Their difference came in when looking at getting policies blocked. If a policy was unpopular with economic elites, they were effective at getting it shut down.
It’s an important distinction, because there’s a clear way to see what causes this behavior. There are a myriad of ways that our systems make it easy to block things rather than get things done. And if people realized that, there’s a pretty clear path for reform.
On the federal level, the filibuster is an obvious example of a an anti majoritarian rule that creates perverse incentives.
Going deeper, the way that the individual houses are structured gives significant power to committee chairs who gain power through seniority and fundraising for their parties, which creates centralized points of leverage for lobbyists.
What we’ve seen over time is that fewer and fewer bills get passed, and individual bills themselves get larger. This is a result of rules and customs changing within the house and senate themselves that have made it harder and harder to pass small bills, so everything gets rolled into monster packages and the process get more obscured to people who are on the outside.
The thing is that all of these rules get set by majority vote. Leadership elections happen by majority vote. Changing rules can happen without consent of the other house. The issue is that there’s very little understanding or focus on why they are important.
There was alignment both at the elite level and the popular level in support of those policies for a long time. It functioned because the minorities it target were politically weak.
A positive example would be something that would have passed if the majority party wanted it when the minority party was against it.
Now, do people claim that anti majoritarianism is good? Sure. Clearly there are people who benefit from this system. In addition, a lot of people do justify it who seemly don’t directly benefit economically, simply due to an ideological affinity.
Huh?
Congress derives its authority from the constitution, at least in the U.S.
None of that is prescribed by the constitution.
If you genuinely don't understand how congress came about and why their actions are accepted by the other branches of government, I would recommend doing some reading of history.
It must be the case that I simply haven’t read enough, simply because my understanding differs from yours. It can’t be possible that my points are a result of careful study over several years.
Speaking of careful study. I suggest that you go back and actually read what I wrote and address what I said. Please inform me where in the constitution there is a prescription for what the house and senate rules must be.
You keep talking about congressional authority. I will reiterate, that is completely tangential to my points.
Since it's quite rare, other readers will have the suspicion that something's up, either that the substantive part is not really so or that the alleged condescension is only imagined.
It would help to be a bit clearer.
The Constitution specifies that the House and Senate make their own rules via a simple majority vote.
The Senate set a rule that they would require a vote to end (previously unlimited) debate and hold a vote on an issue. Originally, this required a two thirds majority, which was lowered to 60 votes later.
More recently, the Senate changed the rules again to only require a simple majority vote on some matters.
Nothing about the Filibuster rule was ever specified in the Constitution.
I do want to push back though a bit. The filibuster isn’t the only rule I was referring to, and the entirety of the constitutions specification of the rule making process is literally “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings”. So when I say rule making broadly has nothing to do with the constitution, it’s because it quite literally doesn’t.
It's better for a small minority of people to make the rules. A small minority of people agree with this, thus it is correct.
Clearly there are things desired by the majority of the population that are not desirable because of downstream effects.
There are thousands of comments and posts on HN every year describing examples.
Really, their core quibble with the Crown, and the sticking point that prevented any peaceful solution (because compromise would have seriously threatened the political power of the nobility in Great Britain), was that they wanted rich people to have the franchise and to be able to hold high-level offices, not just aristocrats.
The founders understood that, which is why they set things up the way they did. Nothing has changed since then. If anything it's even more true, given the new and extensive ways the elites have to manipulate majority opinion.
Quite a few of them are not shitshows.
So I consider your first sentence to be proven false.
If people were wiser and did their research better, these kinds of campaigns would be ineffective and the rich would lose their sway.
The founders also probably didn't expect our government to grow so large and so corrupt. The richest and most corrupt entity in the United States is the government itself. The vast majority of the government is not even beholden to people at all in any way, shape, or form. This includes the tens of thousands of employees in the federal bureaucracies, as well as organizations like teacher's unions who are funded indirectly by tax dollars. Many, if not all, monopolies today are also artificially created by government policy, allowing for an unholy union of corporations and the government.
You say this as if anti majoritarian is a bug. It's not. It's a feature. The US system is supposed to prevent tyranny of the majority. That's why there are checks and balances in it. That's why the Constitution limits the powers of the branches of government, and why further limits were put in place in the Bill of Rights. The US system is not supposed to be a tool for the majority to enforce its will on everyone. It's supposed to be a tool for protecting everyone's basic rights and limiting government to certain particular functions, not to allow it to do whatever a 51% majority wants. That was the original idea of the founders of the US system.
I would say that, if anything, we have too much majoritarian thinking in the US today, and I would support amending the Constitution to put more roadblocks in the way of a 51% majority being able to simply run roughshod over everybody else.
