I’m a conservative who basically went left because of Trump. I feel pretty isolated now politically. And to tell the truth, being in the thick of Republicans it’s pretty depressing to see them go bat shit crazy.
The problem is motivation. Democrats bad ideas that are wrong are based on honest miscalculation or naivety. Republican ideas that are bad are based on some sort of mass psychosis.
My answer to the problem of polarization. Slowly abandon Twitter and Facebook and instead find a few good blogs to follow, and just engage in the comments.
I’m not sure what to do about the dysfunction in government. On one hand, I get the popular vote thing, at least when it comes to President, but on the other hand, I support the Senate. Senators aren’t there to represent people... they are there to represent their state. Funny enough the only solution I see is less Federal control.
I’m skeptical about majority rule as well. Imagine if Republicans got 50.5% of the vote. (Possible) and won house and senate. Should they pass laws passing universal open carry?
Perhaps we need to return to the era of earmarks. Let Democrats bribe a few Republicans by giving them some goodies for their state.
Quite frankly the whole thing is depressing on a broad level. Better to just be a kind considerate person. And assume the same of others, even if they are dumb enough to think that vaccines have micro-chips.
The thing I can't wrap my head around is why national elections are so close right now. I've voted for plenty of Republicans in my life and I just can't understand what current R voters are thinking.
To me, the critical problem facing the nation isn't that 48% of the country can overwhelm the will of the other 52%. The problem is that 48% of the country supports the current Republican party.
The danger that this fact alone represents to our democracy cannot be overstated. The conditions in our culture and our media that have led so many of us to support the lies and borderline sedition of the current Republican party is putting our democracy in mortal danger.
The difference between needing 48% to rule versus needing 51% is practically a rounding error. The fact that 48% of Americans are OK with what happened on January 6th is the real threat to our democracy and is the real problem to solve.
I know it is very fashionable and even reasonable to Senate bash but here’s the thing. You can’t gerrymander a whole state (A dem can get elected gov in Kansas but not to Congress in Kansas’ first district.) The Constitution is not a constitution of the people, it’s a constitution of the states (says so on line one:We the people are making a Constitution of the States). And the democracy loving author of this post could live anywhere but chose to throw away his sacred vote by living in DC. If Rhode Island has more voting power than California and your vote is more important to you than your job, move to Rhode Island. The fact that neither the median voter nor our host (whom I love dearly, don’t get me wrong) doesn’t make such decisions tells you everything you need to know about how angry the median voter is over the Senate’s importance. Ezra Klein and people like us care about debating these things but the median voter, not so much. I don’t see revolution happening because Mitch McConnell becomes Senate leader again because while the left and right tails of the political distribution are willing to storm the Capitol, the median voter just doesn’t think the Senate is terribly unfair and thinks the Constitution is more or less fine.
>>What we have today, though, is that one party dominates the rural white vote, so they dominate the Senate, which in turn gives them an advantage in the Electoral College as well.<<
I would like to see this claim backed empirically. I'm not sure it's true.
First, it has little to do with state *size.* The smallest 15 states are perfectly balanced with Democratic and Republican Senators. (The real Republican advantage is in the next tier of 15 states by population, dominated by Southern and some Mountain states).
So is it state population dominated by white rural residents? Wisconsin is the tipping state now, and its population is 25% rural. Is that "domination"? Michigan is also 25% rural while Florida is under 10% rural. Georgia's is 17% rural; Arizona's is only 5% rural.
White rural residents, especially in places like Pennsylvania, have moved strongly toward Trump and the Republicans and that gives them an advantage, but since rural populations are pretty small, Republicans only win when they take a significant portion of the suburban and exurban vote.
And, oh by the way, California has 5.2 million rural residents, almost equaling Wisconsin's total population, so that must mean Republicans are in great shape here?
I agree with most of Matt's positions on improving American democracy today: gerrymander reform, abolishing the electoral college, reforming or ending the fillibuster.
