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In one of the more anticipated decisions of this term, the Supreme Court (6-3 on ideological lines) has struck down the second Louisiana majority-black district. They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.
In practice, if taken seriously by lower courts, this pretty much destroys nearly all Section 2 Voting Rights Act cases, because of the strong affiliation between blacks and the Democratic Party.
The entire idea of section 2 applied this way has always been rather silly, it takes the collectivist view around race that people are better represented as a class based off their skin color rather than their ability to choose based off their own individual beliefs and preferences. There's a lot to complain about with voting, partisan gerrymandering is still messed up both federally and state election wise, the structure of the Senate explicitly having a bunch of low population states over less high population ones, and the electoral college works in a similar way.
But those are problems by changing the very value of a person's representation, by making someone in California have like 10x less say than the same person in Mississippi in Congress and the presidency. It's not an issue because they fail to make the assumption that black people need some explicit maps drawn out for them "as a class".
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.
Look at the Hunger Games, where a large capital dictates unpopular policy to the other regions.
It's likely we would have significant ongoing issues with places like Texas trying to leave if California was in charge.
The EC allows the federal government to have teeth without a shit ton of civil wars.
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.
We know what the founding fathers were trying to do with the Electoral College because they tell us in their writings, and it had nothing to do with any of the modern arguments for using the Electoral College to count a partisan election. The whole point of the Electoral College according to the people who set it up was to avoid a partisan election for the President. It failed, demonstrating that the genius of the founding fathers was finite and necessitating the 12th amendment as a bugfix.
Something like the modern partisan Electoral College makes sense in a world where states run their own elections, because it means a fully corrupt one-party state can't steal any more Presidential votes than it already has, but it isn't a technology invented by the framers except accidentally.
Can you extrapolate on why the EC wasn’t designed specifically for our current political climate?
This seems like a novel opinion and I doubt many people have any idea why you are referencing.
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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.
Completely fictional story, you might as well point to hunger games as proof for why Marx was right as well.
Texas is the second largest state population wise! Texas is literally one of the victims of EC small state bias.
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.
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?
The average democracy is only about 60 years old at this point. The US has, incredibly, managed to make it to 248.
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).
While this is a valuable myth for Americans, it is false. The Civil War is fairly obviously a total failure of the OG Constitution and the worst outbreak of political violence in the history of the English-speaking world. The Reconstruction amendments were passed by force, not by using the Article V amendment process in the way the framers intended. I think Redemption was also an important de facto amendment of the Constitution (namely de facto repeal of the 15th amendment) achieved by political violence.
It is conventional wisdom on the right (and, in my view, correct) that the New Deal and Civil Rights Era represent irregular changes to the small-c constitution, but they were achieved with broad democratic legitimacy and with very limited political violence, so I don't think they count as a break in continuity. So I would say the US has gone for about 140 years since the last violent regime change, which is still a good run, though no longer outstanding for English-speaking countries.
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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? 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.
Why are France and Britain a problem? The transition from 4th to 5th Republic was not a violent revolution; discounting the period of foreign occupation during WW2, France has had a democratic government continuously since 1870. Britain's separatist rebellions came out of disenfranchised subject territories; as well say the US has a discontinuity because it no longer owns the Philippines.
Several declared-integral parts of France, most notably Algeria have felt otherwise about this statement. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland had to change its name because most, but not all, of Ireland felt otherwise. Even when it's done peacefully and democratically (see hypothetical Scotland referendum), a decision to change the definition of the polity seems anathema to the requested "stability" of a heterogeneous democratic government.
Admittedly the US has also divested several territories in that time (Cuba, the Philippines), but none of those examples have been self-declared as "integral" (states) except for that one time in 1861-1865 (and arguably Reconstruction effectively treating those as colonies for at least a while). There's certainly room to contest the relevance of integral-ness, but it seems important to my reading of "stability".
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Canada has not seen an irregular change to its constitution or boundaries or large-scale political violence since Confederation in 1867. That makes the current Canadian order about the same age as the (post-Civil War) American one, or significantly older if you consider any or all of Redemption, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights era as irregular and/or violent constitutional changes.
Australia likewise since Federation in 1901.
The UK has not seen an irregular change to the constitution since 1688, or a violent one since 1660. There has been political violence due to Irish secessionist movements, but Irish Home Rule would have been handled peacefully if WW1 hadn't happened at the wrong time.
As a separate issue, the main reason why the Anglosphere has so much democratic continuity compared to continental Europe is a lack of foreign invasions, not a lack of revolutions.
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How heterogeneous to count? Finland has two official languages with a 5% population of Fennoswedes. The Sami also haven't seceded from any of the Nordics despite obnoxious activism.
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This isn't even true of the US, so I don't know what you mean by "another".
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.
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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).
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.
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.
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.
Ah so giving them extra vote power is just a deal so they don't shoot up the democracy.
This is essentially the core thesis of the The Federalist Papers.
You believe in gaining the consent of the governed don't you?
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Which is just another way of saying "they're irrelevant".
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.
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.
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.
Yes.
One party in the US two-party system was based on an (admittedly corrupt) alliance between the northern urban political machines and the rural south from about 1910 to about 1980, which is a third of America's history. For much of the other two thirds politics was sectional (New England and friends vs the South and friends) with cities and their hinterlands voting together. AFAIK the only period "urban vs rural" has been the best simple model of national politics in the US was the last twenty years, and it has been a 50-50 split with suburbs as swing territory. [I think you can make an argument for rural Jacksonians vs urban Whigs as a model for the 1820-1840 period, but it isn't the standard one]
In the rest of the democratic world, big-tent centre-right parties which consistently win the countryside and are competitive in the cities are dominant in most countries most of the time. In the UK specifically, the Tories are competitive in the big industrial cities until Thatcher, and in London until Brexit - in both cases until they stopped trying. (Labour's heartland was the coal-mining areas, not the cities) For example, the last time Manchester elected a Tory-majority council was 1967-1971, and 1982-1984 for Birmingham.
