Nope. That’s not question begging and is historically wrong. The states and people gave power to the federal government. And the states wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t in each of their interests.
Yes, the states ceded power to the federal government, but that government only exists because there was a negotiating procedure between those states (and their eligible voters) to protect their interests. I’m not sure what is wrong. You’re making exactly my point.
The states negotiated what was in their interests, and, by proxy, the interests of their white, cishet, landowning male voter base. The interests of “the people” as it exists outside those parameters (LGBT, black people, any other minority) were not considered or negotiated for. No state argued that they should get more votes because of their gay population, or whatever.
That’s what I’m saying. They ceded some power to the federal government, and for some states to sign on they had to be given guarantees that they felt enfranchised their constituents at the time the document was drafted and gave them a fair say at the political level. Minorities outside “the interests of less populous states” do not get such concessions because of this negotiating process.
(Another example would be “slaves count as 3/5s of a person for purposes of apportioning electoral votes/districts”. This is an example of how, while it’s still state-based, electoral votes could be distributed differently to take other populations into account. Except in this case it was a power-grab negotiating move by slaveholders).
The thing people often fail to realize is the two parties are not as far apart as they seem and two Democratic Senators from California will have much in common with two Republican Senators from Utah or Arizona as the interest of those states (in this case water and the Colorado River) lie heavily tied.
The first duty of any Senator is his/her state and the second is to get reelected, not to serve their party.
The problem is magnified by the fact states have lost most of their original authority and are becoming more like county boundaries. In the 60s states lost the right to apportion one of their legislative houses by counties and now must do both houses by population.
There is no reason why it’s not fairer, but then again their is no reason why everyone doesn’t pay the same percent of tax. After all it’s fair isn’t it? Just because I can afford to pay more tax is it fair that I do?
But being fair isn’t always what’s best.
Rural people pay taxes for hospitals, social services, roads and such that go to the urban areas because it’s easier to distribute services over dense population bases.
There are good arguments one could make for both sides.
This is a subject which is scrutinised in political studies courses at universities around the world. If you are interested try “voting apportionment” in Google Scholar. Or even Wikipedia Apportionment (politics) - Wikipedia
I think the main reasons have been covered above. Suffice to say that the US is completely normal in having apportionment. It has nothing to do with land - eg. lots of rural in California which already has a huge urban population. The system provides a slight weight to sparse populations to avoid the tyranny of the majority. Those people need schools. hospitals, and roads too.
Penultima Thule post 21 has intelligently explained the Australian equivalent. New Zealand has it too. And Canada, Britain etc etc.
Pushing the it’s not just a rural versus urban thing with an example:
someone living in Portland, Oregon is slightly over-represented compared to someone living in rural Alabama under our system.
They’re suffering because they’re rural. They aren’t so much ignored as treated as though they have a terminal illness–which they do. Industries compatible with low population density, like farming, need ever fewer people as time goes on. Growing industries like STEM require a high population density. Urban areas already subsidize rural, but there’s a limit to how far that can go. High-speed internet and the like are still no replacement for physical proximity.
I hope this isn’t too much of hijack, but as a New Hampshirite, I find it to be one of the most misunderstood states. Most of the population is in the bottom 20% of the state, and that is really a giant suburb of Boston (with a couple of mildly urban islands). The rest of the state is in fact rural.
It is also odd, in that it tends to be more libertarian than red or blue, and that really is the cause of it’s swing state status. I like to tell people that in NH we like gays AND guns.
Also, interesting factor is the huge portion of NH that moves up here from MA. But it doesn’t tend to be as blue a crowd as you would think. One meets a lot of people who moved here because they are anti tax and anti nanny state, and so were Republican when they were in MA- that is, there’s a selection effect.
Bullshit. I saw an article that quoted a very good paper published by the Bear Fight Institute in bumfucking Winthrop. You can get more podunky than Winthrop, but not by much. STEM relies on information exchange, which this here thingy, through which we are posting to each other, can handle very well regardless of geography. And some people do better work in less urban environments.
