No, you should definitely not hold your breath because my conclusion was that the 2016 Senate vote total, which the Democrats “won” (for all that’s worth) was nothing like the 2016 House results, which the Republicans won. In the post I was responding to, you said “similar results in the U.S. House”, but they weren’t similar. Your claim that your post “puts to rest [my] incorrect conclusion” looks silly to me, and I don’t generally thank people for doing silly things.
Quibbles about semantics don’t interest me. Misunderstanding or pretending to misunderstand another’s point holds no interest for me. Information is valuable.
I might almost conclude that the tiny popular vote win by the D’s in the Senate compared with the tiny R vote advantage in the House was all that you grasped. Your thinking isn’t that simplistic , is it?
Just to see if you’re even remotely on the same page, summarize what you learned by reviewing the results of those 7 House elections shown in the post. *** Look at those results in isolation** — don’t pretend that the only value is to quibble with your misconstruction of a previous post.*
I’m still not holding my breath.
Nothing I didn’t already know:
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in almost every case, the side that gets the most votes wins the House (2012 being the sole exception in recent years)
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larger margins of victory generally translate into more seats for the winning side
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incumbency is an advantage
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Team Blue has done a piss-poor job of distributing themselves geographically, and this costs them seats.
The 2012 election happened after the GOP gerrymandering binge of 2010. So you can’t call that an exception, more of a pattern that will play a role in 2018.
Sure I can, because in 2014 and 2016 the Republicans got more votes in the House. 2012 was the exceptional year, in that the party that received fewer votes won control of the House. In all other years (that septimus posted data for) the party that received the most votes won control of the House.
Had the republicans not won the majority of votes in 2014 or 2016, they likely would’ve still retained control of the house due to gerrymandering done in 2010.
The GOP gerrymandered things to the point where even if they lose the popular vote, they still control the house.
Ho hum, another poll indicating we’re going to hell in a hand-basket.
I’d say the original poll is largely meaningless unless you can compare it to a similar poll taken in, say, 1974. The “Summer of Love” had collapsed into the Weather Underground bombings, Nixon, and Kent State. How much did boomers trust democracy after the release of the Pentagon Papers?
And today’s music sucks, too.
@OP
Personally, after ranging all across the political spectrum and digging up just about every political system I could research (I have a boring job), the only consistent conclusion one can reach is that the only interests that will ever be served are the interests of the powered elite. Now, that’s usually the monied elite, but occasionally you can have a system where power isn’t identical to money but it’s rare and usually not stable. The only possible solution for The People to have their interests served is to give them the power. Completely. In the past, the middle class had a lot more political power (and money) and the US republic kinda sorta worked (it’s better than Monarchy). Now, it’s totally dysfunctional and really only serves the interests of the 1% (republicans) or the 5-10% (democrats). The other 90% has zero representation.
But the question is, what kind of system do people want if not democracy?
I can only speak for myself, but I’d argue total Demarchy. 10,000 senators (no bicameralism needed), selected from computer generated districts that are randomly distributed then adjusted to maximize convexity and equalize population between districts. Senators are randomly selected (Sortition) from college educated citizens and sent to a special year of post-secondary education (focusing on politically neutral economics, real politics, etc, for all those people whose field has absolutely nothing to do with governance), then allowed to administer as a voting member of the legislature for 3 years, after which time they are barred from public office permanently. They are also barred from any field in which they had a committee position with regulatory power (likewise, former members of industry are banned from those committees). No revolving door. No career politicians. Their pay is equal to the median income of the country, but they’re given a perpetual stipend after retirement that scales with the impact of their economic decisions on the median income to incentive LONG TERM economic prosperity and ignore short sighted term gains. Otherwise, the legislature would fill the same role as congress - passing laws, upon the signature of the president, approving appointments, etc.
The executive branch would have a president elected directly by the populace - no districts, no electoral college - popular vote. Single transferable vote, that is everyone votes for an unlimited number of candidates by order of preference, first to 50% of the vote wins, and until there is a winner repeat the following: eliminate the lowest voted candidate(s), recount the votes as if that candidate never appeared on the ballot. The president would have the same veto powers, appointment, ect. Not everything about the US system is bad. All votes would require a paper trail and verifiable counting process. All voters would have a constitutionally protected right to vote. No poll taxes of any sort (voter ID is fine, as long as it is completely free and automatically issued, and entirely intollerable otherwise).
The Judicial system has been the hardest thing to research, but besides the dysfunctional appointment process the US system has worked fairly well. I don’t think I’m experienced enough to suggest an improvement, and would import it directly.
Last but not least, an ideal system would borrow from Switzerland’s (or for those unfamiliar, California has similar) citizen initiatives, wherein a sufficient number of signatures can trigger a citizens vote for something to become law, circumventing congress entirely.
Now, why 10,000 senators? Athens was functional with 6,000 (yes, over the centuries of its existence it had the occasional issue, but it was mostly functional). 10,000 is a far cry from the percentage of the population that Athens had as its representatives (there was a good chance of you getting a seat in Athens at some point in your life, like 50/50, but that’s just not possible with the number of US citizens in existence), but we have historical examples of such a large legislature being able to get things done. 10,000 is at least a representative sample. You’d be laughed out of any rigorous institution if you presented a sample size of 100 or even 500 in a study, why should a single study (vote) be used as a representation of the will of the people? It also dilutes political power. Bribe/blackmail/extort one senator today, and you have 1% control of congress for what may be decades. Bribe one in the new system? You have 0.01% control for exactly 3 years.
