The executive branch, the house and the senate are all set up to reward the conservative party even when they get fewer votes.
Very interesting and depressing read.
[ul]
[li]Blue state senators represent more Americans despite being the minority party[/li]
[li]Due to Gerrymandering, urbanization and the way the house is set up, democrats are the minority party despite winning more votes (as happened in 2012 when democrats won 48.8% of the vote, vs 47.6% for the GOP, despite that the GOP won a 33 seat majority in the house). The democrats can only win the house if they win a 4-11% majority in the popular vote. [/li]
[li]The electoral college has twice given the presidency to the candidate who lost the popular vote (2000 and 2016).[/li][/ul]
The executive and both houses of the legislature reward the minority party due to how our system is set up. The system will continue to get worse as America becomes more urban and people congregate in a smaller and smaller number of states. As the article says, are younger, urban, multicultural voters going to accept being governed by older, rural white voters despite them winning fewer votes?
I fear you are, because several factors come together:
the conviction of many Americans that US is an Exception / the Only True Democracy + Home of Freedom pluse the reverence for the Founding Fathers, while ignoring how much Society has changed, Technology has changed, knowledge has changed.
This means that accepting that parts of the System are truely broken and Need repairing, let alone looking at and learning from what works in other democratic countries, are unthinkable.
the broken education System that goes along with it, allowing myths and falsehoods to be taught (80% of School books are written in Texas and California, and are accepted by School boards, manned by eccentrics with Revisionist agendas, who deliberatly worked to get themselves voted to the “unimportant” Position of School board, in order to push Revisionist history, biology etc.), or side-stepping “problematic” issues in School in Bible Belt/ Southern States.
Along with an emphasis on authoritarian education as a whole (corporal punishment still legal in many states), and not-well qualified (and badly paid) teachers, stops People from growing up to become critical-thinking, fact-checking adult citizens which would want to Reform the current System.
without critical-thinking voters and political candidates, there is no possibility of Reform of education System (see above) to produce those adults who can vote and be elected
because the handful of old rich White men see their twilight coming, they take more measures to make sure they stay in power - they don’t want to loose (they have told lies so Long about what will happen if the evil other side gets to power that they now believe their own lies).
So compromise or gradual hand-over is not on their Radar.
brainwashing with Propaganda about how great and free the USA is (see above) while telling lies about other countries (with free healthcare, laws that protect employees, rights for minorities, not only majority, etc.) still works. Being a Social Justice Warrior, a Bleeding Heart Liberal or similar is still an Insult.
Currently People are reacting to hopelessness of their Situation … by taking opoids. Not by changing things, or marching or anything.
People who go bankrupt due to medical bills don’t march for Change - they commit suicide.
People buy into the toxic Story of Machoism; of life being zero-sum; of only bad People having misfortune (so People don’t “deserve” help) - so they won’t stand up for a better Society, just be quietly ashamed; or go on a Shooting spree.
Perhaps the Democrats* will finally learn the beauty of Federalism. The Federal government doesn’t have to do everything, and in a very large country like the US, maybe it’s best that it doesn’t. No reason the states can’t do more of what the people there want them to do. Personally, I’m happy to let the good folks in Mississippi mostly run their own affairs and then they can mostly stay out of our affairs here in California.
*Yes, the Republican have their own learning to do. But it’s the Democrats who seem to complain most about the subject of this thread.
Hey, that would be great! Even my silly liberal mores would love for that to be the case.
The problem, of course, is that, left to their own devices, the good folks in Mississippi would mostly run their own affairs directly into the fucking ground, which is why over 40% of their state general revenue comes from federal aid, and they still squander most of that on bullshit.
Americans are stuck with their broken system because they have been taught that it would be a bad idea to improve it.
Several things in US law are regarded as (and preserved like) holy relics. Untouchable, undiscussable, unquestionable, … and wrong. Most of the relics were likely right, at the time they were enacted - but that doesn’t matter anymore.
Taking down the holy relics from the shelf, examining them - and laughing at them while throwing them in the trash - is in some cases long overdue.
Repealing the “Holy Second Amendment” and replacing it with reasonable legislation would be one tiny step in the right direction. It’s just an example - there are many other things that belong in the same category, laws that have nothing going for them except historical cachet.
I agree and I think this will catch on more. But it won’t just be states vs federal government, but also urban areas vs the state they live in. The urban areas in red places like South Carolina, Kentucky, Utah, etc. all tend to be blue.
However there will be pushback on both the state and federal level against this. I know that some cities have tried to do things like raise the minimum wage and had the state government try to stop them. Or cities try to have early voting and the state government stops them. etc.
The lopsidedness itself is either an accidental blip of history, or a Republican conspiracy, or a Democratic conspiracy masquerading as a Republican conspiracy, or a Republican conspiracy masquerading as a Democratic conspiracy masquerading as a Republican conspiracy, or…
Anyway, Americans themselves will have to figure that one out.
I support the endorsements of federalism in this thread, but I have no idea how to get us trending in that direction again. We’re definitely trending in the opposite direction, and I don’t see how we get both sides to sort of step back and say “yeah, maybe it’s better if we let the states do these things, even if it means that I don’t get what I want all across the country.”
