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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".
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.
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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