I understand how we got there. The populous states wanted representation based on population, the less populous states wanted equal representation. So the solution is to have both. You break up Congress into two branches with equal power, one with equal representation for every state, and the other with proportional representation by population. Easy peasy.
Except that’s not what we got. Both branches are not equal in power, the Senate is more powerful than the House, thus benefitting smaller states. Also, the number of representatives in the House doesn’t divide out well enough to fit the population, which also gives more power to smaller states. Finally, the Electoral College gives more weight to smaller states for a similar reason. So everything is tilted to the more rural/smaller states.
I think one of the other big screw ups is setting up the system of governance based not on strictly codified procedures, due dates, and must/shall language, but instead on gentlemen’s agreements to act in good faith. The lack of any checks on corruption are also sorely lacking.
Apologies if I repeated anything from earlier, I haven’t skimmed through the whole thread.
The Senate has outsized power because they confirm Executive and Judicial appointments, which are huge exercises in power (example: Mitch McConnell blocking Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court). The House would seem to have more power on paper because budgets have to originate there, but since those have to go through the Senate too, that waters down the House’s influence. The Senate also approves treaties.
The compromise was the bicameral legislature itself, not the additional tilting of the scales.
The Senate only has this power if they are willing to use it. The founding fathers did a highly admirable job of coming up with a system that balances rights and reason. It is not on them what happened in the next centuries; their system was designed to be amended, not be perfect. It assumed an elected president would have integrity and many limitations were available should this not be the case.
One weakening factor for your lower house is biennial election, surely? Once elected, they’ve barely got time to get down to work before getting re-elected becomes the priority.
The founding fathers screwed up in many ways, but in terms of problems they caused that still plague us today, I think the number is fairly small. The electoral college, the high bar needed to amend the Constitution, and the make up of the Senate being by state rather than population are, IMHO, the only major ones left. Of course they made other mistakes, but those have largely been corrected in the intervening 1/4 millennium.
If anyone from “back in the day” is to blame for our current problems, I’d go with Andrew Jackson and his rejection of the intellectual and progressive values that the founding fathers held.
No; they could have not compromised and settled for being separate nations, possibly in a loose alliance. The US itself wasn’t “absolutely necessary” in the first place. The result would have been more democratic in the non-slave states, and the slavers wouldn’t have been in the same position to subvert and corrupt the non-slave states.
France, Spain, Russia and GB already had colonies in the Americas. Not to mention there never would have been a Louisiana Purchase, etc. Most of America would still belong to Spain.
Not how history works. Just because one change happens, that doesn’t freeze all the rest of history in place; that’s just bad alt-history. Colonialist empires would have collapsed as they did in our timeline, and all sort of other unpredictable things would have happened.
Quite a stretch, I think. I can’t imagine any scenario where native polities managed to survive. The outsized impact of differential disease mortality combined with the rapid expansion of agrarian and hence land hungry colonial populations pretty much guaranteed it. The Haudenosaunee would have been no more able to counter individual states than it would have the United States. In 1700 there were maybe ~12,000 Iroquois and ~55,000 colonists in Massachusetts, by 1770 the Iroquois population was roughly the same but Massachusetts was nearly 270,000 and growing rapidly. It was the same everywhere, more or less. 19,000 New Yorkers in 1700, over 160,000 in 1770 - 18,000 Pennsylvanians in 1700 to 240,000 in 1770.
I think the Haudenosaunee would have always lost ground and been swamped out, it’s just a matter of how rapidly and coordinated it would have been. It is even remotely possible it could have been even worse if they fought harder against slightly less overwhelming odds against multiple smaller colonial entities and prompted more retaliatory massacres. But really some sort of USA, even if truncated or a looser confederacy, was always going to happen.
I agree. You really need to get into some major counterfactual scenario like “Europe suffered from plagues just as bad as the Americas did and was crippled for generations” before you get the Native Americans being able to stand up to the colonialists. Apocalyptic plagues on one side and better technology & organization on the other made the outcome basically inevitable. We wouldn’t do very well either if ~9/10ths of the population died and then aliens invaded.
On the other hand a weaker/more divided US might have hit Mexico and been unable to expand further instead of grabbing off a major chunk of its territory.
Well they kinda tried that - the Articles of Confederation. It didn’t work - that’s what lead to the Convention that wrote the Constitution.
Now they could have chosen to stay more independent, but they needed the collective defense to protect against England and France. The very fact that they had rebelled together was the ultimate perspective that suggested they needed each other.
But a bunch of separate nation-states would likely have changed the character of the colonization of the continent. It likely would have lead to more wars fought in America. Just like the European powers perpetually attacking each other, separate American countries would have found reasons to go to war. Being organized under a collective government is what let the US become what it is, for better or worse.