, it's what the article in this post states). And I think even _you_ agree with it if the system weren't stacked in your favor or if we were talking about another country.
You magically think that each state is "just as important to the union" when that's impossible. The US without CA is significantly worse off than it is without CT. Just not a matter of opinion or feelings.
North Dakota really appreciates New York buying its produce, too. And producing its science, technology, and art (no matter how much they complain about it now, I mean come on, Fox News is in NYC!). Also, their agricultural output is 20th (ND) and 24th (NY) in the US, so it's not as if NY is entirely reliant on others. Food output is important for sure, but ND gains more benefit from being in a country with NY than NY does from being in a country with ND.
On a Federal level, California has to share power with the other 49 states. California should not be able to dictate federal policy for everyone else.
Even with fully proportional representation, there is no state that would be able to do anything close to "dictat[ing] federal policy".
California has, according to other people in this discussion, about 40 million people.
The US as a whole has about 340 million people. You'd need 5 Californias, all voting in perfect unison, to "dictate federal policy" in a fully proportional system. And guess what? California does not, in fact, vote in perfect unison, and no one's proposing a system wherein the people of the state vote, and then assign their state's proportional votes entirely to whichever result in that statewide vote gets 50% + 1 votes.
Oh, wait. There is a system that does that. The Electoral College. The one we're talking about getting rid of.
In 2020's Presidential election, California cast more votes for Trump than Texas did. (And Texas cast more votes for Biden than New York did, for that matter.)
In a fully proportional system, something like a third of California's representatives (based on those 2020 Presidential election results) would be voting for policies that the GOP favors.
Once you stop looking at the Electoral College maps and thinking that they accurately depict the political leanings of the country, you start to realize that no state is homogeneous, and the idea that we need to treat them as such is, at best, a hopeless anachronism, and at worst active propaganda.
(2) bringing up a silly system that ends up being electoral college. But bringing up some “silly” alternative is an issue because doing away with 2 senators per state doesn’t automatically mean we just duplicate the house in the senate. Why is that the assumption.
DC should be a state and PR should be a state if they majority vote for it too. These should be beyond obvious and agreeable if people really believe in the reasons America exists and democracy etc.
When my initial comment went against the current senate set up, I didn’t say disband the senate. I’d be fine with a scaling system of Senators like 12 for California, 10 for Texas, 8 for Florida, New York, 6 for next eight states, and so on. This will lead to an amount of around 200 senators. Giving California 5-6% of the Senate instead of 2% isn’t going to suddenly destroy the farmer in Kansas from having any power.
I tracked a discussion on exactly this topic on Tumblr quite recently; here's a fairly representative post: https://fandomsandfeminism.tumblr.com/post/69134673708595609...
It includes two very helpful county-level maps from the 2016 election that drive home how politically non-homogenous our states are.
But to answer your question, yes. The people of Kansas, on a federal level, should have meaningful power. Federal laws affect all states, so each state should have a seat at the table.
Let me turn the questions around: how would it be fair for Kansas to have no power federally at all?
New York can pass laws about what happens in New York. But if New York wants to pass laws about what happens in Kansas, the people of Kansas deserve a voice.
States are independent political entities representing very different groups of people. The EU does the exact same thing as the US federal government. If you don't give smaller states some amount of power and respect, there is not reason for them to participate on your federation.
How would it be fair for Kansas to have power proportional to its population federally?
Well. That sounds like a very silly question, doesn’t it?
You know who actually has close to no power? Many, many other types of minorities across America. Yet these minorities are not cared about with retorts by you or the other person. It’s only about those farmers in Kansas
I live in rural NYS. I know farmers, to be sure (there's a community-supported agriculture farm just about 5 minutes' drive away). But despite the fact that a lot of the land around here is farmland, the vast, vast majority of people here are not farmers. They are teachers, shop owners/workers, factory workers, computer programmers, doctors, lawyers....basically everything you get in most places in the country. The only types of people we don't have are the types you only get in the very biggest cities, like hedge fund managers, and the types that only make sense in certain areas, like sailors.