Running against urbanism and cities is a choice made by some right-wing parties for their own internal reasons. If right-wing parties choose to do that, they don't get to say that urbanites hating them back is an unfairness that needs to be remedied with malapportionment.
Coastal cities are built around ports, usually at river mouths (which gives you access to fresh water). Rich cities relying on food and raw materials imported by sea because they didn't control a large enough rural hinterland to feed themselves goes at least as far back as ancient Athens - Rome was fed from the Nile Delta. And higher value raw materials come from even further afield. The archaeology is ambiguous, but it is likely that Athenian hoplites were going into battle wearing bronze armour where the tin in the alloy came from Cornwall.
New York City doesn't need Idaho because they have Elizabeth, and Elizabeth plus cash gives them the world. If you look at the blue/red state map, every blue state has blue-or-Canadian-controlled access to the sea. (I agree that there are blue cities in red states which don't). Technically all red states have red-controlled access to the sea via the Gulf coast, but in practice using that access would overwhelm the capacity of the Gulf coast ports, and also require the use of railway junctions in blue states. So in the case of a peaceful-but-hostile split, the reds would run out of raw materials first.
There have been times and places where the economy of the city is based on a threat to shoot up the country - see Rome passim. (Urbanites make much better soldiers than yokels, it's just that they have sufficiently good alternative employment opportunities that they don't volunteer for peacetime garrison duty). The modern US is not one of them - rural America is subsidy-dependent, and the largest paypig in the system is Big Tech.
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No, they'd just as relevant as any other individual voter.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaking generally, I don't know that I have a useful definition of being "relevant" or "irrelevant". I'm hearing very similar claims that, after Callais, gerrymandering can or will make many black voters "irrelevant". One could pithily retort that they are just as relevant as any other individual voter, but I don't think that would be satisfying to the person making the claim.
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But in your view, this would make the Urbanites the bad guys, would it not?
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So, The Hunger Games?
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.
That framing seems to ignore that we're a republic, and the senate is the body representing the constituent members of our republic, the states.
Without the Great Compromise between proportional to population representation and equal representation per state (as it had been in the Articles of Confederation) there likely would have been no union.
Dictatorship police state of the 'urban elite', the Great Compromise is the protection against this failure mode and ensures the states / districts are represented in Congress and the mode of electing the President.
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I think most blocs are cultural in at least some sense. It’s just like anything else. Rural Americans have been conservative for a long time now. Evangelicals in many churches would consider a vote for a democrat to be sinful. Is that a sober analysis of political positions? It’s part of the culture.
As to the ridiculous division of power in the country, honestly I think our current system is too flawed to work. It really seems to solidify the ideas of some blocks over others. Yes the individual voter in a large state is disempowered in the senate, but he’s also overpowered in the House and the presidential elections. California has 54 electoral votes. Pennsylvania has 20+. Those states have outsized influence over national politics. If you lose all of the big population states, you lose. Heck, if you lose the northwest corridor you have an uphill battle, especially if you’re a Republican who won’t have the 54 electoral votes CA brings.
Electorally I think it’s past time to allow each congressional and senatorial district to issue its own electors. State by state winner takes all overpowers the large states too much in national policy.
What does "overpowered" mean? Populous states explicitly punch below their weight relative to their actual proportion of the electorate in all federal elections. The US already has a number of countermajoritarian and outright minoritarian institutions, and the argument is that actually we need the federal government to be less representative?
Why not just have a direct popular vote for President? Or abolish the Presidency and have Congress select the chief executive?
I’m mostly thinking of the House and the electoral college. In both cases, California gets 50 votes, and thus can have a large influence on how things will happen. If you live in a less populated state, say Idaho with a whopping 4 electoral votes and 2 members of the House, you, for most practical purposes do not matter. No one looks at a piece of legislation and worries about pissing off Idaho. If something would harm a large state like CA, NY, PA, FL, it’s going to be hard to get the party to agree to do it. Most of the cultural issues are issues because they play in the urban core and big coastal states. If it were backward, and trans issues were viewed negatively in California but positively in Idaho, no one would be forcing the issue of things like bathroom bills.
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I do think electoral votes ought to go by district with the overall state popular vote winner getting the bonus 2 votes.
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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. The people of California and Mississippi are more-or-less equally represented in the House, mostly as intended except we need 3-10x as many seats as we do now. At least they're equally treated in their gargantuan districts.
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.
Taking this consistently, we must conclude that Russia should get to conquer Ukraine, by a vote on the order of 130M to 30M.
Recall that originally state meant, well, "state", not "prefecture".
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Whether it's silly or not is a matter of opinion (I don't think it's silly at all), but it is factually incorrect to say that the Senate gives smaller states more influence than larger ones. It gives them the same influence.
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".
No, that's not true. You don't get to hand wave a state as being equivalent to the people within it and then claim that it's disproportionate influence on that basis. States are coherent entities by themselves, and are not the same thing as the people living within them. Your argument is like saying that if two families own a business together (split 50/50), the family with fewer children somehow has a disproportionate influence over the business. It is a poor argument.
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The founders believed states would have much more power and guard it jealously. The Gettysburg address was the tipping point between "The United States are..." and "The United States is". Then the depression and the war ensured federal dominance.
The Gettysburg address may have been the tipping point, but the writing was on the wall with the railroad and telegraph.
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"These United States..." used to be a thing too.
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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".
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