Why sortition? It’s harder to rig, it eliminates all variants of Tweedism, eliminates gerrymandering, and it produces a far more representative sample. Most politicians will tell you they are the Clever Elite, smarter than you and more experienced than you in every way. This is just salesmanship, and most of them have no more education or experience than the average joe on the street. They just have the balls, money and connections to run for office. We’re basically getting random joes now, except they are hand picked by the Tweeds, bought and paid for by lobbyists, and generally filtered by our system to leave us with the worst of the lot. I’d have a lot more faith in a system looking out for me if the people in office looked like me economically - I avoid playing race cards, but this’d also put an end to the whole argument about representation too.
It’d be a lot more functional, and it would represent the will of the people. You’d also need to rewrite a lot of the constitution (we have no constitutional right to vote, bribery is protected speech, and rules-as-written, you should be able to bring a nuke into a hospital without offering up any reason whatsoever just for starters)… but this post is long enough. I’m happy to engage, however.
The so called democracy we have today? It’s about as “representative” of the people as the old noble republics circa Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The aristocracy chooses who holds the reigns and the people have no real say. We’ve slipped so far from the republic we started as that it’s sad and almost funny. Funny, because even the original intent for the republic was to keep those stupid, poor inferior people from participating (that is why we have the Electoral College to overrule the popular vote, why Senators exist and were chosen by state legislatures and not votes, why we had poll taxes, and why the supreme court was a lifelong position). People seem to forget that when the founders spoke of men, they meant relatively rich, land owning men (who were coincidentally white, but they cared a lot more about money than race, and happily threw poor whites to the dogs same as everyone else). I mean, they modeled their government off of ancient Rome- yeah, bread and circuses, screw the plebs, Rome. They disparaged Athens and rule by the people.
Well, that was quite the screed but I agree completely that a substantially larger Congress and the elimination of first past the post voting will advance the cause of democracy in this country. The corrupt, money-driven system currently in effect serves the will of big donors far more than it does the rest of us.
its that millennials think everyone who is a member of a “marginalized group” is inherently entitled to what they want at everyone’s expense. That doesn’t square with democracy.
True. They think they deserve respect, equal rights, equal protection from and by the law (and law enforcement), an end to or at least a measure of redressment from the social and cultural processes that marginalizes them, dumb shit like that. What a bunch of entitled wankers them millenials are ! Don’t they know it’s about what white hetero people want ?!
The problem isn’t the desire to see marginalized groups no longer marginalized. That’s actually laudable. The problem is the how. Most of the efforts by the left don’t do anything to help marginalization at all and often times make it much worse. That tends to happen when you go after the wrong “cause” for things. You fail to address the casual factors and you exacerbate the situation. Unfortunately, missing the “cause” is a common consequence of ideological practice. You have to use a politically and ideologically agnostic approach (read: science) to answer the question of why X, Y, or Z is marginalized, then use it again to determine what the effects of any proposed change might be. Alas, and also unfortunately, ideologues couldn’t give two hoots about what actual data says.
Millineals are almost exclusively extremely radicalized ideologues (left or right). Neither side cares about facts or science, unless said facts happen to back up one of their presuppositions, in which case everyone else is an idiot for denying facts.
Examples?
In response to the OP, I do get the sense that many millennials think that democracy is only good if it gets them what they want - that if forced to choose between a tyranny that favors their causes, or a democracy in which the opposing side wins every election every time, that they’d choose the tyranny in a heartbeat.
To be fair, that describes perhaps 80% of people in the world, too.
government doesn’t deal in feelings, but laws to keep people physically safe, not their feefees safe.
now that no state has laws banning any one race, ethnicity, religion, or people of either sex from doing things, you have the most equal rights which government can bestow that wouldn’t go beyond the scope of our system and keeps your rights equal to, not more than, others. Violations of those are products of idiosyncrasies of individuals, the idiosyncrasies that will always exist and cannot be eliminated without mind/thought control.
Government systems cannot do such things without delving into tyranny. See the Soviet Union, China, Zimbabwe, and other countries which tried to undo the past regarding social and cultural things.
Having been alive back then and living near Chicago, I can say the 60s were more chaotic, but the divisions, as deep as they were, were not as deep nor as rigid as those today. There was tremendous energy in the 60s, and the will to change came in violent contact with the reluctance to do so. Civil rights, women’s rights and changing roles, an increasingly unpopular war, the environment, the so-called sexual revolution, and a host of other issues caused a lot of clashes, true. But there was incredible energy.
Remember when “rapping” meant discussing issues? Those discussions got heated, sure, but they were fundamentally different from those of today, in which each recalcitrant side caricatures and dismisses the other, people refuse to believe any data or news that doesn’t complement their rigid views, and too many people cite what they’ve heard on the #1 and #2 cable news channels, both incredibly biased.
#MeToo (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/metoo-campaign-women-isolated-at-work/) is the easiest that immediately springs to mind.