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.
If Republicans passed universal open carry with 50.5% of the vote that would be unpopular and they would be help accountable in the next election. Or, maybe it would be popular and they would keep power. That's how democracy is supposed to work. It's a weird thing about this democracy debates that people raise these preemptive policy concerns. In democracies procedure is not supposed to block unpopular things, electorates discipline parties on their own.
That is the most compelling part of Ezra's argument re: eliminating the filibuster to me. Governing majorities should be able to pass their agendas and reap the rewards/penalties for them. If Republicans want to strip down the ACA, which I am not in favor of, they should totally be able to do it and then have to deal with the fallout of that decision. As it stands right now, they get all of the point-scoring of opposing particular issues without having to...you know, DO anything.
It's also how you show you're not just full of partisan shit. Like if our country is center right, let it be center right. I can hope true democracy would lead to my exact policy preferences, but it probably won't. Do we believe in democracy as an abstract principle or not?
Yeah, the Tories here in the UK have been able to actually implement Brexit. At the moment, the consequences are a bit hidden (no-one can travel any way because of covid) but if it turns out to have been a disaster, then they'll catch hell in a future election.
I don't think this is totally true. The Tories enjoy a geographic advantage similar to Republicans. They won less than half the popular vote in the last election but have a huge majority in Parliament. If the election was proportional, the left-wing/2nd-referendum--curious parties could conceivably have formed a government, altho admittedly it would have been tricky.
That's not a geographic advantage. It's a different property of the first-past-the-post system that we share, which is that it inflates a small lead into a bigger one.
Take a look at the 1992 Presidential election as an example. Allocated proportionally, the Electoral college would be 233 Clinton, 202 Bush, 103 Perot, a lead that the system inflated to 370 Clinton, 168 Bush.
The US seldom has a large third party, and hasn't seen a large national lead for one party over the other for a long time, so you rarely see this effect in federal elections, but statewide elections regularly see leads massively inflated by the system. Take a look at the most recent California State Assembly election - the Democrats easily maintained their 2/3 majority, winning 75% of seats, but only got 62.78% of the vote, well below a 2/3 threshold.
It really wouldn't matter where the Tories are winning and where they are losing, when they have an 11.5% lead, it's going to convert to a large majority (a similar lead with the parties reversed in 2001 gave Labour 412/659 seats; compared to 2019's Tories 365/650).
It does, obviously, matter exactly where you win votes, but there isn't a large systemic bias in the UK the way there is in the US.
I'm not sure if open carry was the best example. But there are things that might be popular with a narrow majority, that just shouldn't be universally mandated. Or restricted.
Yep... though we have qualified immunity used as an excuse to perform unreasonable searches. We have students being kicked out of schools for expressing unpopular opinions. Etc...
Yeah but I think that's a separate problem from unequal representation of the Senate. Unequal representation doesn't protect against majoritarianism, it just defines the majority in a weird counterintuitive way.
That was just an example that popped into my mind. Not sure if it was the best one. Personally, where I live, universal open carry is no problem, but I'm not sure I would feel that way if I lived in Chicago or New York City.
This is basically my dad. He was a lifelong Republican, voted for President Obama because he liked him (and I think he wanted to be able to say he was a part of a historical moment, not against it), and then when the Tea Party hit in 2010, he looked at that whole movement and decided he was 100% out on the Republican Party. He hasn't voted for a Republican candidate at the state-wide or Federal level since.
My dad is 60ish years old and has been a pretty successful manager in the manufacturing sector his whole life; what he appreciates most in a candidate is professional competency and someone who follows the data, and as he saw the Republican Party being increasingly driven by nonsense he decided he was done with that.
(The sneaky truth here is that my dad, by virtue of his values, was *always* kind of a very moderate northeastern Republican. Even during the 80s and 90s, his belief system would've placed him firmly in the D camp in many parts of the country, but the places we lived just happened to be liberal enough that he ended up on the R side of the issues. Once that sort of changed nationally, his support followed suit.)
When I say his values, I mean that he has never owned or expressed interest in a guns and finds gun culture weird and bizarre, is in favor of allowing abortion, is basically neutral on unions, and thinks free trade is good.
In a functioning democracy, bad ideas would be punished by voters shifting their preferences. The arguments against democracy presented here are weak because they assume that a perpetual majority will implement bad policies and get away with it. Majority rule is a better system by far. Conservative governors in blue states have a good track record so it’s not as if this would lead to a liberal hell hole. It’d just force conservatives to be slightly more appealing to the average voter.
I actually agree with this. I wish Dems would pass their ideas (except for any permanent change such as supreme court packing). If they are good, they will be kept, if they are bad, then Republicans will win.
Supreme Court packing need not be permanent, in fact it could be a catalyst for a constitutional amendment to fix the court at nine members but with 18 year terms. The amendment would require that every two years the most senior justice would step down and the President would appoint a new justice whenever the number fell below nine. Packing the court with 11 or 13 justices might convince Republicans to support such an amendment to undo the packing
Court packing requires a trifecta, which seems unlikely (but not impossible) for the Republicans in the foreseeable future- that is part of McConnell’s reasoning behind pushing judges so hard. If the Dems did pack the court with younger judges, Republicans might see the clearer path to undoing that would be term limits that would allow the next R President to appoint 2 justices
I agree too! I wish republicans would pass their ideas. My frustration is that there are strong incentives on both sides to posture but not pass anything because of the number of veto points within the government. The chance of a big idea getting passed is so minute.
Just had an unrelated thought - if vaccines have microchips, why aren't we using the vaccines to address the microchip shortage that has production lines stopped at car companies now?
Or is the chip shortage *because* of them all being in the COVID vaccine?
What do you think about proportional representation? This would solve all the problems you're talking about from making more parties with different ideas so you can find one that best fits your views, to allowing productive polarization but incentivizing cooperation and compromise, and finally getting rid of this majority rule debate because there would be no majorities (it would be pretty insane for a 4-6 party system to have one-party control a majority)
That’s my dream. I would love a moderate party. I’m this weird conglomeration of conservative and liberal ideas. I really support stuff like child allowances. I support labor unions. I support a higher minimum wage that is adjusted for inflation. I support a robust immigration system based on Australia and New Zealand points system. If I was writing a tax code, Bezos and Zuckerberg would be practically broke. The wealth tax would be pretty damn scary.
At the same time, I am skeptical of too much of a welfare state that disincentivizes working. I believe in the Second Amendment. I am ok if individual states want to restrict abortion. I think we should enforce immigration laws (this is balanced on making legal immigration easier).
I think I’m basically a populist.
My superpower is I can literally argue in good faith and east side of any political argument. I actually sympathize with my opponents.
But back to your proportional representation thing. Unfortunately I feel like national politics has become a team sport. It’s us against them. So there’s no room for us, them, them.
Yes!! This is exactly why we need proportional representation because there are many other people like you who are much more complex than the big tent parties and yet are sorted into these parties and forced to vote with beliefs you don't actually hold. I'm very similar but more on the left side where I don't support a lot of the more extreme progressive views but would appreciate a bigger safety net, etc. But I would pose another question which is what do you think is causing the nationalized politics? Because for me the answer is the first past the post electoral system.
Social media. Simply put, it allows people to more easily identify with a larger national in-group. Whereas prior to the social media, this identification was more at a local level.
In the 80s, I was a punk, in the 90s I was an Airman. I am sure others would describe themselves primarily by some other label they identified with.
I seriously don't remember ever caring what party someone voted for prior to about 2010. Then all of the sudden, liberal or conservative has become the defining overall broad label.
We are all guilty of meeting people and sort of top level pegging them as a republican or democrat. Maybe millennials and Gen Z think this is normal, but to Gen X and Boomers, its a completely new paradigm. Don't get me wrong, we are guilty of it as well, that's how powerful the tendency is.
On another note, prior to social media, we were primed by national news like CNN and Fox. I remember CNN first becoming a big deal during the Panama invasion. Prior to that it was just network TV for a short time. Local news and anchors had a much bigger effect.
Ya, I definitely agree that plays a part but I would argue that social media is the catalyst that propelled the change forward way faster and farther rather than the direct cause. Many other countries have had this social media revolution but haven't had the same nationalization of politics as the US has had. And I would argue that the reason why the US is so much more gridlocked than other countries is that we're stuck in this FPTP/two-party system that doesn't allow for complexity and instead flattens all debates into a two-sided argument.
Now one question would be why didn't this start sooner, if it was FPTP why didn't it start in the 1800s or something? And that's because we actually did have a four-party system up until around the civil rights era. There were liberal democrats, southern democrats, northern republicans, and rural republicans in the society. That's why republicans supported FDR's New Deal and why democrats couldn't pass any civil rights bills. However, once they did pass the civil rights bills and the parties sorted into two, it wasn't until the republicans in 2010 realized the power that they actually had and began to use it under Mitch McConnell.
I left FB in September before the 2016 election because it was so transparent how FB was profiling me based on my demographic information. I’m a heterodox political thinker, and I have different views from many people in my demographic group (at the time, 20-something in the Bay Area). They served me political advertising and materials that were so off the mark that it started to make me feel crazy. Maybe it’s good that FB got me so wrong. But the whole episode made me think that if I didn’t turn the thing off I would lose my capacity for genuine reflection and critical thought. Now that I’ve been five years away, and we see what we’ve seen from Cambridge Analytica to Jan 6, I think that was a very solid instinct.
I haven't abandoned them entirely, but my engagement is cut down a lot. Facebook really is a good personal communication tool, keep up with people type thing. Who had a baby, who got a new job, or moved, etc...
I think you’re right. Maybe it’s just the people I know but no one really puts much “political,” broadly defined, stuff on their personal pages. By political I mean no anti-vaxx, no weird conspiracies, no anti BLM rants...
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.
Let me provide some insight for how one current R voter is thinking: I didn't vote for Trump (man, I look forward to not having to preface voting discussions with that phrase someday), but I did vote for almost every other Republican on my ballot.
I voted against a lot of things, and for a few. DeSantis has had a sane and reasonable response to the COVID panic, and his opponent turned out to be involved in a strange drug and male prostitute scandal, so I count that one as a huge plus. I disagree with the Democratic Party's views on illegal immigration, on support for Israel, on accomodation with Iran. I disagree with their views on anti-racism, on free speech issues, on religious liberty. I disagree with their views on the level of regulation broadly and their desires to impose a largely urban mindset to a large and diverse population. I find their proposals around climate change to be overwrought and overly pessimistic. I don't find the governance and quality-of-life in all-Democratic places to be a good example of where I'd like to live (SF Bay, Detroit, Baltimore, Portland). I find them condescending in their views to less-educated people.
I disagree with many policies of Republicans, too. But they largely don't work that hard to pass them (end Obamacare, privatize social security as examples) so I don't worry about over-reach in those areas. I do worry about over-reach by the Democrats.
You are clear on what you don’t like about Dems. As for Republicans, you like that they don’t accomplish much (other than cut taxes). Could I describe your view as pro status quo? America is fundamentally fine. Just let me have my freedoms (don’t police my language) and the economy will meet the needs of hard-working Americans. Is that it basically?
Yes, that is a fair characterization. I think we should tinker around the edges, but I don't support the more extensive changes I see the Democratic party supporting.
Earnest question: a lot of people in the US are not doing fine. I don't agree with a lot of far-left claims but there is racism, more poverty than other developed countries, currently lots of carbon emissions, it's very costly to have kids. Do you think these are problems that exist or that it's overblown?
I think those problems exist. I think many of the solutions proposed have unintended (or intended) consequences that would create bigger problems. I support smaller, incremental changes, some Democratic some Republican.
I like the idea (don't know where I saw it) of progressives proposing lots of new ideas, which then have to run the gauntlet of conservative criticism. The terrible ideas get shot down and forgotten, the necessary and positive changes get implemented. From the present it looks like the left has always won, but just because we don't remember all the policies the left used to propose.
If true, it would make sense that the conservative position can be defined more easily by what it doesn't want rather than what it does.
I have also voted R a lot in the past, but I consider the "don't try all that hard to pass things" to be (mostly) more of a bug than a feature.
When GWB was proposing the marriage amendment, I thought "I don't think he really wants to try that hard to pass it"(and I was correct), so it allowed me to justify ignoring his stance (especially since Democrats weren't particularly pro marriage equality at that point). And outside of that I found his policy preferences more in line with my own.