But I think this framing by liberals that "there's no democracy in America" is just terrible and counterproductive. A much more productive way is talk about a spectrum and a developing process: talk about democracy expanding, or becoming stagnant, or receding.
The black and white framing is likely to alienate immigrants, people who had direct experience or heard through their parents, about other political regimes. To give my experience: I came to the US from Brazil 4 years ago. As far as the Global South goes, I'm certainly privileged in that Brazil is one of the more democratic countries, and with the most experience and tradition in it. In fact, there are many things in which Brazilian democracy is superior to American's. But it is just insane for me to claim American democracy doesn't exist. There are fundamental things the US has established that take generations to develop and mature.
Also, Arend Lijphart's model of 2 dimensions of democracy is useful in this discussion. America is a consensus-style democracy in one dimension, due to its federative nature (judicial review, strong bicameralism, etc), but a majoritarian/westiminster style in the other (2 party system, no coalition cabinets, etc). Some things I see are just fixing clear distortions (like reforming the fillibuster), but often I see people demanding more "majoritarianism" and complaining about the Senate, and then demanding a move towards a more proportional electoral system-which goes the opposite direction of majoritarianism in a strict sense- without explaining why. Lijphart's model is useful and easy to grasp for that.
IMO, the Senate made more sense when it was founded and people identified much more strongly with their state than the country. But today, AFAIK, people identify more strongly as Americans and with a political party than with a particular state, so the Senate just seems unfair.
>>>Democrats misfired in 2016 by nominating the very unpopular Hillary Clinton, but in their defense, they were tricked in part by her sky-high numbers as Secretary of State.<<<
This observation -- that the parties have traditionally taken pains to nominate popular candidates (but that Democrats failed at this in 2016) -- leads to an additional observation (and perhaps a rather obvious one): it's good, at least for the Democrats, to have a wide field of candidates. Maybe ultimately what did Democrats in in '16 was the lack of this. Clinton was obviously sorely tested by Sanders that cycle, but it wasn't enough. It probably should have ended up being a Sanders-Biden, Sanders-O'Malley, Sanders-Gore (or some other combination) contest that was arrived at after an early campaign winnowing process entered into by a fairly significant number of candidates (one that would have exposed the flaws in Hillary Clinton's candidacy).
Anyway, in 2020 a large number of ostensibly credible candidates -- Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, Andrew Yang, Beto O'Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden -- all attracted some combination of media attention, national polling recognition, money, or delegates.
Such a process seemed to produce a stronger candidate. I remember some griping over the "excessive" field in the early going (lots of kvetching about the unwieldy debates!) but maybe that's just what the doctor ordered, and Democrats should purposely do what they can do to encourage such a dynamic in 2028.
You've made a decent argument here, but I think it has a fundamental flaw that weakens it considerably. The flaw is the assumption that the present asymmetries in partisan outcomes, which currently disadvantage Democrats, are the result of our governing structures and institutions, such as the EC and Senate.
The problem with that assumptions is that our governing structures and institutions, in their present form, have existed for well over a century yet we've only seen these asymmetries over the past couple of decades. The relevant question, therefore, is why we are seeing this asymmetry now and why we didn't we see it in the past? My view is that since our governing structures and institutions have remained largely the same, then other factors must account for this change.
It's not as if there is an iron law that mandated that the GoP would get their current structural advantage and, likewise, there also is no iron law that mandates they will keep it. We didn't wake up one morning to discover that the GoP had a rural advantage with all the consequential effects - rather the current dynamic between the two parties was the result of an emergent process that had little to do with the structure of our governing institutions. The Democrats didn't intentionally plan and decide to be a party with a constituency that would make them less competitive in the Senate and EC, and the GoP did not have any master plan to have "minority" control either. Yet it happened and it's something that hasn't happened before. The relevant questions, again, are why and why now?
So my view is that the current asymmetry is not caused by any inherent unfairness in the system that specifically benefits one side or another. The problem is our parties and how they are structured. What's changed is that our parties have become decentralized and more democratic, but that has also made them weak. We have the weakest political parties of any comparable democracy with no effective central control or leadership. The parties have become more like brands.