The question isn't and shouldn't be about "should farmers have as much political weight as not-farmers;" it's "should people who live in a mostly-rural state have as much political weight as people who live in a state with big cities"?
Quickly checking Wikipedia, the Californian governor had a ~62% share of the vote, and the NY governor ~67%. That roughly translates to at least 30% of each of those States populations dissenting from the majority view. Shouldn’t their voices be heard, same as the Kansas voters?
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to “Regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States”. If farmers in Kansas feel they’re being unfairly treated by any company that trades across state lines their only point of recourse is their congressional representatives.
As a historical example, railroad companies were once notorious for business practices that unduly favored high-volume users. They'd provide discounts to large corporations while excluding small businesses, and they'd charge more for short hauls than they did for long hauls[0]. It was incredibly unpopular for years, and it disincentivized trade and development in perfectly suitable states like Kansas.
Yet it still took congress years to take action for the same reason it does today (they don't want to anger corporate interests). It finally took a politician from a populous state (Illinois) to bring the issue to bear and incentivize congress to act. It's not a perfect example of what you were asking for, but it's an interesting case study. Kansas would've been much less equally represented in congress than it is today. If anything, it's closer to being over-represented now due to the caps.
At any rate, and to your point, the result was the creation of the first independent federal regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission. Now there are at least 32[1]. This is often cited as an example of federal overreach. It's worth considering that without these agencies, however, that congress may simply be gridlocked on more and more issues the way they were on railroads for years even with more equal representation.
Despite any personal political views I may hold or knowledge I may have acquired, I get extremely nervous when people are quickly and passionately in favor of something like eliminating the electoral college. It's a challenge to find pure functions in our system. Ultimately, I have no grand conclusions to offer up here. I just hope you find it interesting or helpful.
[0] https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Intersta...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...
To prevent a response of “things were different then”. Even putting aside things that would be different if they were around today, namely women’s and non white’s rights, the core crux of being power hungry and considering themselves above poorer people is something that fits in perfectly with their writing and how the status quo is today. There’s no reason to think they’d think differently about who should wield power today. Elitism and greed hasn’t changed like sexism and racism has.
Traditionally, the government spends more per capita on infrastructure in less populated territories. This holds true for most developed countries. Within states this also holds true. More state budget is spent per capita to build up rural roads than city ones. They ensure water, sewage, electricity, television, and internet to provide service to remote populations instead of allowing them to only operate in cities (and they charge the same price despite a higher cost to serve rural populations). Again, this tends to be the case despite whether a developed country has a body like the US Senate or not.
When it comes to government decisions, rural territories whether at the state level or the national level receive disproportionately more benefit from their association with more urban counties or states.
It’s ok to get nervous about change. That’s what conservative beliefs are: change is bad. But if I could offer any advice about a better way to think about this specific issue: dozens of countries don’t have a body like the US Senate and don’t decide their elections based on an electoral college. They’re doing fine and in many ways better than the US. The suggestions to abolish these institutions aren’t some untried theoretical far-fetched idea. They’ve been used for hundreds of years in some places. Not so scary, huh?
Also this fear of tyranny of the majority is widely ignorant of US history. It has happened countless times in different contexts, what value is there in treating the urban/rural divide special?
The white majority supported enslavement of black people.
And destroying or expelling Native Americans.
And the banning of immigration from China.
And Jim Crow.
Then Japanese internment.
Christian majority pushed for criminalizing homosexuality.
And banning gay marriage.
And criminalizing drug use.
Or the capitalist majority sought to destroy communists in the McCarthy era.
All throughout US history we have examples of a majority exerting their power over a minority. It’s just really weird that the urban/rural divide is where you and others draw the line. Should black people’s votes be counted twice? Should communists get 40 votes? Should gay people get 10? Then why is it rural Kansas farmer gets 2?
I was under the impression that it was a compromise between slave holding and free states. Smaller free states we worried about larger slave states overrunning things with their large enslaved populations. There was a lot of back and forth on this in the convention.