ETA: also, I think a portion of the OP is a bit flawed. 2012 is sort of the exception that proves the rule that the House almost always goes to the side that gets the most votes.
Again with the ‘popular vote’ thing? Why is it that people continue to misunderstand presidential elections? We had no election where 3 million more people voted for the loser. We had 51 separate elections, each of which held a certain number of electoral votes. The electoral votes of those 51 elections were then added up to determine the winner of the presidency. The aggregate total of votes cast is meaningless. As John Mace once pointed out, we don’t determine the winner of the World Series by the total number of runs scored but by who won the most games. Same difference. Overall votes don’t count in elections just as overall runs don’t count in the World Series. So please stop with the 3 million more votes nonsense, it only shows your bias and your ignorance…or your speciousness and dishonesty if you know better and deliberately continue to promote the notion because you think it serves your end, as is probably the case with the writer of the piece quoted in the OP.
Some of us understand it quite well and still want it changed, for what that’s worth.
And all that is because of one of the most important “holy doctrines” dating all the way back to the founding: that the State Governments are the true repository units of the fullness of popular sovereignty and the national union is a limited-purpose pooling of some set-aside parts of that sovereignty.
That still is the legal premise, but it clashes into a sociocultural evolution where today the citizens consider themselves to be citizens of the nation, yet at the same time they believe that the default setting for the whole nation is the social ways of their home community so they feel justified in wanting to enshrine it lest someone else “take it from them”.
Municipalities are just flat out screwed as they indeed are legally mere subordinate administrative dependencies of the “sovereign” and of course the sovereign rules over them.
Problem is that the expectation is that wherever you are, as a citizen* of the nation* your rights and entitlements should be the same and be equally assured. You face a couple of challenges:
(1) post-WW2 and even more so post-Internet we have a large part of the national society that is mobile and fluid and really wants to be able to ignore state lines as they live their lives except for tax and car registration purposes. So you have people who want it so that if two guys are married in Maryland then they are *also *married in Idaho and public and private entities there *must *give them the same benefits without any hint of a sideways look; and you have people who want it so that if you can openly pack heat in El Paso then you should *also *be able to do so in Brooklyn and NYPD had better not be tailing you for it… and often enough the people in favor of federalism or uniformitarianism for the one thing, are just as vigorously against it for the other. As mentioned earlier, people see themselves as citizens of the nation, and their state residency is incidental, but the same time they believe that the default setting for “being the American way” should be what *they *see as “obviously right”.
(2) the obvious and uncomfortable matter which is that the well of “states’ rights” is poisoned to Superfund levels, and that was the work of its own alleged defenders. When the old Dixiecrats cried “segregation forever”, they handed over on a silver platter a reiteration that it is the Federal government who is the anointed Doer Of Justice. They chose the wrong hill to die on twice over, literally c. 1860, figuratively c. 1960, and forever tainted the concept.
Then it should be argued that way instead of making the specious and unrealistic/dishonest claim that someone won a ‘popular vote’ that in reality doesn’t exist.
The system is not broken, what’s broken is that Democrats’ desires are no longer compatible with our constitutional system. So of course the system must be changed.
To illustrate how nothing is broken, let’s say we have two districts, Urban District and Rural District. Both have the same number of people, because all districts are roughly equal in population. Urban District elects a Democratic representative by a margin of 90-10. Rural District elects a Republican representative by a margin of 60-40. Each district elected the representative they want, so that’s fair and the system is working exactly as it’s designed to work. But the Democrats then say, “But that’s not fair! In total votes, we won 75-25! That’s a landslide, It shouldn’t be 1 seat each, we should get another seat!” But all you’d be doing then is rewarding urbanites for being more united behind their representative than the rural folk. If Florida elects their governor by a 60-40 margin and Georgia elects their governor by a 80-20 margin, that does not entitle Georgia to name Florida’s governor.
Not really. The system is a compromise between majority and minority rights. The majority will almost certainly have more power than the minority, but will be unable to do anything unless the minority consents. The system was designed to require broad consensus to do anything. Since the Senate has always been this way, what liberals have usually done is pay off rural states to agree to liberal priorities. That’s why red states get so much more federal money than blue states. It’s to buy their acquiescence. The fact that the red states aren’t taking new bribes isn’t the system being broken, it’s red states just deciding that the New Deal and Great Society were far enough, and we’re going no further. And a few billion in ag subsidies or roads isn’t going to buy their support anymore.
While Americans revere the Constitution, almost all of us have some changes we wouldn’t mind seeing. The problem is that the Democrats are focused on fixing their short term political problems, and you’re not going to get many non-Democrats on board to amend or reinterpret the Constitution so that Democrats can win more often.
Now we could take the old relic and throw it away and write a completely new one, but given that any new Constitution would require 3/4ths of the states to agree to it, it would probably have almost all of the infirmities liberals don’t like about it now, and a few new ones might even be added in the process. The only way for Democrats to get the changes they desire is through some kind of illegitimate process that would provoke a civil war, or at the very least, mass disobedience.