This is why Trump was able to capture the GoP nomination. Despite near-universal opposition from the GoP party establishment, he won and took the party over. This never would have happened through most of US history when parties were stronger and had more central control and leadership. That control and leadership have, over the last half-century, become weaker and weaker with "democracy" as the justification.
We now have a very small d democratic primary system which has had the effect of handing control of the party and reigns of power to whatever faction of primary voters happens to be ascendant. This is the reason that a large number of politicians today fear primaries more than anything. The parties can no longer even protect incumbents. Again, this ability for any challenger to adopt a party brand and unseat an incumbent in a primary doesn't exist elsewhere.
And so my view is that this is why the current asymmetry exists. A party with leadership that has actual authority would be able to manage all the competing intra-party factions toward achieving power along with specific ends. A party with that kind of leadership would take concrete steps to make the party more competitive in the Senate and EC by appealing more to relevant constituencies and forcing party factions to play well together. Today there is no leadership or party authority that can do this. So parties cannot effectively act collectively because any faction has a veto.
The result is that the only solution presented to correct the current Democratic disadvantage in the Senate and EC is to do anything except change the Democratic party. The "one neat trick" solutions of structural reforms, or packing the court, or creating new states sidestep the obvious political actions - actions that the Democratic and Republican parties of 30 years ago would have taken.
Gerrymandering is noxious and should be outlawed. Any Republican who argues otherwise is blinded by fear of what it would be like to be without political power, distrust of "the other side," and an unwillingness to compromise.
Much as I dislike the disproportionate effects of the Senate, I have a harder time condemning it with the same fervor. It is less obviously the result of modern players attempting to "rig the game" and more of a reflection of the founders' idea of federalism. I think Ezra Klein covers this in WWP... When the nation was founded, a citizen's state-based identity far outweighed their national one. The Senate was meant to represent an equal collaboration between the states on issues that affected all states. If it was just meant to proportionally represent the national population, you wouldn't bother with a separate chamber of the legislature from the House at all. What purpose would it serve? Even the EU parliament mirrors our own, with a Council that has one member per state: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/unitedstates/en/eu-us-relations/legislative-branches Also, the Constitution is pretty stubbornly firm on the "equal number of Senators per state" rule. Efforts to grant statehood to DC and PR are worthy steps toward representation for those citizens, but not as an end-run to game control of the Senate. It's worth discussing whether the Senate has too much power, or whether the fillibuster should go (it should). But I think it's not inherently un-democratic to have a chamber with equal representation per state.
The Electoral College falls somewhere in the middle, but it's harder to steelman. I'd be happy to see it go.
Nicely-done. I agree with 90% of what you say here. My reservation is the implicit assertions that "democracies" everywhere else ARE literally democratic (which I doubt) and that the de-democraticization of the US is a new thing (which is incorrect).
It used to be different for each state, but it's not all THAT long ago that we had REAL Jim Crow laws in most Southern states. Women couldn't vote before the 19th amendment, Blacks weren't citizens before the civil war, and for the first 50 years property requirements were a huge obstacle. Moreover, the secret ballot wasn't even a thing until the end of the 19th century.
Of course you know these things, and perhaps you intend simply to focus on the past...what? 50 years? But you also raise a more fundamental issue: I think we both would like the US to be a liberal democracy. For me, the "liberal" part is more important than the "democracy" part. I don't see it as self-evident that absolute democracy will lead to optimal results.
The conclusion this leads to is we need to change the Constitution. Fundamentally the issue is we have a Constitution that was designed for the United States to be a federal union more like the European Union than a unitary nation, where the member States retain significant sovereignty and are the primary level of government for most issues and people. But as the founders of the EU hoped would happen there, the United States evolved since the 1787 into a more unitary nation yet we still have the same Constitution. States, as noted with some gerrymandering aside, generally are majoritarian. But the federal government isn't, as the EU isn't, and that's not an accident. It's by design.
