I was mostly talking about changing how electors are chosen in the states, which would be the actual important part of any non-constitutional reform. The size of the House is really not very relevant at all (I guess it would be if you shrunk it quite a bit), but you actually could solve most of the problem by going to proportional (not district) elections for electors in every state. However, any widespread change in selection of electors, which is what you’d need to do to solve the problem without a constitutional amendment, would require more consensus than is needed for a constitutional amendment, so it’s not really a solution at all.
Also, urban people tend to be more interdependent, needing to rely on all kinds of infrastructure that they mostly agree to be taxed for. L.A., for instance has voted to tax itself at least a full cent sales tax just for transit. Another reason cities tend towards being more liberal.
That’s a practical utilitarian consideration that doesn’t strike me as inherently liberal or conservative. I don’t understand how urbanization accounts for the difference in attitudes towards e.g. abortion.
One thing I have thought of in this distinction: what rural/low-population/commodity-extraction-economy jurisdictions tend to be favorable grounds for traditionalist-populist politics. Today that runs in the favor of Republicans but that’s a result of the opportunistic transformation of the party after the 1960s.
And the weighing of the system to give a leg up to rural/agrarian/low-pop jurisdictions was, at the time, a compromise to get the ratifying votes of those state leaderships that were concerned that otherwise the Union would be ruled by Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania, already starting to be seen as potentially growing large populations and capital-intensive economies.
And pause there because I’ve seen an objection to that before: when you are still trying to convince states to join into a new Union, at that point yes there is such a thing as the interest of the state as an individual entity, that you have to accommodate.
The next country to form within the boundaries of the Lower 48 probably won’t have entities resembling current states. No prediction on when this happens, though.
There have been various speculations on what the contiguous USA would look like if it was divided by modern cultural/ economic/ regional factors rather than the historical accidents from 150-250 years ago.
One thing I can almost be certain about: that in another 150-200 years, some people would be loudly complaining of why the hell should those subdivisions continue to exist that way and have whatever devolutions of authority they have.
Not long, probably!
Prompted by this thread, I took a look at the current status of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and found that seven entities (ME, VT, RI, DE, DC, NM, HA) with five or fewer electoral votes have enacted legislation signing on.
SInce all are blue, it raises the question of whether small states would really resist abolishing the EC or if it has become much more of a blue state/red state divide.
The EC is a reasonable compromise, indeed the Constitution would never have been ratified without it. The.reason it is still around in 2024, while technology (sometimes) advances, human nature hasn’t changed one iota since 1789
A good way to think about it, suppose there were a “World Government” and a popular vote, presumably the “popular vote” Democracy enthusiasts would never suggest that China and India should decide every issue for the rest of the world. Or would they?
Somewhere online I saw a graphic showing a circle encompassing India, China, Indonesia and S.E. Asia saying that half the people in the world lived within that circle.
It wouldn’t even cross my mind to have an actual government where each state gets one vote regardless of size. If I thought that large countries would consistently and overwhelmingly vote against my interests, I would either want those functions returned to their constituent states so that neither party is able to impose its will on each other, or not want to enter into such a compact in the first place. I wouldn’t demand both that the world government gets to set universally-binding rules for the whole world in all aspects of life, and that I get 4x the voting power to set these rules compared to larger nations due to being an American.
But barring the arrival of aliens a world government would have no outside- no potential external threats. That was not the case for the newly formed United States of America. In the political reality of the late Eighteenth Century it was crystal-clear that the states had to band together against Britain/ France/ Spain. At a minimum they needed a common defense and foreign policy, so there had to be a unified polity. The question was the balance of power between the states and the central government. The smaller states needed the defense pact but didn’t want to be reduced to protectorates of the central government or vassals of the larger states. If you read the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, the ancient Delian League is given as an example of the pitfalls of a supposedly equal alliance that was effectively dominated by a hegemon.
Sure, but it may make sense to have some sort of bicameral legislature that had two houses - one with representatives based on a country’s population, and a separate half based on “one (or maybe two) votes per country” - that way China & India can’t bully everyone else, and a country like China isn’t going to get overruled by a handfull of microstates deciding economic legislation. Make all legislation need to pass both houses - which will inevitably bias things towards inaction & status-quo - but maybe that’s a good thing when it comes to world-changing legislation.
Of course, maybe you’d want to add an singular executive to the mix, which will act as another check on the two halves of legislature, act as the figurehead, enforce the laws, and lead the military in the event of an attack from space aliens. You could elect the executive by population, or by “one vote per country”, but that would just have the same issues as above. So, while a “bicameral singular executive” solution is out, maybe we just use the same basic playbook again, and assign one vote for each representative in both houses, and then let each country determine how to assign the votes they are allotted, in some sort of electoral college.