> all of these rules get set by majority vote
Yes, and this is an example of too much majoritarian thinking; whoever has the majority in either house of Congress takes that as permission to gerrymander the rules however they like to favor their preferences.
For instance, the majority of the country wants universal healthcare and legalized cannabis, yet the tyranny of the minority keeps blocking these efforts for their benefit. Without majority rule, we have a ridiculously dysfunctional government that doesn't represent the people.
That's one alternative, but not the only one. Another alternative is for the government to not have the power to tyrannize in the first place. As the saying goes, the problem is not that politicians can be bought but that they have something valuable to sell.
> the majority of the country wants universal healthcare and legalized cannabis
I don't think this is true. I think vocal minorities want these things.
If there isn't broad consensus across the country to pass an amendment then states can do it independently. There is no reason a state can't have single payer healthcare, except that they don't want to pay for it and want to just add the cost to the national debt.
States can, indeed do it independently. There’s at least 3 states with a public option
All federal welfare policies can be enacted under the commerce clause and/or the general welfare clause.
Being anti-majority doesn't mean pro-minority.
It is about decreasing the weight of merely being in the majority as an input feature to optimal decision making. It is protecting against pseudo-relevance majority can pose as an overemphasized decision making strategy. This doesn't mean all ideas that manifest as majority is irrelevant, not at all, it is protecting against the false positives.
Mind you a lack of steamrolling with majority alone forces a downstream integration of opponent thoughts.
Think it like a collective intelligence architecture that is trying to make sure we don't get stuck in local optima.
I’m amenable tot he notion that there should be some guardrails on simple majoritarianism, but it shouldn’t follow that all anti majoritarian rules are good.
Should there be more things off-limits? Should there be less? Intelligent people could disagree, but the off-limits category already exists and there is a process to change what is in it.
But in a way you’re right. “The founders” created a government that protected aristocratic interests explicitly. Most states had property requirements to vote when the constitution was ratified, and even higher property requirements to hold office. So you can definitely say that they would have been fine with a system that allowed moneyed interests to block legislation they didn’t like.
The US Senate process to force an end to (previously unlimited) debate on an issue and hold a vote on the matter is not a feature put in place by the Constitution.
It's a rule put in place by the Senate in the 1900's.
> this is an example of too much majoritarian thinking; whoever has the majority in either house of Congress takes that as permission to gerrymander the rules however they like to favor their preferences.
This is literally how the Constitution specifies that the legislature will operate. The Senate sets it's own rules, by majority vote. This is how the "nuclear option" to change the Filibuster rule was recently implemented.
>Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) used the nuclear option Thursday morning, meaning he called for a vote to change the Senate rules by a simple majority vote. It passed, 52 to 48.
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/harry-reid-nuclear-op...
Yes, it is: each house of Congress is explicitly permitted to set its own rules of procedure. That is obviously not an anti-majoritarian feature of the Constitution. I didn't say every single provision in the Constitution was anti-majoritarian, or that the founders did a perfect job of implementing their ideas.
> The Senate sets it's own rules, by majority vote. This is how the "nuclear option" to change the Filibuster rule was recently implemented.
And also, of course, how the filibuster rule was put in place in the first place.
There's a reason we don't push our system on other countries even when we're the ones setting up a new government—it's basically a ho-hum fact among people who are into that kind of thing (so, the ones who tend to end up in charge of directing the creation new governments—at least in charge of the boring details) that the US system blows goats, but some of the ways that it's broken also mean that it's nearly impossible to fix without a revolution. This has been essentially regarded as a fact in poli-sci circles since... I dunno, probably the early 20th century I'd say (Germany and Japan didn't get our system after WWII, notably, and that wasn't by accident)
I don't agree that there were "a whole lot", but yes, some of the original features were bad. The founders knew they couldn't avoid that, which is why they included an amendment process. Which has been used to fix a number of the original features that turned out to be bad.
I also don't agree that the brokenness in the current US system is due to too much use of anti-majoritarian features. I think it's due to too little use of such features. (Well, that and simply ignoring the Constitution altogether when it is politically expedient.)
Our bad election rules make coalition-building to accomplish even very popular things really difficult if powerful interests oppose them, and it's getting worse the more sophisticated the game-playing within our set of rules gets. Moreover, a bunch of the reforms we need would threaten the power of those who could, realistically, work to effectively change the system (see again: broken election process) so they simply will not happen.
We have trouble accomplishing things with overwhelming popularity in the general population that don't need an amendment—amendments are all but dead under modern electoral and political game conditions, and fixing that would require... an amendment. Key reforms that would fix the very deepest problems are about as likely as a literal miracle happening.
Just because we can invoke historical story does not mean we abide it today.