But applying that logic to the current R that basically tells me they won't try to get anything done.... and we really need some things done (even if I'm not 100% a fan of how the Democratic administration wants to do them)
Boy do I want the filibuster gone so both parties can actually try to _do_ things instead of relying on one party "not actually trying to do things"
Yeah. I'm all in on killing the filibuster. Running a government based on tradition and "gentlemen's agreements" is dumb. The rules should be clear, very hard to break, and relatively hard to change.
Disagree and argue as you wish, but I would urge you to use different language. Cancers are meant to be eliminated and this metaphor is not OK when applied to a country filled with Jews.
You complain about Democrats' attitude to free speech then 7 minutes later attacks someone's speech based on a clear misrepresentation of what they wrote
I didn't attack; I disagreed. I don't want him fired. I won't report him to his boss. I won't try to doxx him. I won't try to pass a speech code banning his views.
Greenwald and others have pointed out, that pro-Israel Zionist mastered cancel culture before everyone else. I think Matt has referenced this on twitter. It is about siloing certain discussions and kicking them out of the political realm.
I am sorry, but this comment exactly proves my point. This is a standard canard, play the anti-Semitism card to deflect from criticism of that settler-colonial regime. I think its good word, because like apartheid S. Africa and colonial Algeria, it should be removed.
This is ahistorical though. The Arabs conquered the area just in the 7th century CE. If you don’t want the Jews there, I guess you should try giving the area to Greeks, Italians or Iranians, all of which were there centuries before Arab colonization.
This is a bizarre comment. Arabization from the Muslim conquests wasn't a genocide, when the Arabs conquered the Levant they didn't wipe out the existing population like the Zionists are trying to do. The Palestinians living there are the people who have always lived there, not like the Brooklyn settlers.
In al honesty what do you think we’d be doing differently if not for the Israel lobby? I think Chomsky argues fairly persuasively that it’s the imperialist project that leads to support for Israel not a relatively small lobby.
I don't agree that AIPAC is theost powerful lobby but I would love more discussion about the advantages to the US in unconditional support for Israel, b/c I don't see it
I think the weapons manufacturers have them beat. U.S policy towards Latin America and Asia has been just as brutal. We don't need a foreign lobby to convince us to kill a bunch of people without any benefit to the average american
A fair and useful summary, even if I don't agree with some of the points, but 'not trying hard to end Obamacare' is surely a bit hard to square with California v Texas, no?
California v Texas (or some version of it) was going forward regardless of party control of the Congress and Presidency. The proof for me is that when Republicans had control of the House, Senate and Presidency between 2017-2019, they didn't pass any meaningful legislation other than tax reform.
They really didn't try very hard to pass ACA repeal, or much of anything else for that matter. The only thing of consequence they passed was tax reform.
I don't think that's right at all. They devoted a lot of congressional time and effort to it, and repeatedly brought back new versions even when it was already clear that their efforts were both widely unpopular with the general public and uniting their opponents with a winning campaign line.
I think you're mistaking the lack of complete unity (which they had over tax reform but didn't have over the ACA) for a lack of effort in leadership, but they're not the same thing.
If you don't mind why do you like his response to covid? Like he will tell you that. he is against people who thought we should actually stop the virus above all else and that seems like the better quality of life solution.
I live in Orlando and like everyone I know has been wracked with anxiety for over a year regardless of if they're working from home, working in a store, or were closed for months.
I'm really not trying to argue, but understand because my experience was one that the last year has been just awful here. Are you just fatalistic that we simply couldn't have accomplished a kind of victory against covid? I, perhaps naively, thought people would accept broad serious sacrifices if only people had asked for them.
Yeah I don't think victory against covid was feasible whatsoever. Moreover, it wasn't even really tried. Even in the bluest of blue states and areas I never saw a realistic plan proposed. To me that kind of plan would have involved much more extensive contact tracing and evidence-gathering. Instead it was just "hunker down indefinitely" which was realistic for a certain type of white-collar person but not for anyone else.
Bug bigger than that was the CDCs extreme errors in understanding and communicating how covid is spread. I keep going back to Japan's public health ministry who communicated right from the beginning "the 3 Cs": stay away from close contract, in crowded, poorly ventilated indoor spaces (it's probably all Cs in Japanese). We started with sending kids home from college to their older parents houses and shutting down playgrounds. To this day people are walking around with masks outdoors and then taking them off to eat in restaurants, or washing doorknobs and things like that. It doesn't matter how much sacrifice people are willing to make if half of the sacrifice is geared towards useless hygiene theatre
The sacrifices necessary - stop travel, mass testing, forced quarantines, contact tracing - weren't asked of any American citizen in any state. We are an unruly and diverse populace and we weren't going to stop economic activity (and protests) for a disease with the risk profile of Covid-19. I don't think that is fatalistic, but YMMV.
I guess I just generally disagree that America wouldn't have done that if both liberal and conservative elites had asked them to. Maybe I'm naive but I don't think were that much more divided than the like Nazi Sympathizers to the Communist spectrum in June 1941.
There was like a kind of obvious log trade where liberals would get significant social spending in a guaranteed income and health care aid and conservatives would get closed borders and security state spending to build out the tracking infrastructure.
The US pandemic outcome is not that different from the Western European pandemic outcome. We had a slim chance to contain the pandemic extremely early IF the CDC/FDA had (1) not fumbled their initial test creation and (2) had been able to spin up contact tracing faster, but after that institutional failure (one that no president would have been able to stop in time) we were going to have a bad pandemic because we don't have the cultural cohesion to do true lockdowns (literally locking people inside as China did) or mandatory quarantine in a government run facility. The FDA also refused to approve rapid tests due to their "low accuracy" (see many experts on why speed > accuracy for containing a pandemic).
"we don't have the cultural cohesion to do true lockdowns (literally locking people inside as China did) or mandatory quarantine in a government run facility"
Everyone keeps saying this, but no-one ever tried! If Newsom (or your local governor; I live in CA) had proposed this, I would have supported it. I'm willing to bet I'm not alone.
More rapid tests would have empowered people to assess their own risk better and adjust behavior dynamically. When frequent, regular testing was used, such as in major sports and at many universities, outbreaks were minimized without needing very strict measures.
Yes, exactly that's why you force more complexity into the situation to blur that human tendency. And I mean it would really only take one bill in Congress for this to be passed.
Well, that's the thing, it wouldn't just be a third-party but also a fourth and possibly and fifth and a sixth. By making multi-party districts as well as ranked-choice voting you remove the third-party spoiler effect. The real reason I think they don't want to pursue proportional representation is that they'll lose the monopolies they've set up in government. PR is essentially breaking up the political monopolies through those same political monopolies so it will have to take a lot of support to get it passed.
There are surely multiple ways to get to supporting the current Republican party, but the path that I can grok is 1) being really cynical about government (and related institutions) and 2) being super turned off by left's cultural attitudes (and the policy they drive).
If you're really cynical about government, then Trump's administration being a shitshow doesn't bother you. You think that the government is basically always a shitshow. Also, the lies about the election sound about right.
I got some insight into 2 from talking with a few people from rural areas of my state over the summer (admittedly, not a large sample size). Fundamentally, making race and gender such a big deal is, at best, mostly irrelevant to people in rural areas; why vote for politicians who focus so prominently on other people? For many people, it's not just irrelevant; it's a pretty big turnoff. For example, de facto support for (or at least lack of serious condemnation of) the rioters over the summer --- along with calls for defunding the police and the likes --- was really unpopular. And yes, Biden did say he didn't support defunding the police, but with so much on-the-ground energy for it from the left, few cared what Biden said.
I agree with the view that many of the race/culture aspects of the modern left are garbage, but I also understand that moderate Democrats still exist in significant numbers; they're just a lot quieter.
Yeah. For sure extreme wokeness, defund the police, and riots in Portland and elsewhere pushed more than a few moderate Ds & Rs toward Trumpism. To me, it was a huge red flag when James Lindsay (@conceptualjames, Cynical Theories) came out for Trump even considering that his switch to Trump could have been for branding/economic reasons as much as conviction.
The Dems refusal to loudly slap down extreme wokeness was probably the biggest political blunder of this cycle. OTOH, I don't think them doing so would have moved the numbers by more than a couple percent overall and that would have still left Trumpism with a crazy-high level of support.
I agree that woke shit wouldn't be enough to move the needle much, but I'm including more than just woke shit.
For example, sending in the military to end riots is, historically, a very common approach. Call me a fascist, but it's also not inherently unreasonable. I'd guess that Biden supported sending in the Marines to suppress the Rodney King riots. He would have scored real points with the people I talked to if he called for actually doing something to stop the riots last summer. I understand why he didn't do that, but I also understand why people were disappointed that he didn't advocate for a real response.
I don't recall exactly where everyone landed on things. It looks like Trump was mainly calling on governors to request the National Guard to come in, although as usual, his rhetoric was more inflammatory than anything.
I think you are really right. I think that the degree to which people get info from a bubble and don’t quite get that that is happening is huge. I really find it hard to hate someone who says hey they are policing speech too much on the left I don’t want my kids indoctrinated (recently had a conversation with a liberal dad who doesn’t read almost any politics who is freaked out about critical race theory in school teaching his minority kids to hate white people reminding me that the small amount of stuff that reaches people like him is the weirdest crazy stuff and one may say hey the crazy stuff is on the right is worse than crazy left stuff and may be right but has nothing to do with hey democrats in general have a better plan for the country). I honestly have a lot of sympathy for nonracist(at least by old definitions) republicans who see a bunch of young loud people seeing injustice everywhere calling everyone on their side racist as people who are unrealistic and don’t seem to like the country they love very much.
GOP voters mostly vote on cultural issues—the Democratic Party is toxic in much of the country—and don’t care about January 6, which on all accounts was by fringe weirdos, or think the narrative of it was misrepresented or overblown.
I mean, as bad as January 6 really, really was, the media managed to make the threat sound worse than it was. As bad as Trump really, really was, the media kept exaggerating threats and making things up. Eventually, it just looks like a TV game show to see who can be most dishonest. They seem immune from self-reflection, but Trump was right about the media; they suck.
May as well mention this here: the majority of the media being (a) openly pro Democrat, (b) culturally woke af and (c) really bad at their jobs (more stories walked back in last 5 years than in previous 20) is actually hurting Democrats. I don't know the answer, but it's a real problem. It's a big part of why the (unheard) working class doesn't like the left.
Anti wokeness is prob the biggest gripe of “reasonable” people I’ve spoken with on the right. And they wouldn’t characterize it like that, most of them watch little news and are never on Twitter and don’t know what any of the recent controversies are except very peripherally. I am thinking of people I know who think of protesters and how it seems like every other thing is considered racist and thinks this is craziness and people on my side of the aisle are crazy too but at least they don’t actually seem to hate me, personally. I’m a white dude (not me but the friend in my example) and I’m not super left wing so I believe quite honestly that the left actually hates me. That is one viewpoint I’ve seen. The other is more generally an extreme aversion to instability and dramatic changes to law or institution or whatever. “Hey all this woke stuff and hating corrupt cops is great but I’ve got kids and a job and I just want everyone to chill out and shut up and let me get back to my family.” The message on the right of “the left is trying to disrupt everything” works really well for this type of person of which I know several but as far as I know most still didn’t vote for trump.
Probably anti-wokeness/PC stuff and immigration. Abortion and guns matter too but there are lots of pro-choice people in e.g. rural areas. I don’t think religious liberty is there yet, or likely to be in the future given the Court and the lack of appetite for confrontation on it, but if Dems cracked down on churches for some strange reason they would never win again.
This is why we need proportional representation, it's not that 48% of Americans are OK with what happened on January 6th, although I'm sure a portion of them are, it's that they are more afraid of the Democrats to actually switch their vote from Republican to Democrat. This is why we need to have more parties so voters have more flexibility in their votes and can actually show that they don't appreciate what the party is doing. Without proportional representation this 50-50 split will be the bane of America's existence.
The country’s a bit weird right now IMO. People seem so divided and republican overrepresentation is frustrating for the left and we have insurrectionists and false claims of voter fraud but also we are passing massive relief and have people thinking about how we can pass even more effective relief and throwing economic austerity theories in the garbage bin. I think rural votes counting more is a real problem but I think just as big a problem is the 2 sides hate each other and don’t want or need to talk to each other and that’s not going away. If I had a choice between making government more representative and decreasing the circle jerkiness of the algorithms by which people get their info I would vote for the latter though I’m not too optimistic for either. I’m honestly curious whether slow boring readers would think the representation problem is bigger or the circle jerkiness, though they are not independent or mutually exclusive.