Since this post starts with Liz Cheney: have Greenwald et al—the people who ridicule the Democrats for cheering Liz Cheney, making her out to be some kind of saint, etc.—have any examples of Democrats cheering Liz Cheney and making her out to be some kind of saint? As far as I've seen, Dems haven't gone any farther than saying "Cheney is right on this issue and we wish more Republicans would say so." And of course the irony is that Greenwald in particular will bite your head off if you say that his various examples of praise for Trump or Bannon, or his anti-anti-Trumpism, amount to making him a Trump supporter.
Isn’t the worry a bit more acute? Like that a Republican house might refuse to certify a Democrat electoral college win or that Republican state officials won’t ignore Trumpish requests to “find” votes next time a swing state is close?
From a California perspective it's really frustrating that our votes matter so much less. Sometimes I think that we should just take advantage of the fact that Wyoming is hurting economically because of overreliance on the fossil fuel industry and we should try to buy their senators -- like California would give $1 billion a year to Wyoming (which would result in checks of $1700 per person) and then their Senators would have to vote like our Senators. Somehow it seems more realistic than other options. But if Trump is elected in 2024 with weird electoral college stuff and a huge gap in the popular vote there will be a lot of civil unrest -- and the desire for secession for states like mine that are larger than most other countries in the world will get very intense.
On the last point, I would say there was more civil disobedience in Minneapolis in May/June, where I live, than violence, but that former doesn't get much media attention. But there were a lot more people blocking interstates, roads, camping outside the capitol after curfew than there were looters. And in general the police reacted violently to those people who weren't behaving violently.
America needs a more objective political discourse. The last two Republican presidents have been incompetent and corrupt, the party has almost no ideas and their main policies are unpopular. But they dominate the discourse thru an endless procession of distraction and lies.
Take Trump’s top issue, immigration. The US undocumented population peaked in 2007. So if you think undocumented migrants are a huge issue, things have got better. Yet republicans continually succeed in focusing attention on some sort of border crisis that’s totally imaginary
I’m a conservative who basically went left because of Trump. I feel pretty isolated now politically. And to tell the truth, being in the thick of Republicans it’s pretty depressing to see them go bat shit crazy.
The problem is motivation. Democrats bad ideas that are wrong are based on honest miscalculation or naivety. Republican ideas that are bad are based on some sort of mass psychosis.
My answer to the problem of polarization. Slowly abandon Twitter and Facebook and instead find a few good blogs to follow, and just engage in the comments.
I’m not sure what to do about the dysfunction in government. On one hand, I get the popular vote thing, at least when it comes to President, but on the other hand, I support the Senate. Senators aren’t there to represent people... they are there to represent their state. Funny enough the only solution I see is less Federal control.
I’m skeptical about majority rule as well. Imagine if Republicans got 50.5% of the vote. (Possible) and won house and senate. Should they pass laws passing universal open carry?
Perhaps we need to return to the era of earmarks. Let Democrats bribe a few Republicans by giving them some goodies for their state.
Quite frankly the whole thing is depressing on a broad level. Better to just be a kind considerate person. And assume the same of others, even if they are dumb enough to think that vaccines have micro-chips.
The thing I can't wrap my head around is why national elections are so close right now. I've voted for plenty of Republicans in my life and I just can't understand what current R voters are thinking.
To me, the critical problem facing the nation isn't that 48% of the country can overwhelm the will of the other 52%. The problem is that 48% of the country supports the current Republican party.
The danger that this fact alone represents to our democracy cannot be overstated. The conditions in our culture and our media that have led so many of us to support the lies and borderline sedition of the current Republican party is putting our democracy in mortal danger.
The difference between needing 48% to rule versus needing 51% is practically a rounding error. The fact that 48% of Americans are OK with what happened on January 6th is the real threat to our democracy and is the real problem to solve.
