Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

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>The rules are "I can think you are crass, wrong, bigoted, geriatric, etc., but if a majority of my countrymen think otherwise, we accept we are not successful in the battle of ideas, and fight another battle of ideas in 4 years".

Trump was never supported, much less elected, by a majority of Americans. He didn't even get the majority of votes in the election he won. The American political system was explicitly designed not to empower the will of the majority, because that would have been an existential threat to the status quo (slavery) at the time.

And while it might be nice to claim that we should be civil participants in a battle of ideas, it would be naive to ignore the effect of centuries of gun culture and polarizing neo-reactionary rhetoric on American politics. Regardless of what the founding fathers may have intended (and notwithstanding that they disagreed on many things) a lot of Americans believe political violence is a necessity and a virtue. They lecture people on the virtues of guns after every school shooting, and speak wistfully about "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants."

America has been edging itself with talk of a "cold civil war" for years now. It's like a morbid game of chicken.

> The American political system was explicitly designed not to empower the will of the majority, because that would have been an existential threat to the status quo (slavery) at the time.

This whole retelling of history exclusively through the lens of the slavery is getting super old. It is divisive, it’s a form of revisionist history, and it’s wrong.

Read about the Northwest Ordinance, the provisions in it banning slavery in the 1780s were ultimately adopted verbatim into the Thirteenth Amendment. Or the actions of the founders including John Adams who put their lives on the line to fight against slavery. And the numerous states that made it illegal at the time of the nation’s founding.

There’s a lot more to history than the over-simplified retelling about how the radical pace of social change in the 18th century wasn’t somehow fast enough for our 2024 sensibilities.

The founders feared the will of the majority partially because they saw the instability in France and recognized the dangers of mob rule.

Within a few years of the drafting of the constitution, the reign of terror began.

The majority isn't always right.

Your history is wrong. The French Revolution did not begin until May 1789. The US Constitution had been adopted in March 1789.

Even if there had been instantaneous communication (and we’re talking a 2+ month communication lag), the framers were not influenced by the French Revolution at all.

When looked at in terms of actual writings from the time, the protection of property owners — including enslavers who claimed humans as property — was a key part of how the US Constitution was ultimately accepted.

Read my comment again.

I said within a few years of being drafted. That's accurate.

Instability was apparent before the blood actually began flowing.

Rule by minority seems implicitly less just than rule by the majority - as rule bmy minority converges towards authoritarianism.

Looks like you're getting down voted a lot for this but it's all true. Trump only became president because the electoral college weighs geography higher than population. So does the senate.

The concept is less surprising when degressive proportionality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degressive_proportionality) happens to be fairly common.

Election system that give weight to geography is generally done so to encourage cooperation where people otherwise would prefer going alone. Both EU and US have large historical reasons to unify low population regions with a lot of natural resources with high population regions. Same is true in Germany, Iceland, Sweden and so on, all with varied degrees of giving weight to geography.

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