Why would a different senate set up equal zero effective representation for those farmers? I didn’t even say what my alternative would be.
How come we only care about farmers in Kansas anyway? How come we don’t care about the many other minorities less represented? I’m American, but I’m brown. Why don’t brown minorities like me get our own better representation? Same with lgbtq, and so many more. It’s always only about giving rural conservatives an absurd amount of power.
It’s true that they didn’t generally hold democracy in high esteem. They were too well aware of its past failures, and wary of repeating them. They in fact avoided using the word "democracy" for that reason.
And yes, several of them were keen on increasing the power of the federal government. The US constitution was written in a context where the federal government had been hobbled because under the Articles of Confederation it didn’t have enough power to carry out its policies.
In retrospect it looks to me like they might have been able to make the Articles work, maybe with some adjustments, but they didn’t think so, in the end, and of course they were closer to the situation than I am, so even I take my opinion with a grain of salt.
The president has an outsized impact on general discourse and party direction, not to mention international crises like the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Essentially using the Constitution's (anti-democratic) clauses that allow state officials to pledge their votes however they want regardless of vote outcomes in order to assert a more democratic and representative popular vote system
The popular vote is 7-1 in the previous 8 elections for one party, although the electoral college went 5-3 during that time.
Your statement implies this popular majority favors their side losing? They walk away from those 2 elections feeling this is how things should work? That’s a little silly of a belief.
Yea the polling crisis shows polls are fake.
Seriously, just randomly select people willing to do the job, maybe 10 or 15 people and then vote for one amongst that group. If this sounds radical, then consider this is already how primary votes work today except the “group” is only well connected folks approved by the donor and political class.
Aka it's not about truth. I think the replication crisis is one and the 2016 election. Manny many polls absolutely said Trump has no chance. I remember everyone I knew truly being shocked Trump won.
You were not well informed. That's the short of it. I have no doubt that many people took aggressive takes that were not valid. But reputable analysts were very clear on the issue.
Appealing to the majority on nuanced issues is never a good idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_opinion_polling_for...
Humans are messy and seek simplicity, which ironically is one of the biggest factors in the replication crisis. One might even think that seeking simple answers to complex question is what has led us to this point right now, in which some of choose to reject even the idea of complex answers, insisting that only simple answers can be trusted.
How America Lost Faith in Expertise:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-0...
There are a lot of failures affecting the public trust going on.
Top economists fail to predict inflation (wall street bets didn't get it wrong)
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3259197-nobel-economists...
Pollsters got 2016 so wrong, articles were written about the polling crisis.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/polling-ca...
Psychological Science doesn't replicate, and is probably all garbage. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22360363/replication-...
No evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin levels, finds comprehensive review (Apparently Tom Cruise was right about psychiatry)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220720080145.h...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eymr9NZpna8
Alzheimers research had some high profile fraud caught recently. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/fraud-scientific-rigor-and-...
WSB has predicted a spike in inflation six times out of the last one. They also predicted that their wife's boyfriend would ride a rocketship to the moon. In addition, it's by no means settled that the economists mentioned in that opinion piece were wrong: inflation is currently a worldwide phenomenon seemingly tied more to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and supply-chain disruption than any US-specific increase in the money supply. The extent is debatable, but the linked opinion piece is offering a simple critique of a complex situation.
Reporters wrote many articles demonstrating their lack of understanding of statistics and polling after 2016, yes.
Psychological "science" has been largely-garbage since the beginning, which is why it is often described as a "soft science," a charitable way of saying "not really science." The seratonin survey specifically is debated, and seems like another example of reports over-reporting the limited findings of the review.
There will always be examples of failures at almost every level, and I don't think there are more failures now than in decades past, but we are primed in a variety of ways to now believe that it is a new and somehow dangerous thing.
If you're describing "experts as a group" and meaning "reporters," then no question, reporters have been getting things wrong for a very, very, very long time. As a general rule of thumb, have you ever seen any news reporting ever get things about computers right? And if not--I certainly haven't--why should I not assume that doctors feel the same about medical things, lawyers feel the same about legal things, and so on. Reporting is a skill, but that skill is writing and communication. It's not expertise.