Doesn’t work that way. Physical proximity means that your work networks, friend networks, education networks, hobby networks, finance networks, and so on all overlap. These effects are multiplicative and are the reason why Silicon Valley is so successful, and will continue to be.
We have employees that worked locally for a while and then moved away. There has been a noticeable decrease in their productivity and skill. They just… slowly disconnect over time. All of those random connections that people make over the course of the day simply don’t exist. They’re difficult to measure but crucial.
Living relatively close by and coming in 1-2 days a week isn’t so bad, but that’s not gonna happen with some guy in Nebraska when the company is in California.
Sure, there are some sciences that are more tolerant of remote locations, mostly because they have to be–astronomy, etc. But they will be outcompeted by urbanites unless there is some barrier to entry.
If the internet was good enough to replace other forms of communication, then we should have already seen a huge rise in small-town tech startups. Instead, the opposite has happened.
Maybe particular individuals work better in a rural environment, but they’ll be outcompeted by those who can tolerate an urban one.
No area should have special influence. It should be one vote per person if this were a true democracy. One person, one vote, no exceptions. Across the nation, no exceptions. The Electoral College needs to be abolished. I’ve been saying this for 40 years.
This is not a “true democracy”. What part of that are you not comprehending?
Nevertheless it should be one vote per person; there is no reason or excuse for anything else. No area should have special influence. One vote per person.
Which is it?
- People don’t know that definitions are readily available via google
- People know that definitions are available, but choose not to read them or can’t understand them
- People know the definitions are available, have read and understood them, but intentionally misuse them
I’m always curios.
The United states is a true democracy. What, do you think our representatives are born with the title? Do you know what democracy is?
“Republic” merely describes a system of government where representatives make decisions. A Noble Republic - Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, for example - would be a good example of a republic that wasn’t a democracy. “Democracy” describes a system where the people at large (universal suffrage is not a requirement, and most democracies deny suffrage to children) are responsible for decision making. In the case of the US, it is both a Democracy in that the electorate decides on a Representative, and a Republic, in that our representatives are ultimately responsible for deciding on laws.
Parts of the United States are even Direct Democracies - that is, a system wherein a simple majority of the electorate defined as “the people” at large directly vote on laws - such as California’s proposition petition system.
“True” Democracy does not mean Direct Democracy, it means a state that is both nominally and in fact a Democracy. North Korea is no true democracy despite its sham “elections,” but the United States sure as heck is.
Please, don’t correct terminology if you don’t know your terms. Thanks.
Successful, maybe, but I have seen the utter garbage that comes out of Santa Clara County. I remain unconvinced.
That link is more general than STEM. If nothing else, it illustrates the iron grip that the corporate-favoring socioeconomic system has over everyone, not just hicks and bumpkins in the country. I, personally, see the increasingly concentrated and centralized way of doing business as not actually a good thing. I see that in and of itself as one of the major factors creating the urban/rural divide. And that divide cannot be to our advantage.
90% of everything is garbage. But 10% of something is better than 10% of nothing.
50 years ago we might have been talking about manufacturing startups. Today it’s high tech. The patterns may be more general than STEM, but the specific needs of high tech exacerbate the problem.
If you move into a town with 10k people to open a 100-worker factory, you probably won’t have a problem hiring the people you need. You don’t have to be selective when the only requirement is a high school education. If a software house moves in and hopes to hire 100 decent developers, they’re in trouble.
The way the startup scene works has very little to do with corporations. Long-established corps have almost no idea how to promote genuinely new ideas anyway. Startups form when a critical mass of like-minded people decide to do something, and can convince someone to give them money. This is very difficult when there is not a high concentration of specialists around, and when there are 5 degrees of separation between you and potential investors.
You know, so much arrogance is deadly. Your post might be valid if you hadn’t assumed a whole bunch of things I didn’t say.
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Your commentary on “republic” is irrelevant. I did not draw a distinction between “republic” and “democracy”, as I’m fully well aware they are not apposites.
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Your commentary implies that I feel a “representative” form of government is somehow not a “true democracy”. I said nothing of the sort. Again, you assume too much.