Okay well the circle jerkiness, I believe, is caused by the misrepresentation of power in government. And therefore the most effective and long-lasting change, I believe, to decrease the circle jerkiness is to have proportional representation.
This is because the way we solve conflicts right now is just to push them off into the future rather than coming to compromises. The current electoral system also accentuates extremist policies and polarizing figures because it “excites” the base to vote. Additionally, because voters are predictable it’s easy and politically advantageous to gerrymander because you know which side someone will vote.
However, with PR this all changes. It becomes harder to predict who people will vote for and gives people more flexibility to change their votes in the future, it allows people to see the power of their vote and inspired more people to vote which discourages extremism because extreme policies dissuade many voters and finally it allows government to actually work effectively because there’s no minority trying to sabotage everything the majority is doing in order to win the next election. So there you go why PR actually solves both problems.
But how does improper apportionment create the Facebook and Twitter algorithms that create information bubbles? I had never heard my parents say anything very political in my life, now they email me conspiracy theories they have been sent and ask my thoughts. My friend just asked me how i was going to explain what a racist country we live in to my kids and was flabbergasted when I said I’m not going to tell her that because I don’t see it that way. I’m not sure she had even come in contact with anyone with this viewpoint recently in her life. It’s a little wacky to me.
Well first, as I said in the previous post, it allows the government to actually pass bills and make policy changes. Both republicans and democrats want to break up the monopolies of Facebook/Google and I guess Twitter although it's not necessarily a monopoly, but they can't do it right now because it would hurt the republicans (or whatever parties in the minority) politically. With proportional representation, all the parties are incentivized to pass bills and therefore you could much more easily get regulations and bills passed to help solve some of those conspiracy/information bubbles.
Second, by breaking up the parties from two to 4-6 you expose people to a lot more nuance and complexity without actually having to change anything about the way they get their information. By creating more flexible electorates, people will be able to define and discuss their views much more readily and with a wider range of people, encouraging discussion without us vs. them mentality because there's like 4 other them's.
Rural communities and poor urban communities are facing the same problems. It would be easier, in my opinion, to figure that out (see Charles Booker "from the hood to the holler" in Kentucky) and pursue a vision that speaks to it than it will be to pack the SC, for instance. Imho.
The problem with proportional representation. Is you don’t deal with local issues. It is fairer in a national sense but you can’t call up someone and say don’t close that military base, that my town depends on.
That can be addressed by the Germany/New Zealand style of mixed-member proportional representation.
People vote for the local candidate, and whoever wins the majority in each seat gets that seat, but then the total votes for candidates nationwide are counted, and if the local results weren't proportional to the national results, then additional representatives are added to the national legislature to result in a proportional total.
There's still someone for each particular locality, but there's also proportional overall results.
You can't do that now. I'm confused about how proportional representation decreases local issues. I would argue that it actually helps bring local issues forward.
First, it helps people to realize the complexity and nuance of different issues because instead of just two sides there are multiple sides. This allows them to actually understand their local context better rather than trying to fit in with the two-sided national debate.
Second, because people will be able to see the power in their votes it could encourage them to get involved in local politics as well where they have even more power and more control because of the limited population compared to a state or the country.
Finally, because the parties need the broadest support possible in order to win, it can help bring those local issues forward and encourage politicians to actually visit those towns or cities to hear their views. On a national level, this would mean Presidential candidates wouldn't just go to a bunch of towns in Pennsylvania and talk about policies that rally their base but actually go across the country to where they can most easily convince people to vote for them and create national strategies that mostly align with the broadest support.
In List PR you are voting for a party and seats are assigned by party vote. So in the USA say the libertarian gets 3% of the votes they get 3 senators and 14 house members. This is cool because a party that normally doesn’t get any representation relative to there vote share now has a say. But those people represent the 3% of people who voted for them not say the people of South Texas. So a water use problem involving the Rio Grand will not be important to anyone. No one would represent south Texas or nyc any place they would represent the voters who have their ideology.
Oh sorry, I should've been more specific about what PR I was talking about. So this would be multi-member districts for the house rather than just a national-level vote. So you would be able to vote not only for a party but also specific candidates and it would help prevent some of these smaller parties from getting a whole lot of seats. This would maintain what you're talking about but also add a level of ideology as well where you're not only represented by many different people but hopefully with an ideology you support which isn't possible right now.
I agree, but I think it may be more pragmatic to pursue IRV/ranked choice voting. Easy to explain, doesn't change government. PR requires an entirely new form of government; much tougher sell in a country where we've taught people to revere the constitution.
IRV could help bring in new parties, and do a better job of frightening the current parties into changing, I think.
Well first yes ranked-choice voting is a massive step up from the current system that we have now but second I disagree completely with it being difficult to explain and changing the entire government. First, creating multi-party districts is not that difficult to explain and would require the same explanation as ranked choice voting.
Second, the American government is essentially already a proportional system of government and that’s why it worked so well in the 1900s we just need to formalize it.
Finally, the constitution is the exact document that gives congress power to change election laws so it would be literally the base form of power that congress would be exercising.
I hear you but I think you’re misjudging the problem. PR will work only if people are willing to let their leaders make enforceable deals. Without that we’ll simply have more pointless posturing.
I don't think its correct to say 48% are ok with what happened January 6th. They voted way before the events of January 6th, or any of Trump's other antics leading up to the transition. Based on polls its still an uncomfortable portion of the electorate. But no way 48% of people are "OK with what happened on January 6th."
Another solution here would be to allow a plurality of electoral votes decide the Presidency. Imagine if that were true and you could win with 35%. Then third parties spring up all over the place. The two parties could split, everyone would have multiple competitors, and no election would be zero sum.
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.
You can't *actively* gerrymander the Senate. But the Senate comes *pre*-gerrymandered (at least, for the contemporary political alignment).
Saying "if you want more representation, then move" makes participation in government out as though it were one sort of personal good that one could choose to have more or less of, in trade-off against other goods. But in a nation based on the idea of participatory government, that seems wrong - it's not a personal good like views of the mountains or spacious yards or access to opera houses, that different people might individually value differently, but rather a public good that involves a commitment to treat each person equally *regardless* of the private choices they make.
You're right to observe that the revealed preference of most people is that they care more about other factors in their quality of life (including connections to friends and family due to geographic proximity) than they care about these slight imbalances of political power. But political power is not intended to be a market good like yard space or yummy tacos - the claim is that it's bad for people's opinions not to be represented equally in governance, even if this lack of representation is the result of impartial market transactions.
On this point, I was surprised to find that only 30% of DC residents were actually born in DC. The fairness / representation argument is less persuasive when you realize that 70% of the unrepresented chose to move with the full knowledge of DC's status.
I understand that this sounds on the surface like a compelling rationalization, but it also requires you to just ignore the other 30%, which seems weird.
I don't think it means ignoring them. But I still take into account that it's far less than 100%, and even the 30% won't necessarily live their for the rest of their lives either. 35% would be a stronger case than 30%, and 40% would be a stronger case than 35%, etc... If it was only 1%, and the rest were only government workers hired but whatever administration was in power, then it the argument is almost entirely diluted.
>>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?
Seriously, what is the point of this? The Senate has a 6-7 % pt Republican bias. Huge. Why does it matter which specific states drive it? And what is the relevance that 15% of CA's population is rural?
I'm just being persnickety and want to examine what I see as unsupported statements. It's true that the Senate has a Republican bias. But let's understand what the source of that is. It's not because of "small states" or the rural population. It's because "small-ish" states in the South and Mountain West really really love Republicans
If the Democrats want to be successful in the Senate, they're going to have to figure out how to have more Georgia-type Senate results and find more Jon Testers, even the occasional miracle of a Joe Manchin in West Virginia. Somehow, they're going to have to figure out how to make Florida Senate contests more competitive again.
That's not true. You seem to have completely missed the point of Matt's post: Democrats shouldn't accept a system where the rules aggressively favour Republicans. He focused on non-violent resistance but there are also legislative solutions. Democrats could make a whole new bunch of states. They could ban gerrymandering. They've chosen not to.
Why not both? Try harder to win in redder states through a bit of moderation, while also pointing out "hey we shouldn't have to do this" through non-violent resistance and nudging the system through legislation where possible.
I suppose the counter-argument is Democratic moderates elected under that system then have no incentive to change it (see Joe Manchin?) but I worry that the short-term consequences of refusing to moderate to win under the current unfair system will be to hand power to the increasingly-scary Republicans. It will be *much* harder for Democrats to win/implement popular progressive policies if the Republican Party as it currently stands has a few years to *really* go to town on small-d democratic norms and institutions.
The problem is, trying to change the structure of the Republic in order to achieve progressive ends is both radical and non-majoritarian (Republicans are a minority, progressives still more so). Which totally undermines the trust building that is needed to really deliver the message of moderation that would elect more moderate Democratic Senators. So it seems to me that it is an either-or proposition.
This is true and indeed I didn't mean "set up the system so whatever constitutes the Green New Deal today sails through". I meant more that the system should be tweaked so that it doesn't overweight the preferences of people in smaller political units and/or less populated areas, as it does now. That would likely result in a small but noticeable shift in a progressive direction as prog-lite policies seem to be preferred by medium-sized majorities of people.
If, for example, we were to abolish the Senate (which I don't support) and eliminate small-state bias, and we didn't get Bernie's agenda enacted, my takeaway would be "guess people don't want it", not "we should change the system more".
"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)."
That *is* to do with state size, though. The very small states are balanced; the very big states are balanced (the top 10 states have 12D-8R in Senators, 10-10 before the Georgia elections this year, and they're pretty much mixed together: DRRDMDMDRD, with the M for "mixed").
The big advantage is that the 15 states with 3-7 seats in the House are 22-8 Republican Senators, while the 12 states with 8-12 seats are 17-7 Democratic (but those 12 states contain a lot more people). That's still smaller states if not small states. And it's definitely to do with state size.
Also, those 15 states are pretty rural. The 11 Republican ones even more so: South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Utah, Iowa, Arkansas, Mississippi, Kansas, Nebraska (the four Democratic states are Oregon, Connecticut, Nevada and New Mexico).
It's not "small states", but it is "state size". Republican states are smaller than Democratic states. And those smaller states are mostly white and mostly rural.
It's not the whole story - part of it is differential turnout (red states have lower turnout than blue states, so the same number of voters get more representation because representation is based on the total number of people not the total number of voters), and another part is that the Republicans win states by much smaller margins, so a lot more Democratic votes are "wasted" by building up huge margins in California and New York. Narrowing margins in Texas is a large part of where the big increase in the Republican advantage in the electoral college has come from.
But it is the difference between the Electoral College bias of about 4% and the Senate bias of about 7%.
I struggle with this as well. In a comment on a prior post Matt mentioned how the R+6% bias is simply a function of our current political coalitions and that a 2008 Senate result is still achievable. I read a desire to return to a ~D+10 Senate map in a lot of Matt's posts (e.g., race-neutral policy arguments, democrats should try harder to win elections). But to me, this idea also seems in tension with a inextricable structural R bias.
I lean toward your first statement. What I reject is that whatever structural bias there is is "inextricable." As you note, it was only 13 years ago that the Democrats had 60 seats in the Senate. I believe you have to go back 100 years to see a similar Senate margin for the Republicans. Obviously, many of these Democratic Senators weren't liberals, but they still were Democrats, albeit more conservative ones. And Obama was able to get a lot done with them!
If the 'structure' permitted that 13 years ago, none of knows what the situation will be 13 years from now. Things evolve and voters change their minds. Let's work on that.
Let's work on getting more Heidi Heitkamps, Claire McCaskills, Max Baucuses and even Ben Nelsons. (But no more Joe Liebermans from Connecticut). If we can get more 'structural' reforms (e.g., DC statehood), all well and good. But our primary focus should be on getting good local candidates, implementing effective policies that have clear benefits, and making sure that we first pursue policies that Americans are inclined to support. And please try to avoid the off-putting rhetoric. In other words, exactly what Matt calls for all the time.
If you make an exception for the northern New England states (ME, NH, VT), which are notoriously politically idiosyncratic, that urbanization index chart serves as a pretty good predictor of whether your state will have a Republican for senator and vote for a Republican for president. (Also note the partisan lean used here by 538 doesn't include 2018/20 election results--you'd get an even stronger correlation, I bet, if you included those results.) As the article notes, there are other factors at play and it isn't a *perfect* predictor, but it gets you pretty close, and you would get closer if you controlled for race/ethnicity ("white rural"). And you could get even closer if you controlled for religion and education levels--non-college educated whites in the north and upper Midwest are less religious and tend to be swingier, which would explain differences between similarly "rural" states like TN and WI.