Americans are losing trust in institutions for many reasons, but I don't think those institutions are failing more spectacularly than they have in the past. I think the loss of faith is more subtle than that.
And specifically, many Americans are replacing that lost faith in institutions with the most ludicrous faith in bizarre nonsensical theories of everything, seemingly with the reasoning that "if any experts are wrong about anything, then they must all be wrong about everything."
Most of us got most of our general news from one of three or four news readers, and so we mostly shared similar opinions. People shouted around the edges about details, but that was easy to tune out since it wasn't on one of the big three TV networks. Then 24-hour cable news and the internet changed the way any of us consume news, and I suggest that has much more to do with changing attitudes than any specific details of "experts failing."
Again, we all want simple explanations, and it's easier to believe no experts know anything than to accept that life is so complicated that future events are often hard to predict with perfect accuracy, but most of the time, most "experts" are mostly right, so we don't notice that they were only mostly right, not perfectly right.
P.S. Still, great list of links, so I upvoted you despite disagreeing.
A lot of the shock was due to how terrible the outcome was, rather than due to how unlikely it seemed.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/polling-ca...
> Even with the results of the presidential contest still out, there’s a clear loser in this election: polling.
> This is a disaster for the polling industry and for media outlets and analysts that package and interpret the polls for public consumption, such as FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times’ Upshot, and The Economist’s election unit. They now face serious existential questions.
> The real catastrophe is that the failure of the polls leaves Americans with no reliable way to understand what we as a people think outside of elections
> Without reliable sources of information about public opinion, the press, and by extension, the public, should perhaps employ a measure of humility about what we can and can’t know in politics. As wise as this may be—and even if people manage to act on it—that sort of epistemic humility risks falling prey to the same asymmetrical warfare that has characterized much of the Trump era.
You know what we don't see in this? Any sort of measurement of how good the polls were. And you know what? They were fine. Not a great year for sure. 2 years prior was very good.
If you want an analysis on the efficacy of polling from someone knowledgeable I would suggest looking at Nate Silver's reflections on 2020: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-death-of-polling-is...
Or this one: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-fivethirtyeights-20...
99% of races favored for republicans were correctly called, including 100% accuracy for anything not labeled a toss up. 92% of races favoring dems were called correctly. and 95% overall.
They just showed Clinton was the more likely winner. Polling in the US tends to underrepresent actual Republican votes by a few percent.
...
> popular vote
So you're telling me most people prefer the system which gives them some control over their government rather than the system which enshrines a minority party due to archaic and outdated laws. The majority of the population have had their will overridden in every single Republican presidential win since Reagan if we acknowledge the incumbent advantage especially after 9/11 for Bush Jr.
The senate is also deeply flawed. Republican senators represent 41 million fewer voters than Democratic senators, yet they control half of the chamber and get to stymie everything done outside of budget reconciliation. The House is supposed to represent the people, but has the same bias (to a lessor degree) thanks to the frozen size of the House and rampant gerrymandering. For example, in Wisconsin Democrats won roughly half of the popular vote for house seats in 2020, but only gained 1/3rd of the representatives. Half the population votes Democrat, half votes Republican and Republicans get strong majorities in representation. If California house members had the same proportional representation as Wyoming house, we'd need an additional California house members so even our alleged "proportional representation" system is fundamentally broken.
The majority are getting tired of the minority dictating how politics work in our country.
Both major parties are minority parties.
Historically, people have fought to select leaders. Such a system puts the strongest and most brutal in power.
Now we let people talk and then vote. It's a mechanism for resolving conflicts that has been extremely successful at its job.
This is, btw, why freedom of speech is so important and why it's exactly whose we least want to hear, who must to be able to speak. We resolve conflicts with people we have conflicts with, not people we agree with. Talk about it or fight about it. Talking has led to, probably, the most peaceful period of human history.