I know it is very fashionable and even reasonable to Senate bash but here’s the thing. You can’t gerrymander a whole state (A dem can get elected gov in Kansas but not to Congress in Kansas’ first district.) The Constitution is not a constitution of the people, it’s a constitution of the states (says so on line one:We the people are making a Constitution of the States). And the democracy loving author of this post could live anywhere but chose to throw away his sacred vote by living in DC. If Rhode Island has more voting power than California and your vote is more important to you than your job, move to Rhode Island. The fact that neither the median voter nor our host (whom I love dearly, don’t get me wrong) doesn’t make such decisions tells you everything you need to know about how angry the median voter is over the Senate’s importance. Ezra Klein and people like us care about debating these things but the median voter, not so much. I don’t see revolution happening because Mitch McConnell becomes Senate leader again because while the left and right tails of the political distribution are willing to storm the Capitol, the median voter just doesn’t think the Senate is terribly unfair and thinks the Constitution is more or less fine.
>>What we have today, though, is that one party dominates the rural white vote, so they dominate the Senate, which in turn gives them an advantage in the Electoral College as well.<<
I would like to see this claim backed empirically. I'm not sure it's true.
First, it has little to do with state *size.* The smallest 15 states are perfectly balanced with Democratic and Republican Senators. (The real Republican advantage is in the next tier of 15 states by population, dominated by Southern and some Mountain states).
So is it state population dominated by white rural residents? Wisconsin is the tipping state now, and its population is 25% rural. Is that "domination"? Michigan is also 25% rural while Florida is under 10% rural. Georgia's is 17% rural; Arizona's is only 5% rural.
White rural residents, especially in places like Pennsylvania, have moved strongly toward Trump and the Republicans and that gives them an advantage, but since rural populations are pretty small, Republicans only win when they take a significant portion of the suburban and exurban vote.
And, oh by the way, California has 5.2 million rural residents, almost equaling Wisconsin's total population, so that must mean Republicans are in great shape here?
I agree with most of Matt's positions on improving American democracy today: gerrymander reform, abolishing the electoral college, reforming or ending the fillibuster.
But I think this framing by liberals that "there's no democracy in America" is just terrible and counterproductive. A much more productive way is talk about a spectrum and a developing process: talk about democracy expanding, or becoming stagnant, or receding.
The black and white framing is likely to alienate immigrants, people who had direct experience or heard through their parents, about other political regimes. To give my experience: I came to the US from Brazil 4 years ago. As far as the Global South goes, I'm certainly privileged in that Brazil is one of the more democratic countries, and with the most experience and tradition in it. In fact, there are many things in which Brazilian democracy is superior to American's. But it is just insane for me to claim American democracy doesn't exist. There are fundamental things the US has established that take generations to develop and mature.
Also, Arend Lijphart's model of 2 dimensions of democracy is useful in this discussion. America is a consensus-style democracy in one dimension, due to its federative nature (judicial review, strong bicameralism, etc), but a majoritarian/westiminster style in the other (2 party system, no coalition cabinets, etc). Some things I see are just fixing clear distortions (like reforming the fillibuster), but often I see people demanding more "majoritarianism" and complaining about the Senate, and then demanding a move towards a more proportional electoral system-which goes the opposite direction of majoritarianism in a strict sense- without explaining why. Lijphart's model is useful and easy to grasp for that.
IMO, the Senate made more sense when it was founded and people identified much more strongly with their state than the country. But today, AFAIK, people identify more strongly as Americans and with a political party than with a particular state, so the Senate just seems unfair.
>>>Democrats misfired in 2016 by nominating the very unpopular Hillary Clinton, but in their defense, they were tricked in part by her sky-high numbers as Secretary of State.<<<
This observation -- that the parties have traditionally taken pains to nominate popular candidates (but that Democrats failed at this in 2016) -- leads to an additional observation (and perhaps a rather obvious one): it's good, at least for the Democrats, to have a wide field of candidates. Maybe ultimately what did Democrats in in '16 was the lack of this. Clinton was obviously sorely tested by Sanders that cycle, but it wasn't enough. It probably should have ended up being a Sanders-Biden, Sanders-O'Malley, Sanders-Gore (or some other combination) contest that was arrived at after an early campaign winnowing process entered into by a fairly significant number of candidates (one that would have exposed the flaws in Hillary Clinton's candidacy).
