… and since all politics are local, running it on proportional representation basis where huge swaths of the country are basically, politically, ignored is not a better system.
How are they ignored? They’ll still have votes. They just won’t have a disproportionate level of influence anymore.
Nonsense. North Dakota doesn’t care about anything, because North Dakota lacks a cerebrum in which “caring” can occur.
The PEOPLE who live in ND care, of course. And if enough of the people in ND and WY and SD and AK agree with one another on the issues, then surprise surprise surprise, there will be enough vote to get someone in office to represent them.
The current system, in which rural voters exercise outsize influence because We the People get confused between the amount of dirt in a state and the amount of people in a state, is totally bogus.
And no, politics is no longer all local. Back before the Pony Express went into operation, that idea made a lot of sense. In an age in which I can communicate about voting districts on a messageboard with members all over the world and carry on a nearly instantaneous conversation, that idea makes a lot less sense.
No, there will be no reps from any states at all. None. The reps would have their own home states but would not represent them as states; they would represent only their national partisan constituencies.
The above is how straight party-list PR would work; there are other forms, including multi-member-district PR which retains the element of geographical representation.
That won’t be USA. That will be some other country.
This WaPo article gives the nitty-gritty as to what the lawsuit actually means:
That will still be America. A nation is not its political system. Since 1789 France has been through five monarchies, five republics, and a period of fascist rule – yet through it all France has always remained France.
Because France is an ethnic nation-state. USA isn’t. France is not defined by its political system. USA is.
Since becoming the United States, we’ve grown by 70% (and much more in population terms), freed our slaves, given the vote to more than half of our citizenry who did not already have it, and gone from an agrarian society to an industrial economy to a service-based economy. I think we’ll probably be alright if we stop apportioning our political influence by arbitrary borders.
I doubt it. It would no longer be “United States,” for one. We are defined by our political system.
You’re joking, right? You think states will stop existing merely because we don’t apportion federal legislative representation according to their borders?
Yes, that’s exactly what the U.S. is – a nation-state like any other – and not, say, an idea-state like the Soviet Union.
No, not like any other. It is not an ethnic nation-state like France, or Germany. Ethnic nation-states are defined by their ethnicity and related culture. Thus they can survive political system changes. USA is not like that. And won’t.
Tsk. You really need to read The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind; he considers and refutes the “idea-state” theory quite definitively. I’ll dig you up some relevant excerpts later, time permitting. In a nutshell, the America nation is older than the American state, it predates independence.
“multiculturalism, he [Lind] characterizes as an “unmitigated calamity” and a “a repellent and failed regime”. Thus, Lind opposes affirmative action and racial quotas, and identifies the elimination of them as a “nonnegotiable demand”.”
Doesn’t seem like someone whose ideas you’d support.
I don’t care for the idea of eliminating state allegiances from the House of Representatives, but I would like to see proportional voting determine the makeup of each state’s delegation. For example, living in suburban Tennessee I have absolutely no chance of being represented by a Democrat in congress - there are only 2 Democratic house members from the whole state (with districts in Nashville and Memphis). If we got rid of congressional districts, the ratio might not change that much but at least I would feel like my vote counted.
He wants to get rid of race-based affirmative action and replace it with color-blind class-based AA; seems like a good idea to me, helps the black kids out of the projects and the white kids out of the trailer parks. Like Buchanan and the paleocons he sees American national “culture” as essentially rooted in Anglo culture – but, unlike them, also sees it as a thing capable of changing out of recognition over time while remaining essentially the same, just like every other national culture. Thus, immigrants are no threat to it and if they change it, as they have many times in the past, that’s fine - so long as they ultimately assimilate. In all ways – he also foresees and lauds a mixed-race “Trans-American Nation.”
Lind does, in fact, take a hard line on immigration – but only to the point of insisting it be limited to well-educated or high-skilled persons who can add value to the economy. He takes this position not for racial or cultural reasons but for economic and class-interest reasons – unlimited immigration drives down working Americans’ wages and favors the business interests of the Overclass.
So let’s say there is proportional voting for your state’s delegation. Let’s say there are five loosely defined geographic areas - A through E. You’re from area E. Through proportional representation, none of the people elected into your state’s delegation are from area E. In fact, they are mostly from area A, on the other end of the state. Do you really think that the candidates that were elected who come from the other areas will keep your area’s interests close to heart while representing your state? Better than the candidates from E would have?
That is actually the form of PR Michael Lind proposed (and argued it can be done without constitutional amendment) in this 1992 article.
- This immediately follows a section where he argues for expanding the total membership of the HoR for completely different reasons.