The majority inherently rules whether it’s US Constitution or the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Not really sure how you get to a system of material comfort and logistics we have without majority buy in to not fight and kill.
I wish people would realize how silly they sound reciting the dead peoples chants when the literal world clearly shows majority rule is not so bad literally. For whatever reason quite a few folks prefer to fight over which vain elders hallucinations and diatribes are the one true social system when the reality is providing real stuff to survive is all society really is about.
Yours is no less propaganda.
People do cultural learning, pretty much everything you use from technology to medicine and yes politics is overwhelmingly based on dead people's ideas. That is the basis of us as cultural beings.
You're right with cultural learning we might inherit noise too, but you'll have to fight against the content of those ideas, not dismiss from mere historicity. If an idea has merit, it will be timeless.
Medicines we keep using keep proving their value to the present through experiment. We have binned plenty discovered in the past but later revealed to be snake oil.
As ephemeral gibberish does not exist it is naturally lost to time as those who memorized it die off. What’s literally true remains always verifiable by experiment.
I can find academic papers, political arguments we are in violation of the old ideas today anyway. How do we know we even abide them as intended and aren’t just abiding arbitrary math for staffing institutions described by the Constitution? They are not like organic chemistry where cause-effect is obvious. Does “America” give rise to society or people engineering together casually referring to some old gibberish when pressed? How do you test for existence of political ideology except by populist poll? Democratic majority rule. But that’s anti-America which is to prevent majority rule!
What I advocate is more like forgetting they exist by not teaching them. We can teach how to create together versus destroy each other, without the history lesson, and measure for impact literally to avoid carrying forward snake oil.
So instead, we get old-fashioned tyranny of the of the rich and powerful minority.
Perhaps the threshold for passing a bill should increase with the bill's length.
The push for Federalism is a good example of this. If you hear a politician claiming "states' rights", this might just be why. One material example of this is the NRA funding lawsuits against the Brady Bill, despite the gun control measures being popular with non elites.
So, just in the premise the study, by needing to throw away almost all the survey responses where everyone agrees and get the policies what they want, actually goes a far way to debunking the populist premise that "economic elites" and "the People" are opposing factions with inherently different political opinions.
Further, the study considered the group as "disagreeing" if the margin in survey answers was at least 10%. So if 90% of one group wanted something and 80% of the other, that was considered as them disagreeing.
When a follow-up study further filtered responses to questions where more that margin spans the 5% mark, i.e. most people in each group disagree, then the effect completely disappears and it's more or less a coin toss which way policy goes.
> So, just in the premise the study, by needing to throw away almost all the survey responses where everyone agrees and get the policies what they want, actually goes a far way to debunking the populist premise that "economic elites" and "the People" are opposing factions with inherently different political opinions.
Help me understand, it sounds like you're saying that "when the poor people agree with the rich people, everyone gets what they want and democracy is proved to be healthy, nevermind that when they disagree, the rich people get what they want anyway."
> When a follow-up study further filtered responses to questions where more that margin spans the 5% mark, i.e. most people in each group disagree, then the effect completely disappears and it's more or less a coin toss which way policy goes.
So you're saying that when like, 90% of the rich people wanted A and 90% of the poor people wanted B, then it was a coin toss? That would make a good argument if so. Can you link to the study?
EDIT: Actually now that I think about it, it doesn't really make a good argument, because the donor class is so much smaller than the non- that if 90% of donors want A and 90% of the poor want B, B should prevail easily. So if it's a coin toss, that's extremely biased, no?
That's how I read it too.
Not the GP, but I think that the interests of the general public are actually much more closely aligned with those of "the elite" far more than people would like to believe. If for 90% of the issues the elite are just as likely to disagree amongst themselves than with the general public, it would be absurd to conclude that "democracy is a sham."
When Roe v. Wade got overturned, a lot of people on the internet were proclaiming this was an act by "the elite" who want cheap workers. In reality, virtually every billionaire who has a vocal opinion on abortion is pro-choice, and several have donated hundreds of millions towards the cause.
Sure, that may or may not be true, but we're discussing a study that claims that when the two groups disagree, the smaller one wins.
> When Roe v. Wade got overturned, a lot of people on the internet were proclaiming this was an act by "the elite" who want cheap workers. In reality, virtually every billionaire who has a vocal opinion on abortion is pro-choice, and several have donated hundreds of millions towards the cause.
RvW was overturned by the supreme court, but I think the effect we're discussing applies to laws enacted by the legislature. This article references the paper: https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2015/05/disturbing-d...
If that were true corporate lobbying wouldn't exist, so this theory is obviously false.
We're talking about the money here.