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Your commentary misses my main point: the United States of America as established in the Constitution of 1787 is not a “true democracy” (whatever that phrase means; more below). We do not have a right as citizens to vote on the President. Never have had such a right. Several states did not in the 1788 election. The state I currently live in didn’t allow popular selection of the electors until after the Civil War; for fully one-third the existence of the country, South Carolinians were unable to directly OR indirectly select who the President should be.
Since the United States has never been a “true democracy” as far as selecting its President goes (to say nothing of the process of selecting Senators, prior to the 17th Amendment), complaining that we don’t have precisely equal vote values is silly. When you compound that with the fact that, while we democratically select our Representatives for the House, the representation in the House is ALSO not that close to “one man, one vote” (just look at the variation between Montana and Rhode Island in terms of people per representative), asserting that the US is a “true democracy”, thus entitling us to “one man, one vote” at the national level is without historical foundation.
Thus, since you weren’t addressing what I was talking about, your entire post lacks any relevance, and, as a result, looks like just pure snark for the sake of trying to sound educated.
But let’s address something embedded in your post: the meaning of “true democracy.”
Let’s start by pointing out that “true democracy” has no specific meaning. Indeed, as is noted by anyone who addresses the subject, the meaning of the term “democracy” is variable. So a “true” democracy could mean, as you highlight, a system where people have a valid choice vs. a system where people have only the illusion of choice. But it could also mean “direct democracy” vs. non-direct forms, such as that found in the US and in Great Britain. It depends upon your viewpoint.
But I wasn’t using the words as a term of art with specific meaning. I was simply replying to this:
In replying, I was rejecting the implied assumption that the US is, indeed, the sort of “true democracy” she envisions. So, again, your rant is both wrong (in its categorical assertion of the meaning of “true democracy”, and irrelevant (by focusing on distinctions not relevant to the discussion.
Each person has one vote. Where do they have more than one? If you don’t like the fact that some areas have different outcomes due to different political boundaries, I disagree with the notion of pure democracy to change that.
I am amazed that so many people don’t realize that this entire thread, is based on trying to explain something is true, that flat out isn’t true to begin with.
THERE IS NO BIAS TOWARDS LARGE LAND HOLDERS.
Representation is by population. That’s it. The same number of people in every state, get the same number of representatives as every OTHER state, with the same population, no matter how concentrated it is.
The reason why some people gripe and complain about unequal representation, is because there are MINIMUMS. That is, the MINIMUM amount of Federal representation each state gets, is two Senators, and one Representative. Even if the total population of the state is much lower than the current standard (about 700,000 people per Representative). Thus, even though Wyoming has less than 600,000 people altogether, they still get the same representation as a state with almost twice their number of voters.
BY CHANCE, there are lots more large land holdings in the least populous states, but that has ZERO to do with why they have proportionately more representation.
IN ADDITION: the whole thing about why someone can lose the popular vote but win the Presidency, ALSO has nothing to do with any bias towards land or non-urban areas. That has instead, to do with the lack of PROPORTIONAL counting of electors. Any state which wants to, CAN decide to switch to proportional electors, but so far, only two of the fifty have done so.
There is much misinformation and misplaced emphasis in this thread. I think the sentient humans in Wyoming would be amused to learn that their high representation derives from being a sovereign state independent of Montana.
I’m sure there’s a greater sense of “otherness” between the subregions of California than across the Wyoming-Montana border. Heck, there are profound cultural changes just driving from one part of L.A. to another or between parts of the S.F. Bay Area.
But that all gets very “philosophical.” Here’s simple arithmetic error:
The difference between 600,000 and 700,000 is the least of worries when people complain about electoral college unfairness. You seem to have overlooked the 2 extra electors assigned to each state.
Wyoming voters get 3.6 times the Electors-per-person as California voters. Three.Point.Six.
A WY voter get 66 times the representation in the US Senate than a CA voter … Sixty-six times … sagebrush gets better treatment … what a great country we are !!!