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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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by making someone in California have like 10x less say than the same person in Mississippi in Congress and the presidency.

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.

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?

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).

Plenty of other democracies have been stable without such a system

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.

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.

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.