Issues like guns, abortion, gay marriage -- social issues -- are used to divide and distract the public from the financial issues which our uniparty in DC almost always goes the same way on, and which the public generally does Not support.
Big pharma, the banks, the arms industry, big agriculture -- I mean do we really have to list every industry? All of them profit by subverting the interests of the public and they do, to the tune of trillions of dollars. "absurd to conclude that "democracy is a sham" -- not absurd, obvious.
The first part of this is just false, you're being tremendously selective about which billionaires you're including. There are plenty of stinking rich anti-abortion people who have poured huge amounts into their cause.
Now, as to which group is larger, or richer, I leave that for someone with the time to look at the data, but it is not as open and shut as you're suggesting.
The CORRECT ISSUE and primary issue we need to be focused on is conflict of interest.
It makes no sense to try to get a group of people such as congress that have conflict of interest to fix the problems they created and are benefiting from , hence the result of the Princeton study.
The sad part is that BOTH individual republicans and democrats should want to reduce conflict of interest as it benefits both sides and everyone in general. However BOTH party are too successful in keeping them fighting with each other , blaming each other, and chasing their tails trying to fix the issues with the people that created them.
"Tyranny of the majority" seems like more of a problem for the rich and powerful, in my experience.
I dunno, I can definitely think of some times in our history when it impacted the poorest people.
I think there’s something very useful in the elections for representatives, in terms of it being an official poll of the people.
I think sortition is a really interesting concept and could work well, but I think it won’t work if it’s the only legislative body. I would be pretty starkly against that, but I would support reforms that made it the second legislative body.
If you really want a unicameral system as your top priority, I’d support a proportional representation House of Representatives.
I don't really think sortition itself would kill the parties. It does seem like a good way to weaken them, but...I suspect they would find a way to survive.
I genuinely don't know of how to do away with political parties. Is there a good example of a democratic system (or a governance by the people) that doesn't have political parties?
I mean if you really wanted to get futuristic about it you could even have a sort of crypto sortition where everyone is completely anonymous and representatives don't even know each others identity.
A jury also gets to hear arguments from both the prosecution and the defense. For complex trials this can last weeks/months. Presumably for the "jury" legislature that you propose, you'd want lobbyists/bureaucrats to plead their case. How do you prevent them from being hoodwinked by the lobbyists/bureaucrats? If you think that they shouldn't be able to hear arguments from lobbyists/bureaucrats, how do you prevent them from coming up with absolutely braindead policies like "haha tax cuts/spending go brrr"?
But the important benefit of an anonymous sortition in particular to me is that there is no connection between individuals and lobbyists. You cannot trade personal favours down the line. The pernicious part to me is when the guy who regulates the arms industry gets a board seat ten years later.
Essentially what I think of as ideal is a sort of black box. Uncorrelated, impersonal, representative and random snapshot of the public opinion on an issue. Transparency is I think the worst celebrated value because it opens decision makers up for capture. If the policies are still braindead afterwards, well I think then we're democratically at our wits' end.
probably there would have to many kinds of concurrent reforms and adjustments to make something like that work...
some type of lobbying reform would have to take place, as well as some kind of basic reasoning/education tests for sortition... also perhaps candidates could be picked by sortition but you'd have to get a winning vote by a majority of people etc... i wonder if there are any studies/books about this kind of thing
> Our findings of substantial influence by interest groups is particularly striking because little or no previous research has been able to estimate the extent of group influence while controlling for the preferences of other key non- governmental actors. Our evidence clearly indicates that—controlling for the influence of both the average citizen and economic elites—organized interest groups have a very substantial independent impact upon public policy. Theories of interest-group pluralism gain a strong measure of empirical support.
(Quote from your citation below.)
At some point I suspect "jury nullification" or worse will go mainstream.
https://represent.us/americas-corruption-problem/
A Ted Talk by Harvard Law professor and Copyright Law reform advocate Lawrence Lessig on the topic:
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-...
What it does show is that "the people" and "the elites" agree on almost everything, more than you'd expect them to. Pretty obvious, if you pay attention at all you'd notice most Americans don't vote for economic reasons!
I mean we have no problem looking at historical society and drawing a distinction between nobility and the masses. Why does that logic fall apart in modern day societies
In the past (and present!) this false narrative has been used to push mostly bad things: nativism, xenophobia, and really dumb economic policy. By falling for this false distinction you are priming yourself to be susceptible to demagoguery and similar bad ideas.
If you look at reality you'll find that most distinctions between "the elites" and "the people" collapse and there is substantial overlap between both groups, both in membership and in their political self-interest.
In The People vs The Elite, there are people and there are elite people.
People are people and elite people are people, therefor the people are the elite! Qed