Anyway, in 2020 a large number of ostensibly credible candidates -- Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, Andrew Yang, Beto O'Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden -- all attracted some combination of media attention, national polling recognition, money, or delegates.
Such a process seemed to produce a stronger candidate. I remember some griping over the "excessive" field in the early going (lots of kvetching about the unwieldy debates!) but maybe that's just what the doctor ordered, and Democrats should purposely do what they can do to encourage such a dynamic in 2028.
You've made a decent argument here, but I think it has a fundamental flaw that weakens it considerably. The flaw is the assumption that the present asymmetries in partisan outcomes, which currently disadvantage Democrats, are the result of our governing structures and institutions, such as the EC and Senate.
The problem with that assumptions is that our governing structures and institutions, in their present form, have existed for well over a century yet we've only seen these asymmetries over the past couple of decades. The relevant question, therefore, is why we are seeing this asymmetry now and why we didn't we see it in the past? My view is that since our governing structures and institutions have remained largely the same, then other factors must account for this change.
It's not as if there is an iron law that mandated that the GoP would get their current structural advantage and, likewise, there also is no iron law that mandates they will keep it. We didn't wake up one morning to discover that the GoP had a rural advantage with all the consequential effects - rather the current dynamic between the two parties was the result of an emergent process that had little to do with the structure of our governing institutions. The Democrats didn't intentionally plan and decide to be a party with a constituency that would make them less competitive in the Senate and EC, and the GoP did not have any master plan to have "minority" control either. Yet it happened and it's something that hasn't happened before. The relevant questions, again, are why and why now?
So my view is that the current asymmetry is not caused by any inherent unfairness in the system that specifically benefits one side or another. The problem is our parties and how they are structured. What's changed is that our parties have become decentralized and more democratic, but that has also made them weak. We have the weakest political parties of any comparable democracy with no effective central control or leadership. The parties have become more like brands.
This is why Trump was able to capture the GoP nomination. Despite near-universal opposition from the GoP party establishment, he won and took the party over. This never would have happened through most of US history when parties were stronger and had more central control and leadership. That control and leadership have, over the last half-century, become weaker and weaker with "democracy" as the justification.
We now have a very small d democratic primary system which has had the effect of handing control of the party and reigns of power to whatever faction of primary voters happens to be ascendant. This is the reason that a large number of politicians today fear primaries more than anything. The parties can no longer even protect incumbents. Again, this ability for any challenger to adopt a party brand and unseat an incumbent in a primary doesn't exist elsewhere.
And so my view is that this is why the current asymmetry exists. A party with leadership that has actual authority would be able to manage all the competing intra-party factions toward achieving power along with specific ends. A party with that kind of leadership would take concrete steps to make the party more competitive in the Senate and EC by appealing more to relevant constituencies and forcing party factions to play well together. Today there is no leadership or party authority that can do this. So parties cannot effectively act collectively because any faction has a veto.
The result is that the only solution presented to correct the current Democratic disadvantage in the Senate and EC is to do anything except change the Democratic party. The "one neat trick" solutions of structural reforms, or packing the court, or creating new states sidestep the obvious political actions - actions that the Democratic and Republican parties of 30 years ago would have taken.
Gerrymandering is noxious and should be outlawed. Any Republican who argues otherwise is blinded by fear of what it would be like to be without political power, distrust of "the other side," and an unwillingness to compromise.