But to your point, your counterexamples seem to misinterpret the claim as "white rural voters dominate the states where Republican senators are elected." But the claim is that white, rural voters are more widely distributed across more states, so to the extent that all of those voters choose one party (which is in fact happening), that's going to have a greater impact in more Senate elections than a corresponding change in the voting behaviors of another more concentrated demographic. And because Senate seats are not distributed proportionally, the total population of those voters doesn't matter--the key is that the demographic is efficiently distributed.
Can I throw an uncomfortable question into this conversation?
Why is does it seem to be assumed that rural white voters are deserving of being stripped of rights granted to them by that constitution? A lot of people who are not rural can’t swallow this on basic fairness grounds, and would need to be persuaded to think otherwise. It is an argument that needs to be made successfully in order to get the structural changes that we Democrats want. This will not happen if the existence of these rights of rural people is treated as an offense to democracy. “Proportional representation that advantages my side, because it’s good and right, and rural people are undeserving” strikes me as unpersuasive, particularly if the message is delivered with indignation and a dollop of class and cultural condescension. The founders of the constitution believed in civic virtue, and this underpinned their idea that the United States should not be a pure democracy. What are the arguments for the proposition that urban progressives have more of that than rural Christians?
That’s not an argument, that’s a statement of preference. Most Americans today believe in this principle more or less, while also not being comfortable rewriting the constitution to strip people’s current rights away either. Especially when the principle is cited in the context of obvious partisanship. We need a better argument than that.
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.
I agree with you about needing stronger parties (bring back the smoke-filled rooms), but I don’t think that’s what’s driven polarization. It has a lot of causes, but for instance, nobody foresaw that Democrats would become increasingly urbanized, or that education would globally become more associated with left politics (it used to be the other way around, because education correlates with greater income, which correlates with right wing economics). Nor was it foreseen that the population gaps between states would be so enormous.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that party weakness is causing polarization. Rather, it limits the ability of parties to effectively deal with it and be more competitive.
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.
>>>Much as I dislike the disproportionate effects of the Senate, I have a harder time condemning it with the same fervor.<<<
I don't have a problem with the way Senate seats are apportioned (it's arguably an elegantly simple method) so much as I have a problem with the fact that the Senate is fully the equal of the House in crafting legislation. Indeed, it's probably the stronger of the two chambers given its confirming role for judicial and executive branch appointments.
In a good number of bicameral polities, the upper chamber exercises considerable powers, but these are nonetheless inferior to the lower (people's) chamber's powers, and so the former mostly plays an amending or delaying role with respect to legislation (which is a non-trivial role!). If America could ever modify its constitution in this manner, I'd have zero problem with Wyoming and California both sending two Senators to Washington.
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.
Nah, the Constitution was definitely designed to be highly centralized if you read the debates. It was designed by people who were horrified by the populism of state governments and the weakness of the central government under the Articles. Prominent members of the Convention favored abolishing the states or making them administrative districts. That obviously didn’t happen, and would have been even more radical, but it was on the table.
They also fully expected the Senate to create political inequality between large and small states and many strongly favored a more proportional system. But the small states were terrified of dominance by NY, PA, VA, and once admitted places like OH and KY, and each state had one vote in the convention, so they got the Senate for protection.
The system has changed in many other big ways—the administrative state, the Reconstruction Amendments, and incorporation—but the “compact theory” of the Constitution is largely an anachronistic view later promoted by the South. Federalism now works largely as originally intended, with both state and federal governments having major power over people.
I'm not sure what your point is, because even if you're right that some members of the constitutional convention thought they were creating a constitution that, by their standards was highly centralized compared to what preceded it, the fact is they created a Constitution that includes the Senate which represents States *as States* and an Electoral College which gives States a say *as States* in the selection of the President.
Of course it did, but that doesn’t show the Constitution was designed to resemble a relatively loose union like the EU with weak central powers. That’s the Articles system, not the Constitution.
They were trying to make a centralized government, but since they were starting from such a decentralized baseline, what they ended up with still looks today like the EU a little bit, which is bad.
It was only designed to be centralized relative to the articles of confederation but compared to the West Minster system it was still designed to be highly decentralized, likewise compared to democracies which sprang up and succeeded from the early 20th century.
If the Constitution was "designed to be highly centralized," then it is the most poorly written and constructed document of all time. I think Allan Thoen's view is more convincing.
Why do you say that? The Convention clearly anticipated and discussed the preemption power. The main debate on it was whether to adopt an even stronger federal veto of all state laws. And the purpose of the Convention was to expand Congress’s power over the internal economy, especially money and debt enforcement, which resulted in wide enumerated powers to preempt with, plus the abolition of the Articles’s limitation of the central government to the enumerated powers.
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.
I can tell you why *I* think he's dishonest and hypocritical but sometimes read him anyways. Obviously it requires reading with a critical eye, but the conclusions he's motivated to come to are ones that are sometimes correct (generally along the lines of criticism of the US National Security apparatus), and I haven't yet found someone who will consistently put forward only the genuinely good ones. Getting all the half-compelling ones spewed at me and sorting out for myself which ones are correct is the best I've managed to find so far.
Do you support him going on Glenn Beck, pandering to Beck’s conspiracy theories, and then saying the Democrats are evil because they want to abolish the electoral college?
I mean I paid a lot of attention to Donald Trump too! Unfortunately sometimes bad actors have a lot of influence and it's worthwhile to keep abreast of what they're saying. And in my case there's a personal element too, which is that I read him religiously in the Bush years and so it's hard to shake the habit of caring what he has to say.
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?
I tend to agree. We can live with bias in the Senate and the Electoral College; it just means we need a climate policy that caters to rural areas somehow (soil sequestration, carbon storage, etc). But if the GOP decides to reject a valid presidential outcome in 2024, I don't see how you avoid a collapse of the system.
Matt predicted all this in a Vox piece in 2015, so we know his Substack is value for money.
There seems to be this undergirding belief that *if* things really got so bad as to actually potentially change the outcome, reasonable republicans would speak out. But I think what we're seeing is that the incentives to go along with things are very strong when the time comes.
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.
If Californians want more equal representation in the Senate and Electoral College they can subdivide California into a smaller states. All that takes is approval by the California legislature and Congress - and if that's what Californians want, even Joe Manchin might not stand in the way, local rule and all.
But if Californians' attachment to the idea of California as California makes that option too unpalatable .... well that kind of proves the point of those who say we are in fact a federal union and that states are not merely anachronistic relics shouldn't have representation in the federal government.
Actually I don't know if the California legislature could approve subdividing the state or it would take a state constitutional convention. But at the federal level all it takes is congressional approval.
I think that creating two equal Californias which would almost certainly both yield Democratic senators would in fact be a bridge too far in a Senate with a filibuster. And it seems bizarre that we would have to give up existing economies of scale and still get nothing approaching proportional representation -- the two Californias would still be much more populous that most other states. Probably the third and fourth most populous states. Becoming our own nation seems like a better investment of time and energy when the benefits are so small. I get that California is the boogeyman for the right and absolutely the housing situation here is a crisis but we are actually in fits and starts making headway and I see our state moving forward in all kinds of ways that the right wing resists. I am a thousand percent for Democrats working to win under the rules as they are and I did everything I could in 2020 during the primary to rally folks in my orbit to Biden over Sanders to give us the best shot of beating Trump and I take comfort in the fact the Dems got our act together and made this happen. But if Republicans keep changing the rules to win with minorities and then turn around and govern from anger and resentment -- like cutting taxes for the rich heirs but raising them for blue states -- it seems like we are better off keeping our tax revenues at home.
Once you start on this process, can you really be sure you’ll get the political advantage you expect? It depends on how you split the state. Why just two? Why not four, to give the Republicans a shot? Everything will be in play. For example, splitting New York to give downstate New York its own Senators (most representative and logical), would leave behind a Red upstate New York, thus nullifying the existing +1 Blue State advantage in the Senate. Which is why there is a lot of talk and no action on this.
The only area where California has a disadvantage is in Senate representation and only in terms of proportional representation - plus a tiny bit of the same in the EC. The latter could be almost eliminated by expanding the House, which leaves the Senate. In every other dimension, California trounces the influence of Wyoming. In several areas, California is a de facto second federal regulator thanks to its size and influence.
Many non-Californians, me included, are not disposed to the idea of eliminating California's "disadvantage" in the Senate while preserving all of California's many other advantages in size and scale.
What "advantages"? California is more influential than Wyoming because it's much larger. That's just fairness. What would be unfair is if California got ten extra representatives because it's the largest state, or something of that nature.
Yes, California is much larger which gives it a ton of influence outside of California that no other state has. California is the only state granted an exception to federal EPA regulation, for example. California, by virtue of its size and market power, is a de facto second federal regulator in many areas. See for example the effects that SB822 is having on the wireless industry.
Our system is built and designed as a federal compact of semi-sovereign states. Equality between the states in terms of status and representation in the Senate is intentional. This was put into the Constitution for the specific purpose of ensuring that big states cannot completely dominate the other states in the federal government. I can see how Californians would like to retain all their state's advantages and get rid of their one disadvantage, and you may think doing that is "fair" but many people do not. And not just those who live in Wyoming.
This kind of regulatory accomodation seems pretty far afield from permanently and intentionally overrepresenting Wyoming residents. You may think that the two are equally offensive, and I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree. You place far too little weight on the principle of democratic equality.
I'd just note that democratic equality was never intended at the federal level. As previously noted, the Constitution is a compact among equal states and therefore the state is the core political unit in our federal system. The Constitution was designed to make it impossible to change the equality of states with respect to each other without dismantling the whole thing. The point in bringing that up is just to note that it's not possible to achieve what you want without blowing up the Constitution. At the very least, one much convince the small states to give up political power to benefit you and California - they are unlikely to ever agree to that absent some kind of quid pro quo. So my objection has little to do with democratic principles as opposed to the very real practical aspects of getting from here to there.
Secondly, democratic equality also applies in the other direction. I have no representation in California since I am a resident of Colorado, but as a de facto federal regulator, California policy in a number of areas affects me and many people outside of the state of California. You complain that you have unequal representation compared to Wyoming, but I can complain that I have no representation at all in California.
If it helps, remember we have some tiny blue states too. And I also get some comfort from knowing how miserable California Republicans are. I drove through House District 1 a few months ago and the Trump regalia blew my mind. People had Trump flags flying that were bigger than my entire apartment!
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.
If Republicans passed universal open carry with 50.5% of the vote that would be unpopular and they would be help accountable in the next election. Or, maybe it would be popular and they would keep power. That's how democracy is supposed to work. It's a weird thing about this democracy debates that people raise these preemptive policy concerns. In democracies procedure is not supposed to block unpopular things, electorates discipline parties on their own.
That is the most compelling part of Ezra's argument re: eliminating the filibuster to me. Governing majorities should be able to pass their agendas and reap the rewards/penalties for them. If Republicans want to strip down the ACA, which I am not in favor of, they should totally be able to do it and then have to deal with the fallout of that decision. As it stands right now, they get all of the point-scoring of opposing particular issues without having to...you know, DO anything.
It's also how you show you're not just full of partisan shit. Like if our country is center right, let it be center right. I can hope true democracy would lead to my exact policy preferences, but it probably won't. Do we believe in democracy as an abstract principle or not?
To be clear, I am not in favor of stripping down the ACA, not that I am opposed to the ACA personally.
Yeah, the Tories here in the UK have been able to actually implement Brexit. At the moment, the consequences are a bit hidden (no-one can travel any way because of covid) but if it turns out to have been a disaster, then they'll catch hell in a future election.
I don't think this is totally true. The Tories enjoy a geographic advantage similar to Republicans. They won less than half the popular vote in the last election but have a huge majority in Parliament. If the election was proportional, the left-wing/2nd-referendum--curious parties could conceivably have formed a government, altho admittedly it would have been tricky.
That's not a geographic advantage. It's a different property of the first-past-the-post system that we share, which is that it inflates a small lead into a bigger one.
Take a look at the 1992 Presidential election as an example. Allocated proportionally, the Electoral college would be 233 Clinton, 202 Bush, 103 Perot, a lead that the system inflated to 370 Clinton, 168 Bush.