I'd almost certainly prefer a mechanically determined pool (say, all Walmart store general managers as of 2020 who are natural-born citizens, >35, not felons, etc), and then randomly pick the President from that pool. Maybe let people use negative voting to eliminate 10-50% of the pool first.
Unfortunately, among recent US presidents, there have also been many who have been much worse than it can be expected for a randomly chosen American to be.
I do not believe that it is possible to make with any certainty an estimate of which president selection system would have been superior, i.e. how the better and worse presidents would have been compensated in the 2 systems.
So judging from the US historical experience, it is impossible to reject the system of a random selection of the president, like for jury members, as clearly inferior to a president voted by the people.
Maybe a combined system would be better, with a set of presidential candidates chosen randomly from all citizens, one of which is elected by popular vote.
This would exclude the people addicted to power who have progressed inside their party through dubious means, becoming the party candidates.
(One of) The problems with political representatives is that they _want_ to be politicians. Either as a means to an end, or as a mechanism to better serve themselves or others like them. On more rare occasions you find the occasional altruist.
Since there's a selection bias going on, how can the current crop act as representatives of their populace when they aren't _like_ those they claim to represent?
It is an idea that is usually so quickly dismissed with "what if we pick a total idiot!?" - as if people optimizing for campaigning as opposed to governing couldn't end up being total idiots as well.
Why do we have one absolute ruler? You could make up reasons about deciding votes and stuff, but clearly it's a throwback to the good old days when one person killed anough people to become King.
They could work shifts and always have someone awake, while still being able to go on holiday.
Similar applies to CEOs, why does it have to be one person representing the will of many.
There are a lot of modern countries who claim to be republics and even USA has a "Republican" party, but all these modern uses of the word "republic" are wrong, because none of them uses this principle of filling all executive positions with multiple people, so that none of them will have all the power of those positions.
The modern states which use the word "republic" justify their claim by having elected leaders, but that was not something specific to the Roman Republic. There were plenty of ancient states with elected leaders and with various other lesser public functions filled by elections.
What distinguished the Roman Republic from all others was the requirement of electing multiple people for all positions, including for the supreme executive function, for which they had 2 consuls, and not 1 president.
There's many logical reasons. The federal bureaucracy handles the day to day work of federal agencies, not the actual individual elected to be the President. The President appoints a cabinet to oversee those agencies. So there's no need for any individual to be awake 24/7 making decisions which means there's no need for multiple shifts of executives to be available.
Multiple executives would actually be a terrible system as situations last longer than a single shift. Day Shift President would have to hand over a bunch of context to Swing Shift President for any issue lasting longer than a single shift. Swing Shift President may not agree with Graveyard Shift President on the best course of action which leads to an inefficient and/or legally arduous process of adjudicating primacy of authority.
This principle does not specify anything about the mechanism that determines how certain executive or legislative positions are filled.
Any such position could be filled for example based on the result of a majority voting by all citizens, or by representatives of all citizens, or based on a random choice between all citizens.
These and also many other possible mechanisms are all equally democratic, because any citizen can fill those positions and all citizens have equal influence on who will fill the position.
On what basis do you claim it means that?
not only objectively impossible to measure but there is no evidence for this. It's Churchillian cliche which has now become a thought-destroying mantra.
Fact of the matter is that the president and senate should not be elected by the masses. The masses need to vote for local control up through their state legislature. After that, the States should vote for their representatives: the senate and the president.
At the same time some small group of self-starters should act as citizen journalists to actually keep these people accountable. For too long the powers that be have the media running cover for them. New organizations and individuals on YouTube and other media sites are showing how corrupt the government is. We need to take them seriously, still confirming their validity.
Finally, reform the US House so that it has the appropriate size for equal population representation. California needs more seats in the House. So do other States.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
(2020/1 seem to have been a bad batch of years, as a lot of scores seems to have dropped)
See also:
I do think it's revealing that when the US helps a country set up a new government (for example, in Iraq), they set them up with a parliamentary system, and not an American-style presidential one. I once asked a politically-minded friend why that was, and he said it was because parliamentary systems are friendlier to small factions in countries with lots of different ethnic groups.