Much as I dislike the disproportionate effects of the Senate, I have a harder time condemning it with the same fervor. It is less obviously the result of modern players attempting to "rig the game" and more of a reflection of the founders' idea of federalism. I think Ezra Klein covers this in WWP... When the nation was founded, a citizen's state-based identity far outweighed their national one. The Senate was meant to represent an equal collaboration between the states on issues that affected all states. If it was just meant to proportionally represent the national population, you wouldn't bother with a separate chamber of the legislature from the House at all. What purpose would it serve? Even the EU parliament mirrors our own, with a Council that has one member per state: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/unitedstates/en/eu-us-relations/legislative-branches Also, the Constitution is pretty stubbornly firm on the "equal number of Senators per state" rule. Efforts to grant statehood to DC and PR are worthy steps toward representation for those citizens, but not as an end-run to game control of the Senate. It's worth discussing whether the Senate has too much power, or whether the fillibuster should go (it should). But I think it's not inherently un-democratic to have a chamber with equal representation per state.
The Electoral College falls somewhere in the middle, but it's harder to steelman. I'd be happy to see it go.
Nicely-done. I agree with 90% of what you say here. My reservation is the implicit assertions that "democracies" everywhere else ARE literally democratic (which I doubt) and that the de-democraticization of the US is a new thing (which is incorrect).
It used to be different for each state, but it's not all THAT long ago that we had REAL Jim Crow laws in most Southern states. Women couldn't vote before the 19th amendment, Blacks weren't citizens before the civil war, and for the first 50 years property requirements were a huge obstacle. Moreover, the secret ballot wasn't even a thing until the end of the 19th century.
Of course you know these things, and perhaps you intend simply to focus on the past...what? 50 years? But you also raise a more fundamental issue: I think we both would like the US to be a liberal democracy. For me, the "liberal" part is more important than the "democracy" part. I don't see it as self-evident that absolute democracy will lead to optimal results.
The conclusion this leads to is we need to change the Constitution. Fundamentally the issue is we have a Constitution that was designed for the United States to be a federal union more like the European Union than a unitary nation, where the member States retain significant sovereignty and are the primary level of government for most issues and people. But as the founders of the EU hoped would happen there, the United States evolved since the 1787 into a more unitary nation yet we still have the same Constitution. States, as noted with some gerrymandering aside, generally are majoritarian. But the federal government isn't, as the EU isn't, and that's not an accident. It's by design.
Since this post starts with Liz Cheney: have Greenwald et al—the people who ridicule the Democrats for cheering Liz Cheney, making her out to be some kind of saint, etc.—have any examples of Democrats cheering Liz Cheney and making her out to be some kind of saint? As far as I've seen, Dems haven't gone any farther than saying "Cheney is right on this issue and we wish more Republicans would say so." And of course the irony is that Greenwald in particular will bite your head off if you say that his various examples of praise for Trump or Bannon, or his anti-anti-Trumpism, amount to making him a Trump supporter.
Isn’t the worry a bit more acute? Like that a Republican house might refuse to certify a Democrat electoral college win or that Republican state officials won’t ignore Trumpish requests to “find” votes next time a swing state is close?
From a California perspective it's really frustrating that our votes matter so much less. Sometimes I think that we should just take advantage of the fact that Wyoming is hurting economically because of overreliance on the fossil fuel industry and we should try to buy their senators -- like California would give $1 billion a year to Wyoming (which would result in checks of $1700 per person) and then their Senators would have to vote like our Senators. Somehow it seems more realistic than other options. But if Trump is elected in 2024 with weird electoral college stuff and a huge gap in the popular vote there will be a lot of civil unrest -- and the desire for secession for states like mine that are larger than most other countries in the world will get very intense.
On the last point, I would say there was more civil disobedience in Minneapolis in May/June, where I live, than violence, but that former doesn't get much media attention. But there were a lot more people blocking interstates, roads, camping outside the capitol after curfew than there were looters. And in general the police reacted violently to those people who weren't behaving violently.
America needs a more objective political discourse. The last two Republican presidents have been incompetent and corrupt, the party has almost no ideas and their main policies are unpopular. But they dominate the discourse thru an endless procession of distraction and lies.
Take Trump’s top issue, immigration. The US undocumented population peaked in 2007. So if you think undocumented migrants are a huge issue, things have got better. Yet republicans continually succeed in focusing attention on some sort of border crisis that’s totally imaginary