The US seldom has a large third party, and hasn't seen a large national lead for one party over the other for a long time, so you rarely see this effect in federal elections, but statewide elections regularly see leads massively inflated by the system. Take a look at the most recent California State Assembly election - the Democrats easily maintained their 2/3 majority, winning 75% of seats, but only got 62.78% of the vote, well below a 2/3 threshold.
It really wouldn't matter where the Tories are winning and where they are losing, when they have an 11.5% lead, it's going to convert to a large majority (a similar lead with the parties reversed in 2001 gave Labour 412/659 seats; compared to 2019's Tories 365/650).
It does, obviously, matter exactly where you win votes, but there isn't a large systemic bias in the UK the way there is in the US.
I'm not sure if open carry was the best example. But there are things that might be popular with a narrow majority, that just shouldn't be universally mandated. Or restricted.
That's what the Bill of Rights is for
Yep... though we have qualified immunity used as an excuse to perform unreasonable searches. We have students being kicked out of schools for expressing unpopular opinions. Etc...
Yeah but I think that's a separate problem from unequal representation of the Senate. Unequal representation doesn't protect against majoritarianism, it just defines the majority in a weird counterintuitive way.
Should the UN be more equal? UN votes relative to a countries population?
The senate is their to protect a state as a wholes interest.
Personally, I think we were better off when Senators were appointed by the Governor or State Government.
That was just an example that popped into my mind. Not sure if it was the best one. Personally, where I live, universal open carry is no problem, but I'm not sure I would feel that way if I lived in Chicago or New York City.
I’m the same way. But I prefer it at the more local level.
This is basically my dad. He was a lifelong Republican, voted for President Obama because he liked him (and I think he wanted to be able to say he was a part of a historical moment, not against it), and then when the Tea Party hit in 2010, he looked at that whole movement and decided he was 100% out on the Republican Party. He hasn't voted for a Republican candidate at the state-wide or Federal level since.
My dad is 60ish years old and has been a pretty successful manager in the manufacturing sector his whole life; what he appreciates most in a candidate is professional competency and someone who follows the data, and as he saw the Republican Party being increasingly driven by nonsense he decided he was done with that.
(The sneaky truth here is that my dad, by virtue of his values, was *always* kind of a very moderate northeastern Republican. Even during the 80s and 90s, his belief system would've placed him firmly in the D camp in many parts of the country, but the places we lived just happened to be liberal enough that he ended up on the R side of the issues. Once that sort of changed nationally, his support followed suit.)
When I say his values, I mean that he has never owned or expressed interest in a guns and finds gun culture weird and bizarre, is in favor of allowing abortion, is basically neutral on unions, and thinks free trade is good.
In a functioning democracy, bad ideas would be punished by voters shifting their preferences. The arguments against democracy presented here are weak because they assume that a perpetual majority will implement bad policies and get away with it. Majority rule is a better system by far. Conservative governors in blue states have a good track record so it’s not as if this would lead to a liberal hell hole. It’d just force conservatives to be slightly more appealing to the average voter.
I actually agree with this. I wish Dems would pass their ideas (except for any permanent change such as supreme court packing). If they are good, they will be kept, if they are bad, then Republicans will win.
Supreme Court packing need not be permanent, in fact it could be a catalyst for a constitutional amendment to fix the court at nine members but with 18 year terms. The amendment would require that every two years the most senior justice would step down and the President would appoint a new justice whenever the number fell below nine. Packing the court with 11 or 13 justices might convince Republicans to support such an amendment to undo the packing
More likely it would just lead to an escalating round of packing. Dems up it to 11. Republicans up it to 15, etc...
Though I am pretty agnostic as to Democratic or Republican elected officials, I am partial to conservative judges.
Court packing requires a trifecta, which seems unlikely (but not impossible) for the Republicans in the foreseeable future- that is part of McConnell’s reasoning behind pushing judges so hard. If the Dems did pack the court with younger judges, Republicans might see the clearer path to undoing that would be term limits that would allow the next R President to appoint 2 justices
I agree too! I wish republicans would pass their ideas. My frustration is that there are strong incentives on both sides to posture but not pass anything because of the number of veto points within the government. The chance of a big idea getting passed is so minute.
Just had an unrelated thought - if vaccines have microchips, why aren't we using the vaccines to address the microchip shortage that has production lines stopped at car companies now?
Or is the chip shortage *because* of them all being in the COVID vaccine?
/s
(the fact I have to end this with /s ...)
Lol. The paranoia of people who carry around their smartphones and post on social media all the time.
But it’s all coming together.
I think I probably lean more liberal than you but feel we are in this together.
What do you think about proportional representation? This would solve all the problems you're talking about from making more parties with different ideas so you can find one that best fits your views, to allowing productive polarization but incentivizing cooperation and compromise, and finally getting rid of this majority rule debate because there would be no majorities (it would be pretty insane for a 4-6 party system to have one-party control a majority)
That’s my dream. I would love a moderate party. I’m this weird conglomeration of conservative and liberal ideas. I really support stuff like child allowances. I support labor unions. I support a higher minimum wage that is adjusted for inflation. I support a robust immigration system based on Australia and New Zealand points system. If I was writing a tax code, Bezos and Zuckerberg would be practically broke. The wealth tax would be pretty damn scary.
At the same time, I am skeptical of too much of a welfare state that disincentivizes working. I believe in the Second Amendment. I am ok if individual states want to restrict abortion. I think we should enforce immigration laws (this is balanced on making legal immigration easier).
I think I’m basically a populist.
My superpower is I can literally argue in good faith and east side of any political argument. I actually sympathize with my opponents.
But back to your proportional representation thing. Unfortunately I feel like national politics has become a team sport. It’s us against them. So there’s no room for us, them, them.
Yes!! This is exactly why we need proportional representation because there are many other people like you who are much more complex than the big tent parties and yet are sorted into these parties and forced to vote with beliefs you don't actually hold. I'm very similar but more on the left side where I don't support a lot of the more extreme progressive views but would appreciate a bigger safety net, etc. But I would pose another question which is what do you think is causing the nationalized politics? Because for me the answer is the first past the post electoral system.
Social media. Simply put, it allows people to more easily identify with a larger national in-group. Whereas prior to the social media, this identification was more at a local level.
In the 80s, I was a punk, in the 90s I was an Airman. I am sure others would describe themselves primarily by some other label they identified with.
I seriously don't remember ever caring what party someone voted for prior to about 2010. Then all of the sudden, liberal or conservative has become the defining overall broad label.
We are all guilty of meeting people and sort of top level pegging them as a republican or democrat. Maybe millennials and Gen Z think this is normal, but to Gen X and Boomers, its a completely new paradigm. Don't get me wrong, we are guilty of it as well, that's how powerful the tendency is.
On another note, prior to social media, we were primed by national news like CNN and Fox. I remember CNN first becoming a big deal during the Panama invasion. Prior to that it was just network TV for a short time. Local news and anchors had a much bigger effect.
Anyway, that's my theory.
Ya, I definitely agree that plays a part but I would argue that social media is the catalyst that propelled the change forward way faster and farther rather than the direct cause. Many other countries have had this social media revolution but haven't had the same nationalization of politics as the US has had. And I would argue that the reason why the US is so much more gridlocked than other countries is that we're stuck in this FPTP/two-party system that doesn't allow for complexity and instead flattens all debates into a two-sided argument.
Now one question would be why didn't this start sooner, if it was FPTP why didn't it start in the 1800s or something? And that's because we actually did have a four-party system up until around the civil rights era. There were liberal democrats, southern democrats, northern republicans, and rural republicans in the society. That's why republicans supported FDR's New Deal and why democrats couldn't pass any civil rights bills. However, once they did pass the civil rights bills and the parties sorted into two, it wasn't until the republicans in 2010 realized the power that they actually had and began to use it under Mitch McConnell.
I left FB in September before the 2016 election because it was so transparent how FB was profiling me based on my demographic information. I’m a heterodox political thinker, and I have different views from many people in my demographic group (at the time, 20-something in the Bay Area). They served me political advertising and materials that were so off the mark that it started to make me feel crazy. Maybe it’s good that FB got me so wrong. But the whole episode made me think that if I didn’t turn the thing off I would lose my capacity for genuine reflection and critical thought. Now that I’ve been five years away, and we see what we’ve seen from Cambridge Analytica to Jan 6, I think that was a very solid instinct.
I haven't abandoned them entirely, but my engagement is cut down a lot. Facebook really is a good personal communication tool, keep up with people type thing. Who had a baby, who got a new job, or moved, etc...
I think you’re right. Maybe it’s just the people I know but no one really puts much “political,” broadly defined, stuff on their personal pages. By political I mean no anti-vaxx, no weird conspiracies, no anti BLM rants...
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.
Let me provide some insight for how one current R voter is thinking: I didn't vote for Trump (man, I look forward to not having to preface voting discussions with that phrase someday), but I did vote for almost every other Republican on my ballot.
I voted against a lot of things, and for a few. DeSantis has had a sane and reasonable response to the COVID panic, and his opponent turned out to be involved in a strange drug and male prostitute scandal, so I count that one as a huge plus. I disagree with the Democratic Party's views on illegal immigration, on support for Israel, on accomodation with Iran. I disagree with their views on anti-racism, on free speech issues, on religious liberty. I disagree with their views on the level of regulation broadly and their desires to impose a largely urban mindset to a large and diverse population. I find their proposals around climate change to be overwrought and overly pessimistic. I don't find the governance and quality-of-life in all-Democratic places to be a good example of where I'd like to live (SF Bay, Detroit, Baltimore, Portland). I find them condescending in their views to less-educated people.
I disagree with many policies of Republicans, too. But they largely don't work that hard to pass them (end Obamacare, privatize social security as examples) so I don't worry about over-reach in those areas. I do worry about over-reach by the Democrats.
You are clear on what you don’t like about Dems. As for Republicans, you like that they don’t accomplish much (other than cut taxes). Could I describe your view as pro status quo? America is fundamentally fine. Just let me have my freedoms (don’t police my language) and the economy will meet the needs of hard-working Americans. Is that it basically?
Yes, that is a fair characterization. I think we should tinker around the edges, but I don't support the more extensive changes I see the Democratic party supporting.
Earnest question: a lot of people in the US are not doing fine. I don't agree with a lot of far-left claims but there is racism, more poverty than other developed countries, currently lots of carbon emissions, it's very costly to have kids. Do you think these are problems that exist or that it's overblown?
I think those problems exist. I think many of the solutions proposed have unintended (or intended) consequences that would create bigger problems. I support smaller, incremental changes, some Democratic some Republican.
What kinds of changes?
I like the idea (don't know where I saw it) of progressives proposing lots of new ideas, which then have to run the gauntlet of conservative criticism. The terrible ideas get shot down and forgotten, the necessary and positive changes get implemented. From the present it looks like the left has always won, but just because we don't remember all the policies the left used to propose.
If true, it would make sense that the conservative position can be defined more easily by what it doesn't want rather than what it does.
I have also voted R a lot in the past, but I consider the "don't try all that hard to pass things" to be (mostly) more of a bug than a feature.
When GWB was proposing the marriage amendment, I thought "I don't think he really wants to try that hard to pass it"(and I was correct), so it allowed me to justify ignoring his stance (especially since Democrats weren't particularly pro marriage equality at that point). And outside of that I found his policy preferences more in line with my own.
But applying that logic to the current R that basically tells me they won't try to get anything done.... and we really need some things done (even if I'm not 100% a fan of how the Democratic administration wants to do them)
Boy do I want the filibuster gone so both parties can actually try to _do_ things instead of relying on one party "not actually trying to do things"
Yeah. I'm all in on killing the filibuster. Running a government based on tradition and "gentlemen's agreements" is dumb. The rules should be clear, very hard to break, and relatively hard to change.
The Israel Lobby is the biggest cancer on America's foreign policy.
Disagree and argue as you wish, but I would urge you to use different language. Cancers are meant to be eliminated and this metaphor is not OK when applied to a country filled with Jews.
You complain about Democrats' attitude to free speech then 7 minutes later attacks someone's speech based on a clear misrepresentation of what they wrote
I didn't attack; I disagreed. I don't want him fired. I won't report him to his boss. I won't try to doxx him. I won't try to pass a speech code banning his views.
Can you give me an example of the Democratic party proposing "speech codes"?
Greenwald and others have pointed out, that pro-Israel Zionist mastered cancel culture before everyone else. I think Matt has referenced this on twitter. It is about siloing certain discussions and kicking them out of the political realm.
