11 votes

America’s self-obsession is killing its democracy

8 comments

  1. moriarty
    Link
    Very interesting article by a political science professor at UCL talking about the similarities between the current political situation in the US and the collapse of democracy in other countries....

    Very interesting article by a political science professor at UCL talking about the similarities between the current political situation in the US and the collapse of democracy in other countries. Well worth the read.

    When democracies start to die, they usually don’t recover. Instead, they end up as authoritarian states with zombified democratic institutions: rigged elections in place of legitimate ones, corrupt courts rather than independent judges, and propagandists replacing the press.

    Sounds familiar?

    The wish list from several democracy experts I spoke with is long, and includes passing the Electoral Count Act, creating a constitutional right to vote, reforming districting so more elections are competitive, establishing a nonpartisan national election-management body, electing the president via popular vote, reducing the gap in representation between states like California and Wyoming, introducing some level of proportional representation or multimember districts, aggressively regulating campaign spending and the role of money in politics, and enforcing an upper age limit for Supreme Court justices. But virtually all of those ideas are currently political fantasies.

    12 votes
  2. [7]
    NoblePath
    Link
    I mean, wasn't there big arguments about this issue at the founding convention? I've always accepted my 8th grade civics class' explanation (and as Ms. Burton is the only teacher I still remember...

    reducing the gap in representation between states like California and Wyoming

    I mean, wasn't there big arguments about this issue at the founding convention? I've always accepted my 8th grade civics class' explanation (and as Ms. Burton is the only teacher I still remember from that year, so she was probably right, she also taught me how to be skeptical of advertising), less populous states were apprehensive about a fully proportional representation scheme, so we got the 2 senators from every state, proportional reps compromise. We could perhaps flip the terms of each I suppose.

    2 votes
    1. [2]
      Greg
      Link Parent
      Part of the issue is that the House of Representatives is no longer proportional either, because it’s too small to accurately reflect a population difference that large with reasonable...

      Part of the issue is that the House of Representatives is no longer proportional either, because it’s too small to accurately reflect a population difference that large with reasonable granularity. California is currently 17 members short based on population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_Rule

      I’m skeptical of the motivation behind the senate (do you really need two Dakotas?), but I can see arguments there from both sides. The overall size limit on Congress is, IMO, indefensible.

      9 votes
      1. vektor
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        How about 20 californias? More seriously though: States are ultimately arbitrary subdivisions. When writing the constitution, no one knew how many and what kind of states there would be. There's...

        (do you really need two Dakotas?)

        How about 20 californias?

        More seriously though: States are ultimately arbitrary subdivisions. When writing the constitution, no one knew how many and what kind of states there would be. There's no good reason to draw the state boundaries where they are. (exhibit one: most of them are straight lines. We know how well they work in other ex-british colonies)

        Either you accept the united states as exactly that, united, and do away with this nonsense, or you conceptualize the US as a very loose compound of states where you agree that every state is equal. Why would you choose the latter? I don't know. Don't do it. Or try it, talk the talk and walk the walk, and then see how the US' international influence diminishes to nothing.

        There's probably a good name for the property I'm after here; I come across it occasionally in game design: If you have a mechanism or system operating upon a divisible set of things, it shall produce identical results across all possible divisions. Sounds a bit like a homomorphism to me, but not quite. If your mechanism doesn't do that, you better either have a good reason why it doesn't, or otherwise have a good reason why certain divisions (i.e. state boundaries) are exceptional.

        To look at it from a different lense: If small states are apprehensive because of their dimished influence in case of proportional representation.... who the fuck asked them? "By the people" or something, right? Wyoming (sorry to pick on them) as a state just popped into existence as an ethereal being and demanded representation because of its statehood? I doubt it. Its citizens demand representation, but why should they get better representation than those from other states? There is simply no good reason to expect that the current state borders are in any way a good way of carving up power. Want to protect the influence and inalienable rights of rural Americans? Fucking do that then.

        7 votes
    2. Cycloneblaze
      Link Parent
      I think in its current form the federal structure of the United States is more of a drag on its ability to serve its people than a legitimate defence of theirs against tyrannical government. While...

      I think in its current form the federal structure of the United States is more of a drag on its ability to serve its people than a legitimate defence of theirs against tyrannical government. While in the 1700s states may have been distant enough (in terms of travel time but also information spread and therefore politics) that balancing them against each other in a federal system made sense, today the US is very homogenised, but the federal system vastly limits its ability to express that, and more importantly, the ability for the national government to actually govern in a national way. States end up being a barrier between people and democratic government. Are the people in Texas really that different from Californians that they need to have their own additional sovereign governments?

      I also tend to think that this applies to other countries with federal governments - in general federalism seems to tie together groups who would rather not be united, or it puts a layer of bureaucracy and abstraction between people who have no reason to be divided so. Local government is important, but removing policy areas from the national government which would be better managed there ain't it.

      5 votes
    3. lou
      Link Parent
      As a foreigner that never had a civics class, this always sounded overcomplicated and problematic to me. Popular vote is really not that bad, and may reinforce the idea that you're part of a...

      As a foreigner that never had a civics class, this always sounded overcomplicated and problematic to me. Popular vote is really not that bad, and may reinforce the idea that you're part of a nation, and not a collection of states that view each other as enemies.

      4 votes
    4. [2]
      spctrvl
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      That was the reasoning, the problem is that since the time of the convention, a whole bunch of both nearly empty states and gargantuan populous states were arbitrarily carved out of the west with...

      That was the reasoning, the problem is that since the time of the convention, a whole bunch of both nearly empty states and gargantuan populous states were arbitrarily carved out of the west with little forethought, then populations continued to concentrate in states so that the difference between most and least populated went up by a factor of 6, and worst of all (and more recent, hence why the system is only now becoming untenable) the population polarized fairly strictly on population density lines. It's a compromise that, these days, simply amounts to a librem veto for the far right interests that control rural areas.

      2 votes
      1. NaraVara
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        Oh there was plenty of forethought. There's a reason the states that were admitted after the Civil war are much bigger than the ones immediately preceding the Civil War (which ran from roughly...

        Oh there was plenty of forethought. There's a reason the states that were admitted after the Civil war are much bigger than the ones immediately preceding the Civil War (which ran from roughly 1860 to 1865). They were fucking around to try and game out the numbers of Free and Slave state Senate seats. Once the drama went out of it they were like "Eh sure just draw some squares" and stopped worrying about diving by numbers north and south of the Missouri Compromise line.

        3 votes