> The authors of the Basic Law sought to ensure that a potential dictator would never again be able to come to power in the country. Although some of the Basic Law is based on the Weimar Republic's constitution, the first article is a protection of the human dignity ("Menschenwürde") and human rights; they are core values protected by the Basic Law. The principles of democracy, republicanism, social responsibility, federalism and rule of law are key components of the Basic Law (Article 20). Articles 1 and 20 are protected by the so-called eternity clause ("Ewigkeitsklausel") Article 79 (3) that prohibits any sort of change or removal of the principles laid down in Articles 1 and 20.
If we define the amount of election discrepancy as being the difference between the election totals and the count of actual ballots properly cast by legally eligible voters, an electoral college system confines discrepancies to within the given state. Illinois voters might have their votes improperly represented, but that's of much less concern to Arizona voters than if any election discrepancy not only misrepresented voters' wishes in Illinois but could manufacture additional voting power to that discrepancy.
At the surface level this makes sense. But dig deeper. It’s reciprocal- if you take that approach why should those states listen to you? If you throw out their interests wholesale, then you have no right to govern them and they should secede and make their own laws.
This is how we got the senate and electoral college. Why should someone in Florida have a say over the people of Kenya, New Zealand or Idaho? In a sense people should self govern unless they come together in some kind of mutual pact where both sides get a benefit. Otherwise you are speaking of literal tyranny.
I think this is a highly uncharitable rephrasing of what's being said. This sort of hyper-partisan lens I think can ruin one's ability to reason through what's actually being said. It's strawman-ing, in other words.
What's _actually_ being said is "LA county's population should be listened to as much as Michigan state" (for example). No one is saying don't listen to 40 states. They're saying each person should have an equal say in how our nation is governed.
Without that hyper-partisan lens, your argument sorta just looks silly and falls apart, doesn't it? I mean, "it's reciprocal" we value your state's population equally to our own. Those states should listen to us because we listen to them. No one is throwing out anyone's interests wholesale, so we do have a right to govern together and no one should secede?
Being clear here, no one is talking about disenfranchising people of their representation. They're talking about equalizing representation. When your interests are overrepresented this might _feel_ like an attack on you, but it's the same way some subset of men felt women earning the right to vote lessened theirs or some subset of white people felt black people achieving the right to vote lessened their control. It's true in a way, but only in the sense that some portion of the population unjustly and unfairly held more power than they were entitled to. You don't want to look at your voting power that way, do you?
Further the people making the claim I referenced are talking about getting rid of the electoral college and 2 votes in senate which is essentially disenfranchising those people. How is it ‘reciprocating’ the vote? Your concept of equality doesn’t work here because it wasn’t the original deal and the distances and other things at play (water rights, starting wars, etc) don’t translate exactly to one vote one person.
I argue your premise is wrong for the situation “one person one vote” works locally and at the state level, but when applied federally it actually nullifies the smaller state voter and our ancestors were smart enough to design for that.
Thank you for your feedback I am eager to explore this idea further.
That’s the problem here. Yes, black people achieving a say in how they were governed lessened white people’s power. Clearly it was the right thing to do. Unless you’d like to argue against this point?
My argument is that favoring rural over urban is not dissimilar. As a matter of practice, favoring rural _is_ the same as favoring white, Christian (especially evangelical) land owners.
Your fears over “one person one vote” nullifying smaller states is just not reality. Most countries don’t have a Senate-like body and their smaller territories are not wastelands. Thinking it would nullify their voters is not based on real world observation.
As a matter of fact, smaller states derive more benefit from cleaving to bigger ones than the other way around in nearly every way. The world provides plenty of evidence that disproves your arguments, we don’t have to fear theoreticals.
It’s very, very often used to contort political positions into outlandish caricatures. Pretending the other side was arguing that we shouldn’t listen to 40 states because LA is larger is simply not what’s being argued here.
Still somewhat similar issues to getting enough states on board, but not quite the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...