I am sorry, but this comment exactly proves my point. This is a standard canard, play the anti-Semitism card to deflect from criticism of that settler-colonial regime. I think its good word, because like apartheid S. Africa and colonial Algeria, it should be removed.
This is ahistorical though. The Arabs conquered the area just in the 7th century CE. If you don’t want the Jews there, I guess you should try giving the area to Greeks, Italians or Iranians, all of which were there centuries before Arab colonization.
This is a bizarre comment. Arabization from the Muslim conquests wasn't a genocide, when the Arabs conquered the Levant they didn't wipe out the existing population like the Zionists are trying to do. The Palestinians living there are the people who have always lived there, not like the Brooklyn settlers.
What would it mean for Israel to be "removed"? What country would Tel Aviv be part of?
In that case, your choice of words supports your views, though I strongly disagree with your characterization.
Yeah, I'd like to 2nd this.
In al honesty what do you think we’d be doing differently if not for the Israel lobby? I think Chomsky argues fairly persuasively that it’s the imperialist project that leads to support for Israel not a relatively small lobby.
Yes. Read Ben Rhodes book and this book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Foreign_Policy
Israel's aims don't benefit the US. The pushback is from the Lobby, which is huge. AIPAC is the most powerful lobby in DC.
I don't agree that AIPAC is theost powerful lobby but I would love more discussion about the advantages to the US in unconditional support for Israel, b/c I don't see it
I think the weapons manufacturers have them beat. U.S policy towards Latin America and Asia has been just as brutal. We don't need a foreign lobby to convince us to kill a bunch of people without any benefit to the average american
Are you an “average american” [sic]?
I don't own stock in Raytheon, if that is what you mean
That’s not what I meant, but thanks for playing.
Maybe call them vermin instead?
A fair and useful summary, even if I don't agree with some of the points, but 'not trying hard to end Obamacare' is surely a bit hard to square with California v Texas, no?
California v Texas (or some version of it) was going forward regardless of party control of the Congress and Presidency. The proof for me is that when Republicans had control of the House, Senate and Presidency between 2017-2019, they didn't pass any meaningful legislation other than tax reform.
But they tried, really quite hard, to pass ACA repeal in that window. And California v Texas was driven entirely by Republican AGs.
They really didn't try very hard to pass ACA repeal, or much of anything else for that matter. The only thing of consequence they passed was tax reform.
I don't think that's right at all. They devoted a lot of congressional time and effort to it, and repeatedly brought back new versions even when it was already clear that their efforts were both widely unpopular with the general public and uniting their opponents with a winning campaign line.
I think you're mistaking the lack of complete unity (which they had over tax reform but didn't have over the ACA) for a lack of effort in leadership, but they're not the same thing.
If you don't mind why do you like his response to covid? Like he will tell you that. he is against people who thought we should actually stop the virus above all else and that seems like the better quality of life solution.
I live in Orlando and like everyone I know has been wracked with anxiety for over a year regardless of if they're working from home, working in a store, or were closed for months.
He prioritized the safety of seniors, kept schools open, vaccine rollout based on age, avoided mass closures of business activity. And ended up with a Covid death rate that was better than most states (ranked 27th), despite an older population. See: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/
I'm really not trying to argue, but understand because my experience was one that the last year has been just awful here. Are you just fatalistic that we simply couldn't have accomplished a kind of victory against covid? I, perhaps naively, thought people would accept broad serious sacrifices if only people had asked for them.
Yeah I don't think victory against covid was feasible whatsoever. Moreover, it wasn't even really tried. Even in the bluest of blue states and areas I never saw a realistic plan proposed. To me that kind of plan would have involved much more extensive contact tracing and evidence-gathering. Instead it was just "hunker down indefinitely" which was realistic for a certain type of white-collar person but not for anyone else.
Bug bigger than that was the CDCs extreme errors in understanding and communicating how covid is spread. I keep going back to Japan's public health ministry who communicated right from the beginning "the 3 Cs": stay away from close contract, in crowded, poorly ventilated indoor spaces (it's probably all Cs in Japanese). We started with sending kids home from college to their older parents houses and shutting down playgrounds. To this day people are walking around with masks outdoors and then taking them off to eat in restaurants, or washing doorknobs and things like that. It doesn't matter how much sacrifice people are willing to make if half of the sacrifice is geared towards useless hygiene theatre
The sacrifices necessary - stop travel, mass testing, forced quarantines, contact tracing - weren't asked of any American citizen in any state. We are an unruly and diverse populace and we weren't going to stop economic activity (and protests) for a disease with the risk profile of Covid-19. I don't think that is fatalistic, but YMMV.
I guess I just generally disagree that America wouldn't have done that if both liberal and conservative elites had asked them to. Maybe I'm naive but I don't think were that much more divided than the like Nazi Sympathizers to the Communist spectrum in June 1941.
There was like a kind of obvious log trade where liberals would get significant social spending in a guaranteed income and health care aid and conservatives would get closed borders and security state spending to build out the tracking infrastructure.
The US pandemic outcome is not that different from the Western European pandemic outcome. We had a slim chance to contain the pandemic extremely early IF the CDC/FDA had (1) not fumbled their initial test creation and (2) had been able to spin up contact tracing faster, but after that institutional failure (one that no president would have been able to stop in time) we were going to have a bad pandemic because we don't have the cultural cohesion to do true lockdowns (literally locking people inside as China did) or mandatory quarantine in a government run facility. The FDA also refused to approve rapid tests due to their "low accuracy" (see many experts on why speed > accuracy for containing a pandemic).
"we don't have the cultural cohesion to do true lockdowns (literally locking people inside as China did) or mandatory quarantine in a government run facility"
Everyone keeps saying this, but no-one ever tried! If Newsom (or your local governor; I live in CA) had proposed this, I would have supported it. I'm willing to bet I'm not alone.
More rapid tests would have empowered people to assess their own risk better and adjust behavior dynamically. When frequent, regular testing was used, such as in major sports and at many universities, outbreaks were minimized without needing very strict measures.
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-pandemic-playbook-Podcast/B092MX6G9B
Great The Weeds podcast on that subject.
>>>DeSantis has had a sane and reasonable response to the COVID panic<<<
Covid panic?
What would you think of proportional representation or a party that doesn't support Trump but is still to the right of Manchin?
That’s my dream. But human tendency is to divide into us them, not us, them, them.
Yes, exactly that's why you force more complexity into the situation to blur that human tendency. And I mean it would really only take one bill in Congress for this to be passed.
Yeah, but any thing that opened up a third-party would hurt but the Democrats and Republicans there for fear keeps them from supporting it.
Well, that's the thing, it wouldn't just be a third-party but also a fourth and possibly and fifth and a sixth. By making multi-party districts as well as ranked-choice voting you remove the third-party spoiler effect. The real reason I think they don't want to pursue proportional representation is that they'll lose the monopolies they've set up in government. PR is essentially breaking up the political monopolies through those same political monopolies so it will have to take a lot of support to get it passed.
There are surely multiple ways to get to supporting the current Republican party, but the path that I can grok is 1) being really cynical about government (and related institutions) and 2) being super turned off by left's cultural attitudes (and the policy they drive).
If you're really cynical about government, then Trump's administration being a shitshow doesn't bother you. You think that the government is basically always a shitshow. Also, the lies about the election sound about right.
I got some insight into 2 from talking with a few people from rural areas of my state over the summer (admittedly, not a large sample size). Fundamentally, making race and gender such a big deal is, at best, mostly irrelevant to people in rural areas; why vote for politicians who focus so prominently on other people? For many people, it's not just irrelevant; it's a pretty big turnoff. For example, de facto support for (or at least lack of serious condemnation of) the rioters over the summer --- along with calls for defunding the police and the likes --- was really unpopular. And yes, Biden did say he didn't support defunding the police, but with so much on-the-ground energy for it from the left, few cared what Biden said.
I agree with the view that many of the race/culture aspects of the modern left are garbage, but I also understand that moderate Democrats still exist in significant numbers; they're just a lot quieter.
Yeah. For sure extreme wokeness, defund the police, and riots in Portland and elsewhere pushed more than a few moderate Ds & Rs toward Trumpism. To me, it was a huge red flag when James Lindsay (@conceptualjames, Cynical Theories) came out for Trump even considering that his switch to Trump could have been for branding/economic reasons as much as conviction.
The Dems refusal to loudly slap down extreme wokeness was probably the biggest political blunder of this cycle. OTOH, I don't think them doing so would have moved the numbers by more than a couple percent overall and that would have still left Trumpism with a crazy-high level of support.
I agree that woke shit wouldn't be enough to move the needle much, but I'm including more than just woke shit.
For example, sending in the military to end riots is, historically, a very common approach. Call me a fascist, but it's also not inherently unreasonable. I'd guess that Biden supported sending in the Marines to suppress the Rodney King riots. He would have scored real points with the people I talked to if he called for actually doing something to stop the riots last summer. I understand why he didn't do that, but I also understand why people were disappointed that he didn't advocate for a real response.
Are you discounting the National Guard? When governors called them up, they seemed to do a pretty good job.
Did Biden call for it? Also, not all governors did much with them.
I don't recall exactly where everyone landed on things. It looks like Trump was mainly calling on governors to request the National Guard to come in, although as usual, his rhetoric was more inflammatory than anything.
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/biden-vows-not-to-use-national-guard-as-a-political-prop-1.643174
I think you are really right. I think that the degree to which people get info from a bubble and don’t quite get that that is happening is huge. I really find it hard to hate someone who says hey they are policing speech too much on the left I don’t want my kids indoctrinated (recently had a conversation with a liberal dad who doesn’t read almost any politics who is freaked out about critical race theory in school teaching his minority kids to hate white people reminding me that the small amount of stuff that reaches people like him is the weirdest crazy stuff and one may say hey the crazy stuff is on the right is worse than crazy left stuff and may be right but has nothing to do with hey democrats in general have a better plan for the country). I honestly have a lot of sympathy for nonracist(at least by old definitions) republicans who see a bunch of young loud people seeing injustice everywhere calling everyone on their side racist as people who are unrealistic and don’t seem to like the country they love very much.
GOP voters mostly vote on cultural issues—the Democratic Party is toxic in much of the country—and don’t care about January 6, which on all accounts was by fringe weirdos, or think the narrative of it was misrepresented or overblown.
I mean, as bad as January 6 really, really was, the media managed to make the threat sound worse than it was. As bad as Trump really, really was, the media kept exaggerating threats and making things up. Eventually, it just looks like a TV game show to see who can be most dishonest. They seem immune from self-reflection, but Trump was right about the media; they suck.
May as well mention this here: the majority of the media being (a) openly pro Democrat, (b) culturally woke af and (c) really bad at their jobs (more stories walked back in last 5 years than in previous 20) is actually hurting Democrats. I don't know the answer, but it's a real problem. It's a big part of why the (unheard) working class doesn't like the left.
What do you see as the top culture issues driving the R vote? My guess is religious freedom & abortion, guns, and anti-wokeness.
Anti wokeness is prob the biggest gripe of “reasonable” people I’ve spoken with on the right. And they wouldn’t characterize it like that, most of them watch little news and are never on Twitter and don’t know what any of the recent controversies are except very peripherally. I am thinking of people I know who think of protesters and how it seems like every other thing is considered racist and thinks this is craziness and people on my side of the aisle are crazy too but at least they don’t actually seem to hate me, personally. I’m a white dude (not me but the friend in my example) and I’m not super left wing so I believe quite honestly that the left actually hates me. That is one viewpoint I’ve seen. The other is more generally an extreme aversion to instability and dramatic changes to law or institution or whatever. “Hey all this woke stuff and hating corrupt cops is great but I’ve got kids and a job and I just want everyone to chill out and shut up and let me get back to my family.” The message on the right of “the left is trying to disrupt everything” works really well for this type of person of which I know several but as far as I know most still didn’t vote for trump.
Probably anti-wokeness/PC stuff and immigration. Abortion and guns matter too but there are lots of pro-choice people in e.g. rural areas. I don’t think religious liberty is there yet, or likely to be in the future given the Court and the lack of appetite for confrontation on it, but if Dems cracked down on churches for some strange reason they would never win again.
Yeah. That sounds right to me. I forgot to put immigration on my list but it's clearly near the top. Thanks.
This is why we need proportional representation, it's not that 48% of Americans are OK with what happened on January 6th, although I'm sure a portion of them are, it's that they are more afraid of the Democrats to actually switch their vote from Republican to Democrat. This is why we need to have more parties so voters have more flexibility in their votes and can actually show that they don't appreciate what the party is doing. Without proportional representation this 50-50 split will be the bane of America's existence.
