ThisIsSin
Tomboy miscegenation
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User ID: 822
ThisIsSin
Tomboy miscegenation
7hr ago
Plenty of other democracies have been stable without such a system
The average democracy is only about 60 years old at this point. The US has, incredibly, managed to make it to 248.
What the EC does currently is tell minority party voters in every state that they don't matter and shouldn't bother.
That's more a consequence of FPTP (and in Westminster systems, whipping votes) than anything else. Again, other countries have political parties that manage to pull this kind of voter suppression off just fine.
Separation and/or a more confederated system starts to make more sense here simply because it encourages political competition and innovation in the areas that break off. Otherwise you start to run into certain failure modes of democracy, like "intentionally fail to enforce immigration laws, let the illegals vote, then swing elections that way", or letting the cities merge together politically into one globally homogeneous patchwork rather than retaining solutions tailored to/coupled with that area's unique circumstances (perhaps as a reaction to not being able to get their reforms through).
ThisIsSin
Tomboy miscegenation
7hr ago
Far more influence over the country as a whole != far more influence in actual fact, especially on the local level.
The large city/states have more than enough ways to throw their weight around, including the mere fact they're city/states. They don't need the ability to pass the "Loot the Rest of the Country Forever Because Fuck You Act".
ThisIsSin
Tomboy miscegenation
7hr ago
rural voters are relevant too. They're just only as relevant as their actual population size.
Which is just another way of saying "they're irrelevant".
Not true.
Trivially true; look at election maps of my [admittedly newly-added] example over the last 150 years and you'll see exactly what I mean. The cities always only ever vote for themselves with a brief exception perhaps once every 30 years.
More citizens live in the cities therefore doing pro city stuff
This doesn't actually preclude them from doing their city thing in that city. In fact, a significant chunk of power comes from the city people being able to do this- which is balanced against the below.
And the rural country doesn't likewise depend on the cities?
The country needs the city far less than the city needs the country. This is a significant strategic liability for the city, actually- the city needs water and food and raw materials (to convert into finished goods) far beyond subsistence levels by its nature of being a city. Thus the power the city derives from centralization is dependent on the rest of the country, not the other way around.
This is much like how a man's job is to bring home the food and the woman's job is to cook it.
If the woman doesn't do her job, they're unhappy. If the man doesn't do his, they're dead.
So it is for city and country, and why the country outranks the city.
Ah so giving them extra vote power is just a deal so they don't shoot up the democracy.
Yes.
To a large degree, I think this is because the people on the ground have asked for too much. It's not that the people have too little power- that was what the BoR and the Amendments are an attempt at mitigating (and were to a large degree successful)- it's that they have too much.
Regulatory agencies are an instance of this- they employ lots of people and execute a quasi-popular mandate, but that mandate is also extremely conservative (or "safe") and the agencies [have] become self-licking ice cream cones. Thus the central government becomes, by virtue of those employed at these agencies (and those who do business with them, to a lesser degree) having a vote, captured by those special interests, and Congress (being beholden to them) has become too weak to purge them. That is why it is completely ineffective against them- if Congress moved against the agencies, the people employed by them would purge Congress.
The best thing would be to disenfranchise anyone who works for those public agencies simply because it's a massive conflict of interest. The Founders got it right by not permitting DC to vote, but that has to apply to every public employee (and aside from China, no state at that time was powerful enough to have a bureaucracy of that size, so it's natural they overlooked this). In doing that, that the rest of the citizenry has a better chance of keeping them working in the public interest, not just the interest of the agency. In turn, the agencies must keep the citizenry on board with their agendas (which is in part why RFK is in the position that he is).
This is kind of why emperors get into the positions that make them emperors- the citizens wage a [civil] war, put one of them on the throne, and that generally solves the bureaucracy problem (but creates some obvious others). Elections actually do still allow the average citizen to impose some of their will, but for how long that remains the case remains to be seen.
by making someone in California have like 10x less say than the same person in Mississippi in Congress and the presidency
Yes, and that's a good thing.
Let's take a look at where that isn't true: Canada. This country has the politics you say you want, where the only relevant voters reside in one of 3 cities (legislature is de facto unicameral, though on paper it is something else). Naturally, they all vote as a bloc, and their policies are not only alien to the rest of the country, but increasingly oppressive in the sense that they prevent anywhere else from developing.
As a direct result, Canada has had active separation movements since roughly the late 1800s. These weren't as much of a problem between 1910 and 1950 for obvious reasons, but it's been a continual threat since 1970, and the referendum in QC in the mid-'90s had majority support except for the city on the QC/ON border (as in, the vote for QC to secede would have succeeded without Montreal). Even then, it was defeated on a razor thin margin. And the next Provincial election in QC is likely going to the separatists.
Serious attempts at Western separatism are newer. The province is a natural seat of government for a separated West due to where it is and what it sits on, and there's a bigger barrier with respect to the fact it needs to win referenda in 4 provinces to be a viable country- but Ottawa (and Vancouver) become more and more foreign, and grow more and more hostile, to the rest of the nation every single day. The rest of the country won't have the chance to get any political representation for 15 years, the sitting government exists completely contrary to the results of the election, and everyone knows it.
Most of the movement on the issue has been cooler than it would be in the US- Canada is a much poorer country thanks to difficult land and high latitude so there's a lot less to fight over and a lack of social cohesion is therefore costlier. Were this same situation true for the US (even in its original 13-colony form) it just straight up wouldn't have survived.
TL;DR Consent of the governed isn't equally geographically distributed, and the cities depend on the country for raw resources and soldiers- which are two things cities require for continual survival they cannot create on their own. (Not that it's a law of nature for a city to fail to field soldiers; that's a new incapacity revealed over the latter half of the 20th century, and specifically for Western cities.)
It is wise to limit the power of larger states to run roughshod over smaller states to ensure the larger states are limited to mining/colonizing the rest of the country in a sustainable manner, and not one that doesn't just end up with the country folks shooting up the power lines and oil pipelines (or seceding completely -> reserving the right to wage what is technically a civil war at some time in the future).
ThisIsSin
Tomboy miscegenation
16hr ago
[Progressives] confused getting yelled at with actually getting prescribed out of existence; they seem to think that nobody should be allowed to make them feel bad and the power of the state should be deployed to that effect.
Yes, I think this is a perfectly valid characterization of their actions.
Because these are only topics a high-decoupler woman would bother discussing (in a way that isn't just naked self-interest), and those are rare.
There's not much more going on than that.
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