magicalkittycat
14hr ago
States are collective entities made up of, wait for it.... people. The Senate gives smaller states disproportionate influence because states with less people have the same swing as states with more people.
When we say a state, past all the abstraction we really just mean "the people there in that region".
Which is just another way of saying "they're irrelevant".
No, they'd just as relevant as any other individual voter.
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.
Even in the most one sided cities, they still tend to be around 70/30 Dem vs GOP. Which is what I assume you actually mean rather than "vote for themselves".
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.
Actually it can, look at North Carolina! The state legislature is extremely gerrymandered into a basically permanent veto proof GOP majority despite being a swing state that routinely votes Dem leaders and they constantly use this to try to limit and control Charlotte and Raleigh's ability to self govern. Like that famous "bathroom bill" a decade ago came out explicitly in response to Charlotte passing an inclusive ordinance within city borders. This is not uncommon.
Cities are in fact often precluded from doing what they want because of gerrymandering.
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.
Yes those are quite important, but cities are needed too. Try defending the country without the technology and logistics that urban wealth helps create and provide. Much of those are raw materials and natural resources are practically useless without the urbanites inventing things to do with them.
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.
If the woman doesn't do her job in this scenario, they get sick and die from eating raw meat. Just like how the rurals would be squashed by our enemies without the wealth and intelligence of the city.
But it's also an ahistorical example, women did tons of work in the past. Most people were far too poor to be letting someone get away with not being productive! When famines are frequent and the Lord demands his pay, you don't get to sit on your ass. Even the young children had to go out and till the fields.
Only the nobles and chieftains could have such a fancy life of not needing everyone working hard. Women milked cattle, tilled fields, managed crops, kept chickens, cleaned (also known as sanitizing things), make clothing (especially necessary at the time where minor scratches and infections could kill and no A/C or heating), hauled water, picked fruits and vegetables and various other tasks.
Ah so giving them extra vote power is just a deal so they don't shoot up the democracy.
Yes.
So what you're saying is that the cities should just start threatening their supreme economic and technological superiority back. Sure cities might be without food for a short bit before they move to conquer the fields, but the rurals will be without life after a few AI guided drone strikes and missiles.
magicalkittycat
15hr ago
Can you think of another heterogeneous democracy that has operated for at least a hundred years and hasn't had a region or subset of its population declare independence?
This isn't even true of the US, so I don't know what you mean by "another".
Sure, the South tried to leave, but you can't exactly point at France (new Republic every two generations!) or Britain (see Ireland, or India) either.
Even you're aware that your ask isn't true of the US. But yes I can, Switzerland. In fact it's even more heterogenous, 40% of the population has a migrant background and there's two different main languages spoken in both German and French.
The Electoral College prevents a small number of influential and high population urban centers with views that may be broadly considered alien from running a country most of the size of a continent. It is likely responsible for quite a bit of US stability.
Plenty of other democracies have been stable without such a system, so I'm gonna have to doubt this claim. Maybe the size does make a difference, but there's not too much evidence for it that counteracts the examples in other nations.
Look at the Hunger Games, where a large capital dictates unpopular policy to the other regions.
Completely fictional story, you might as well point to hunger games as proof for why Marx was right as well.
It's likely we would have significant ongoing issues with places like Texas trying to leave if California was in charge.
Texas is the second largest state population wise! Texas is literally one of the victims of EC small state bias.
The EC allows the federal government to have teeth without a shit ton of civil wars.
Now maybe if we don't give rurals disproportionate influence and instead only power proportionate to the population they will turn violent, but that says a lot about the rural population IMO.
The American founding fathers were some of the most brilliant and successful political theorists in the history of mankind. Don't throw out the political technologies they invented because it has been recently expedient.
That's true, but they were not perfect and even knew this pretty well themselves and it's why they have processed like constitutional amendments to begin with. It's especially useful to understand the time period they were working in as well, the electoral college makes more sense in a world where organizing and communicating things took a lot more effort.
Voting for people to serve as your representatives that go to the big meeting and give your state's votes makes way more sense back then. Now we can easily collect everyone's votes and know who people actually want.
What the EC does currently is tell minority party voters in every state that they don't matter and shouldn't bother. Did you know California has the largest Republican party in the country? Doesn't matter, they don't get a vote in the presidential elections. They are disenfranchised because the EC says so, and that means California Republicans have to rely entirely on other state Republicans. This means any interests and beliefs that California Repiblicans might want that aren't supported by say, Mississippi Republicans goes nowhere. They have no say, no influence, no sway. They have no voice, no one to speak for any interests unique to California Republicans.
The same way how Mississippi Democrats just have to go along with whatever the California Democrats want. It pushes our country towards extremism on both sides because the more statistically likely to be moderate people, the reds in blue states and the blues in red states, literally don't get a say. Republicans are only the reddest of red and Democrats are only the bluest of blues because everyone else has no vote and no influence thanks to the EC. Imagine if a Democrat candidate had to bother to appeal to the more moderate Dems in Texas?
magicalkittycat
18hr ago
The Senate does not represent people, it represents States. You may think that States do not deserve representation at all, but that's a different argument. California and Mississippi are equally represented in the Senate, as intended.
Yeah it's a rather silly system that hasn't scaled well. States are collectives of people but they aren't people, the people in states should be represented fairly and the current Senate system doesn't do that. It explicitly gives smaller less populated areas far more influence.
magicalkittycat
18hr ago
Yes, and that's a good thing.
If it wasn't, you'd get the problem Canada has where the only relevant voters are all in 3 cities.
That's not true, in a one vote power per person system, rural voters are relevant too. They're just only as relevant as their actual population size.
Naturally, they all vote the same way.
Not true, but even if they do so what? More citizens live in the cities therefore doing pro city stuff means benefiting more citizens than pro rural stuff then.
Since consent of the governed isn't equally geographically distributed, and the cities depend on the country for resources and soldiers,
And the rural country doesn't likewise depend on the cities? They benefit from all the wonderful intentions, financing, and other stuff that comes out of the cities. Farming and resources are valuable, but rural life has electricity, cars, far more stable crops from advances in science (bad harvests are so much less common), medical inventions, internet, smart phones, TV, cheap good looking clothes, and basically anything else that comes from urban workers.
Rural life benefits immensely from the economic and technological growth that the cities are responsible for.
country folks shooting up the power lines and oil pipelines (or seceding completely, then waging war at some time in the future).
Ah so giving them extra vote power is just a deal so they don't shoot up the democracy.
A proportionate response to an explicit threat of "We will destroy democracy if we can't rig it" is not what happened in the hunger games. The hunger games government was a dictatorship police state, kinda like the Russia and North Korea that Trump so admires.
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