The country’s a bit weird right now IMO. People seem so divided and republican overrepresentation is frustrating for the left and we have insurrectionists and false claims of voter fraud but also we are passing massive relief and have people thinking about how we can pass even more effective relief and throwing economic austerity theories in the garbage bin. I think rural votes counting more is a real problem but I think just as big a problem is the 2 sides hate each other and don’t want or need to talk to each other and that’s not going away. If I had a choice between making government more representative and decreasing the circle jerkiness of the algorithms by which people get their info I would vote for the latter though I’m not too optimistic for either. I’m honestly curious whether slow boring readers would think the representation problem is bigger or the circle jerkiness, though they are not independent or mutually exclusive.
Okay well the circle jerkiness, I believe, is caused by the misrepresentation of power in government. And therefore the most effective and long-lasting change, I believe, to decrease the circle jerkiness is to have proportional representation.
This is because the way we solve conflicts right now is just to push them off into the future rather than coming to compromises. The current electoral system also accentuates extremist policies and polarizing figures because it “excites” the base to vote. Additionally, because voters are predictable it’s easy and politically advantageous to gerrymander because you know which side someone will vote.
However, with PR this all changes. It becomes harder to predict who people will vote for and gives people more flexibility to change their votes in the future, it allows people to see the power of their vote and inspired more people to vote which discourages extremism because extreme policies dissuade many voters and finally it allows government to actually work effectively because there’s no minority trying to sabotage everything the majority is doing in order to win the next election. So there you go why PR actually solves both problems.
But how does improper apportionment create the Facebook and Twitter algorithms that create information bubbles? I had never heard my parents say anything very political in my life, now they email me conspiracy theories they have been sent and ask my thoughts. My friend just asked me how i was going to explain what a racist country we live in to my kids and was flabbergasted when I said I’m not going to tell her that because I don’t see it that way. I’m not sure she had even come in contact with anyone with this viewpoint recently in her life. It’s a little wacky to me.
Well first, as I said in the previous post, it allows the government to actually pass bills and make policy changes. Both republicans and democrats want to break up the monopolies of Facebook/Google and I guess Twitter although it's not necessarily a monopoly, but they can't do it right now because it would hurt the republicans (or whatever parties in the minority) politically. With proportional representation, all the parties are incentivized to pass bills and therefore you could much more easily get regulations and bills passed to help solve some of those conspiracy/information bubbles.
Second, by breaking up the parties from two to 4-6 you expose people to a lot more nuance and complexity without actually having to change anything about the way they get their information. By creating more flexible electorates, people will be able to define and discuss their views much more readily and with a wider range of people, encouraging discussion without us vs. them mentality because there's like 4 other them's.
Rural communities and poor urban communities are facing the same problems. It would be easier, in my opinion, to figure that out (see Charles Booker "from the hood to the holler" in Kentucky) and pursue a vision that speaks to it than it will be to pack the SC, for instance. Imho.
The problem with proportional representation. Is you don’t deal with local issues. It is fairer in a national sense but you can’t call up someone and say don’t close that military base, that my town depends on.
That can be addressed by the Germany/New Zealand style of mixed-member proportional representation.
People vote for the local candidate, and whoever wins the majority in each seat gets that seat, but then the total votes for candidates nationwide are counted, and if the local results weren't proportional to the national results, then additional representatives are added to the national legislature to result in a proportional total.
There's still someone for each particular locality, but there's also proportional overall results.
Kind of the places where PR works tend to be small. I like the German system until they can’t form a government lol.
You can't do that now. I'm confused about how proportional representation decreases local issues. I would argue that it actually helps bring local issues forward.
First, it helps people to realize the complexity and nuance of different issues because instead of just two sides there are multiple sides. This allows them to actually understand their local context better rather than trying to fit in with the two-sided national debate.
Second, because people will be able to see the power in their votes it could encourage them to get involved in local politics as well where they have even more power and more control because of the limited population compared to a state or the country.
Finally, because the parties need the broadest support possible in order to win, it can help bring those local issues forward and encourage politicians to actually visit those towns or cities to hear their views. On a national level, this would mean Presidential candidates wouldn't just go to a bunch of towns in Pennsylvania and talk about policies that rally their base but actually go across the country to where they can most easily convince people to vote for them and create national strategies that mostly align with the broadest support.
In List PR you are voting for a party and seats are assigned by party vote. So in the USA say the libertarian gets 3% of the votes they get 3 senators and 14 house members. This is cool because a party that normally doesn’t get any representation relative to there vote share now has a say. But those people represent the 3% of people who voted for them not say the people of South Texas. So a water use problem involving the Rio Grand will not be important to anyone. No one would represent south Texas or nyc any place they would represent the voters who have their ideology.
Oh sorry, I should've been more specific about what PR I was talking about. So this would be multi-member districts for the house rather than just a national-level vote. So you would be able to vote not only for a party but also specific candidates and it would help prevent some of these smaller parties from getting a whole lot of seats. This would maintain what you're talking about but also add a level of ideology as well where you're not only represented by many different people but hopefully with an ideology you support which isn't possible right now.
I agree, but I think it may be more pragmatic to pursue IRV/ranked choice voting. Easy to explain, doesn't change government. PR requires an entirely new form of government; much tougher sell in a country where we've taught people to revere the constitution.
IRV could help bring in new parties, and do a better job of frightening the current parties into changing, I think.
Well first yes ranked-choice voting is a massive step up from the current system that we have now but second I disagree completely with it being difficult to explain and changing the entire government. First, creating multi-party districts is not that difficult to explain and would require the same explanation as ranked choice voting.
Second, the American government is essentially already a proportional system of government and that’s why it worked so well in the 1900s we just need to formalize it.
Finally, the constitution is the exact document that gives congress power to change election laws so it would be literally the base form of power that congress would be exercising.
I hear you but I think you’re misjudging the problem. PR will work only if people are willing to let their leaders make enforceable deals. Without that we’ll simply have more pointless posturing.
And why wouldn't they make enforceable deals under PR?
I don't think its correct to say 48% are ok with what happened January 6th. They voted way before the events of January 6th, or any of Trump's other antics leading up to the transition. Based on polls its still an uncomfortable portion of the electorate. But no way 48% of people are "OK with what happened on January 6th."
Could not agree more. This is absolutely the critical question. I wish I had seen a really compelling explanation.
Another solution here would be to allow a plurality of electoral votes decide the Presidency. Imagine if that were true and you could win with 35%. Then third parties spring up all over the place. The two parties could split, everyone would have multiple competitors, and no election would be zero sum.
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.
You can't *actively* gerrymander the Senate. But the Senate comes *pre*-gerrymandered (at least, for the contemporary political alignment).
Saying "if you want more representation, then move" makes participation in government out as though it were one sort of personal good that one could choose to have more or less of, in trade-off against other goods. But in a nation based on the idea of participatory government, that seems wrong - it's not a personal good like views of the mountains or spacious yards or access to opera houses, that different people might individually value differently, but rather a public good that involves a commitment to treat each person equally *regardless* of the private choices they make.
You're right to observe that the revealed preference of most people is that they care more about other factors in their quality of life (including connections to friends and family due to geographic proximity) than they care about these slight imbalances of political power. But political power is not intended to be a market good like yard space or yummy tacos - the claim is that it's bad for people's opinions not to be represented equally in governance, even if this lack of representation is the result of impartial market transactions.
On that particular point, the Constitution is bad.
On this point, I was surprised to find that only 30% of DC residents were actually born in DC. The fairness / representation argument is less persuasive when you realize that 70% of the unrepresented chose to move with the full knowledge of DC's status.
I understand that this sounds on the surface like a compelling rationalization, but it also requires you to just ignore the other 30%, which seems weird.
I don't think it means ignoring them. But I still take into account that it's far less than 100%, and even the 30% won't necessarily live their for the rest of their lives either. 35% would be a stronger case than 30%, and 40% would be a stronger case than 35%, etc... If it was only 1%, and the rest were only government workers hired but whatever administration was in power, then it the argument is almost entirely diluted.
>>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?
Seriously, what is the point of this? The Senate has a 6-7 % pt Republican bias. Huge. Why does it matter which specific states drive it? And what is the relevance that 15% of CA's population is rural?
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-senates-rural-skew-makes-it-very-hard-for-democrats-to-win-the-supreme-court/
I'm just being persnickety and want to examine what I see as unsupported statements. It's true that the Senate has a Republican bias. But let's understand what the source of that is. It's not because of "small states" or the rural population. It's because "small-ish" states in the South and Mountain West really really love Republicans
If the Democrats want to be successful in the Senate, they're going to have to figure out how to have more Georgia-type Senate results and find more Jon Testers, even the occasional miracle of a Joe Manchin in West Virginia. Somehow, they're going to have to figure out how to make Florida Senate contests more competitive again.
That's not true. You seem to have completely missed the point of Matt's post: Democrats shouldn't accept a system where the rules aggressively favour Republicans. He focused on non-violent resistance but there are also legislative solutions. Democrats could make a whole new bunch of states. They could ban gerrymandering. They've chosen not to.
A reasonable response, but I return again to my position as being persnickety about empirical claims.
That's all I'm doing here.
Why not both? Try harder to win in redder states through a bit of moderation, while also pointing out "hey we shouldn't have to do this" through non-violent resistance and nudging the system through legislation where possible.
I suppose the counter-argument is Democratic moderates elected under that system then have no incentive to change it (see Joe Manchin?) but I worry that the short-term consequences of refusing to moderate to win under the current unfair system will be to hand power to the increasingly-scary Republicans. It will be *much* harder for Democrats to win/implement popular progressive policies if the Republican Party as it currently stands has a few years to *really* go to town on small-d democratic norms and institutions.
The problem is, trying to change the structure of the Republic in order to achieve progressive ends is both radical and non-majoritarian (Republicans are a minority, progressives still more so). Which totally undermines the trust building that is needed to really deliver the message of moderation that would elect more moderate Democratic Senators. So it seems to me that it is an either-or proposition.
This is true and indeed I didn't mean "set up the system so whatever constitutes the Green New Deal today sails through". I meant more that the system should be tweaked so that it doesn't overweight the preferences of people in smaller political units and/or less populated areas, as it does now. That would likely result in a small but noticeable shift in a progressive direction as prog-lite policies seem to be preferred by medium-sized majorities of people.
If, for example, we were to abolish the Senate (which I don't support) and eliminate small-state bias, and we didn't get Bernie's agenda enacted, my takeaway would be "guess people don't want it", not "we should change the system more".
If you are being persnickety, the northern plains are the biggest distortion.
"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)."
That *is* to do with state size, though. The very small states are balanced; the very big states are balanced (the top 10 states have 12D-8R in Senators, 10-10 before the Georgia elections this year, and they're pretty much mixed together: DRRDMDMDRD, with the M for "mixed").
The big advantage is that the 15 states with 3-7 seats in the House are 22-8 Republican Senators, while the 12 states with 8-12 seats are 17-7 Democratic (but those 12 states contain a lot more people). That's still smaller states if not small states. And it's definitely to do with state size.
Also, those 15 states are pretty rural. The 11 Republican ones even more so: South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Utah, Iowa, Arkansas, Mississippi, Kansas, Nebraska (the four Democratic states are Oregon, Connecticut, Nevada and New Mexico).
It's not "small states", but it is "state size". Republican states are smaller than Democratic states. And those smaller states are mostly white and mostly rural.
It's not the whole story - part of it is differential turnout (red states have lower turnout than blue states, so the same number of voters get more representation because representation is based on the total number of people not the total number of voters), and another part is that the Republicans win states by much smaller margins, so a lot more Democratic votes are "wasted" by building up huge margins in California and New York. Narrowing margins in Texas is a large part of where the big increase in the Republican advantage in the electoral college has come from.
But it is the difference between the Electoral College bias of about 4% and the Senate bias of about 7%.
I struggle with this as well. In a comment on a prior post Matt mentioned how the R+6% bias is simply a function of our current political coalitions and that a 2008 Senate result is still achievable. I read a desire to return to a ~D+10 Senate map in a lot of Matt's posts (e.g., race-neutral policy arguments, democrats should try harder to win elections). But to me, this idea also seems in tension with a inextricable structural R bias.
I lean toward your first statement. What I reject is that whatever structural bias there is is "inextricable." As you note, it was only 13 years ago that the Democrats had 60 seats in the Senate. I believe you have to go back 100 years to see a similar Senate margin for the Republicans. Obviously, many of these Democratic Senators weren't liberals, but they still were Democrats, albeit more conservative ones. And Obama was able to get a lot done with them!
If the 'structure' permitted that 13 years ago, none of knows what the situation will be 13 years from now. Things evolve and voters change their minds. Let's work on that.
Let's work on getting more Heidi Heitkamps, Claire McCaskills, Max Baucuses and even Ben Nelsons. (But no more Joe Liebermans from Connecticut). If we can get more 'structural' reforms (e.g., DC statehood), all well and good. But our primary focus should be on getting good local candidates, implementing effective policies that have clear benefits, and making sure that we first pursue policies that Americans are inclined to support. And please try to avoid the off-putting rhetoric. In other words, exactly what Matt calls for all the time.
See also: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-senates-rural-skew-makes-it-very-hard-for-democrats-to-win-the-supreme-court/
You could start here: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-urban-or-rural-is-your-state-and-what-does-that-mean-for-the-2020-election/
If you make an exception for the northern New England states (ME, NH, VT), which are notoriously politically idiosyncratic, that urbanization index chart serves as a pretty good predictor of whether your state will have a Republican for senator and vote for a Republican for president. (Also note the partisan lean used here by 538 doesn't include 2018/20 election results--you'd get an even stronger correlation, I bet, if you included those results.) As the article notes, there are other factors at play and it isn't a *perfect* predictor, but it gets you pretty close, and you would get closer if you controlled for race/ethnicity ("white rural"). And you could get even closer if you controlled for religion and education levels--non-college educated whites in the north and upper Midwest are less religious and tend to be swingier, which would explain differences between similarly "rural" states like TN and WI.
But to your point, your counterexamples seem to misinterpret the claim as "white rural voters dominate the states where Republican senators are elected." But the claim is that white, rural voters are more widely distributed across more states, so to the extent that all of those voters choose one party (which is in fact happening), that's going to have a greater impact in more Senate elections than a corresponding change in the voting behaviors of another more concentrated demographic. And because Senate seats are not distributed proportionally, the total population of those voters doesn't matter--the key is that the demographic is efficiently distributed.
Can I throw an uncomfortable question into this conversation?
Why is does it seem to be assumed that rural white voters are deserving of being stripped of rights granted to them by that constitution? A lot of people who are not rural can’t swallow this on basic fairness grounds, and would need to be persuaded to think otherwise. It is an argument that needs to be made successfully in order to get the structural changes that we Democrats want. This will not happen if the existence of these rights of rural people is treated as an offense to democracy. “Proportional representation that advantages my side, because it’s good and right, and rural people are undeserving” strikes me as unpersuasive, particularly if the message is delivered with indignation and a dollop of class and cultural condescension. The founders of the constitution believed in civic virtue, and this underpinned their idea that the United States should not be a pure democracy. What are the arguments for the proposition that urban progressives have more of that than rural Christians?
One person, one vote.
That’s not an argument, that’s a statement of preference. Most Americans today believe in this principle more or less, while also not being comfortable rewriting the constitution to strip people’s current rights away either. Especially when the principle is cited in the context of obvious partisanship. We need a better argument than that.
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.
I agree with you about needing stronger parties (bring back the smoke-filled rooms), but I don’t think that’s what’s driven polarization. It has a lot of causes, but for instance, nobody foresaw that Democrats would become increasingly urbanized, or that education would globally become more associated with left politics (it used to be the other way around, because education correlates with greater income, which correlates with right wing economics). Nor was it foreseen that the population gaps between states would be so enormous.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that party weakness is causing polarization. Rather, it limits the ability of parties to effectively deal with it and be more competitive.
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.
>>>Much as I dislike the disproportionate effects of the Senate, I have a harder time condemning it with the same fervor.<<<
I don't have a problem with the way Senate seats are apportioned (it's arguably an elegantly simple method) so much as I have a problem with the fact that the Senate is fully the equal of the House in crafting legislation. Indeed, it's probably the stronger of the two chambers given its confirming role for judicial and executive branch appointments.
In a good number of bicameral polities, the upper chamber exercises considerable powers, but these are nonetheless inferior to the lower (people's) chamber's powers, and so the former mostly plays an amending or delaying role with respect to legislation (which is a non-trivial role!). If America could ever modify its constitution in this manner, I'd have zero problem with Wyoming and California both sending two Senators to Washington.
Turn the Senate into the House of Lords and I have no problem with it.
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.
Nah, the Constitution was definitely designed to be highly centralized if you read the debates. It was designed by people who were horrified by the populism of state governments and the weakness of the central government under the Articles. Prominent members of the Convention favored abolishing the states or making them administrative districts. That obviously didn’t happen, and would have been even more radical, but it was on the table.
They also fully expected the Senate to create political inequality between large and small states and many strongly favored a more proportional system. But the small states were terrified of dominance by NY, PA, VA, and once admitted places like OH and KY, and each state had one vote in the convention, so they got the Senate for protection.
The system has changed in many other big ways—the administrative state, the Reconstruction Amendments, and incorporation—but the “compact theory” of the Constitution is largely an anachronistic view later promoted by the South. Federalism now works largely as originally intended, with both state and federal governments having major power over people.
I'm not sure what your point is, because even if you're right that some members of the constitutional convention thought they were creating a constitution that, by their standards was highly centralized compared to what preceded it, the fact is they created a Constitution that includes the Senate which represents States *as States* and an Electoral College which gives States a say *as States* in the selection of the President.
Of course it did, but that doesn’t show the Constitution was designed to resemble a relatively loose union like the EU with weak central powers. That’s the Articles system, not the Constitution.
They were trying to make a centralized government, but since they were starting from such a decentralized baseline, what they ended up with still looks today like the EU a little bit, which is bad.
It was only designed to be centralized relative to the articles of confederation but compared to the West Minster system it was still designed to be highly decentralized, likewise compared to democracies which sprang up and succeeded from the early 20th century.
Of course. But “more decentralized than Westminster” does not mean “as decentralized as the EU.”
If the Constitution was "designed to be highly centralized," then it is the most poorly written and constructed document of all time. I think Allan Thoen's view is more convincing.
Why do you say that? The Convention clearly anticipated and discussed the preemption power. The main debate on it was whether to adopt an even stronger federal veto of all state laws. And the purpose of the Convention was to expand Congress’s power over the internal economy, especially money and debt enforcement, which resulted in wide enumerated powers to preempt with, plus the abolition of the Articles’s limitation of the central government to the enumerated powers.
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.
Why do you pay attention to him when it seems clear you think he's both dishonest and hypocritical?
I can tell you why *I* think he's dishonest and hypocritical but sometimes read him anyways. Obviously it requires reading with a critical eye, but the conclusions he's motivated to come to are ones that are sometimes correct (generally along the lines of criticism of the US National Security apparatus), and I haven't yet found someone who will consistently put forward only the genuinely good ones. Getting all the half-compelling ones spewed at me and sorting out for myself which ones are correct is the best I've managed to find so far.
Do you support him going on Glenn Beck, pandering to Beck’s conspiracy theories, and then saying the Democrats are evil because they want to abolish the electoral college?
I don't, and it's even because of stuff like that I'm not a paid subscriber
I mean I paid a lot of attention to Donald Trump too! Unfortunately sometimes bad actors have a lot of influence and it's worthwhile to keep abreast of what they're saying. And in my case there's a personal element too, which is that I read him religiously in the Bush years and so it's hard to shake the habit of caring what he has to say.
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?
I tend to agree. We can live with bias in the Senate and the Electoral College; it just means we need a climate policy that caters to rural areas somehow (soil sequestration, carbon storage, etc). But if the GOP decides to reject a valid presidential outcome in 2024, I don't see how you avoid a collapse of the system.
Matt predicted all this in a Vox piece in 2015, so we know his Substack is value for money.
There seems to be this undergirding belief that *if* things really got so bad as to actually potentially change the outcome, reasonable republicans would speak out. But I think what we're seeing is that the incentives to go along with things are very strong when the time comes.
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.
If Californians want more equal representation in the Senate and Electoral College they can subdivide California into a smaller states. All that takes is approval by the California legislature and Congress - and if that's what Californians want, even Joe Manchin might not stand in the way, local rule and all.
But if Californians' attachment to the idea of California as California makes that option too unpalatable .... well that kind of proves the point of those who say we are in fact a federal union and that states are not merely anachronistic relics shouldn't have representation in the federal government.
Actually I don't know if the California legislature could approve subdividing the state or it would take a state constitutional convention. But at the federal level all it takes is congressional approval.
I think that creating two equal Californias which would almost certainly both yield Democratic senators would in fact be a bridge too far in a Senate with a filibuster. And it seems bizarre that we would have to give up existing economies of scale and still get nothing approaching proportional representation -- the two Californias would still be much more populous that most other states. Probably the third and fourth most populous states. Becoming our own nation seems like a better investment of time and energy when the benefits are so small. I get that California is the boogeyman for the right and absolutely the housing situation here is a crisis but we are actually in fits and starts making headway and I see our state moving forward in all kinds of ways that the right wing resists. I am a thousand percent for Democrats working to win under the rules as they are and I did everything I could in 2020 during the primary to rally folks in my orbit to Biden over Sanders to give us the best shot of beating Trump and I take comfort in the fact the Dems got our act together and made this happen. But if Republicans keep changing the rules to win with minorities and then turn around and govern from anger and resentment -- like cutting taxes for the rich heirs but raising them for blue states -- it seems like we are better off keeping our tax revenues at home.
Once you start on this process, can you really be sure you’ll get the political advantage you expect? It depends on how you split the state. Why just two? Why not four, to give the Republicans a shot? Everything will be in play. For example, splitting New York to give downstate New York its own Senators (most representative and logical), would leave behind a Red upstate New York, thus nullifying the existing +1 Blue State advantage in the Senate. Which is why there is a lot of talk and no action on this.
The only area where California has a disadvantage is in Senate representation and only in terms of proportional representation - plus a tiny bit of the same in the EC. The latter could be almost eliminated by expanding the House, which leaves the Senate. In every other dimension, California trounces the influence of Wyoming. In several areas, California is a de facto second federal regulator thanks to its size and influence.
Many non-Californians, me included, are not disposed to the idea of eliminating California's "disadvantage" in the Senate while preserving all of California's many other advantages in size and scale.
What "advantages"? California is more influential than Wyoming because it's much larger. That's just fairness. What would be unfair is if California got ten extra representatives because it's the largest state, or something of that nature.
Yes, California is much larger which gives it a ton of influence outside of California that no other state has. California is the only state granted an exception to federal EPA regulation, for example. California, by virtue of its size and market power, is a de facto second federal regulator in many areas. See for example the effects that SB822 is having on the wireless industry.
Our system is built and designed as a federal compact of semi-sovereign states. Equality between the states in terms of status and representation in the Senate is intentional. This was put into the Constitution for the specific purpose of ensuring that big states cannot completely dominate the other states in the federal government. I can see how Californians would like to retain all their state's advantages and get rid of their one disadvantage, and you may think doing that is "fair" but many people do not. And not just those who live in Wyoming.
This kind of regulatory accomodation seems pretty far afield from permanently and intentionally overrepresenting Wyoming residents. You may think that the two are equally offensive, and I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree. You place far too little weight on the principle of democratic equality.
We will probably agree to disagree then.
I'd just note that democratic equality was never intended at the federal level. As previously noted, the Constitution is a compact among equal states and therefore the state is the core political unit in our federal system. The Constitution was designed to make it impossible to change the equality of states with respect to each other without dismantling the whole thing. The point in bringing that up is just to note that it's not possible to achieve what you want without blowing up the Constitution. At the very least, one much convince the small states to give up political power to benefit you and California - they are unlikely to ever agree to that absent some kind of quid pro quo. So my objection has little to do with democratic principles as opposed to the very real practical aspects of getting from here to there.
Secondly, democratic equality also applies in the other direction. I have no representation in California since I am a resident of Colorado, but as a de facto federal regulator, California policy in a number of areas affects me and many people outside of the state of California. You complain that you have unequal representation compared to Wyoming, but I can complain that I have no representation at all in California.
If it helps, remember we have some tiny blue states too. And I also get some comfort from knowing how miserable California Republicans are. I drove through House District 1 a few months ago and the Trump regalia blew my mind. People had Trump flags flying that were bigger than my entire apartment!
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