Majority vote was not the deciding criteria, known to all well before the election. So this is an odd complaint - that somehow the majority needs to decide.
Also, the majority didn't vote for the Democrats either. Of those who voted, 48% voted D, 46% voted R, 3% voted Johnson, 1% voted Stein, misc voted to others.
So would a D win also have been somehow not deserved because they didn't get a majority?
And this is only of those who voted, which is only 55% of eligible voters. So D (and R) both got ~25% of the eligible vote. Some of this is because many people were disgusted by both parties. Trump and Hillary were the two worst Presidential candidates in history, as measured by unfavorability ratings [1]. Had the Dems run anyone with a somewhat normal rating, they would have likely trounced Trump.
We set up some rules that were not entirely unreasonable, and enough people did vote for the outcome that we got that the US does indeed deserve this. And both parties ran record level disliked candidates, so what did you expect would happen?
[1] "Among U.S. adults, Clinton now has a 56% unfavorability rating, while Trump had 63%.
And with registered voters, the two are basically tied: Clinton has 59% unfavorability and Trump has 60%."
I don't think the OP meant the president. The senate has about 400+ bills sitting on it's desk. If we had a functioning senate, then it would force the president to publicly veto the bill.
The Senate also has the right to publicly not debate on bills, which also sends information to voters, just as if the President vetoed a bill. Each of the three pieces has these powers and should exercise them as they think they were elected to do.
That is by design. I wish our state (Oregon) was of similar design so that all interests are represented. As it is now the populous centers, mostly Portland and Eugene, dictate their values to the rest of the state.
Rural areas are already heavily overrepresented in the american system. We certainly don't need to put the thumb on the scale further.
The ultimate problem is that "the rest of the state" (for virtually all states) is empty, hardly anybody lives there, and letting a minority override the will of everybody else is tyranny of the minority.
Taken to the extreme, this is ultimately what killed South Africa and Rhodesia and other countries - a relatively small minority imposing their will on the majority, things getting worse and worse with no recourse for the people whose lives were actually affected until things boiled over.
At its core, this is ultimately an argument for anti-democratic principles.
I’m not sure the translation of your argument works. America is not Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).
There is often something lost in this argument, which I think is a strength of the system, not a weakness. That is: the US Senate, which was the compromise, is a rejection of utilitarianism as the pinnacle of governing.
You don’t want tyranny of the minority, and I don’t want tyranny of the majority, so let’s have a system of checks and balances that ensures (within limits) that we address both groups.
So it's better to have rural dwellers with an outsized voice in deciding what happens in city areas?
You also are performing a convenient geographic sidestep where suddenly "where you live" isn't the country or even the state but is really only concerned with the local. So the rest of the people who live in the nation are diminished.
Localism has led to lots of problems in American history, now we can add a shitshow of a Coronavirus response on top of the others.
The party of localism tends to be gung-ho about that huge federal military operation... yet refuses a necessarily-similar intervention in a pandemic.
An extra large irony here is that "left-leaning cities in right-leaning states" is much more common than the reverse, so what we often see in practice is rural state dwellers telling city dwellers in those states what to do. Look at the mask stuff for Atlanta vs Georgia from today, for instance.
That's without skewing the strength of the vote, even!
So, no, I'm far from convinced that we have to protect the poor rural folks from their fellow citizens.
No, it doesn't make sense that people should have greater voting power based on their location in the same polity.
Your argument is equally valid in reverse -- there's no reason why rural dwellers should decide what happens in cities. Why should your vote count for more because I have more neighbors than you do?
While city dwellers vote may be technically less powerful on a per capita basis, they make up for it in numbers. There are simply more of you with similar needs/wants. Not to mention far more money to achieve those needs and wants. In a city an individual's needs from his/her government are just less unique.
No, I want both minority and majority voices heard. What I am saying is that city voices are strong. They get the majority of the funding and influence when it comes to politics, regardless of voting power on a per capita basis.
The difference is you are arguing that rural citizens should get no say whatsoever. I care about everyone instead of only those living in a small geographic circle and understand that the needs of those living outside of that circle are unique from city dwellers themselves.
> What I am saying is that city voices are strong. They get the majority of the funding and influence when it comes to politics,
your experience of the american political system is vastly different from mine. You have a whole house in congress devoted to making sure low-population states get disproportionate representation, the other congressional house and the state legislatures have boundary lines that are gerrymandered to disproportionately benefit and empower you, a rural farming state has the first say in primaries and an incredible amount of pandering from legislators, the electoral college gives you disproportionate power over selecting the president in the general, you get incredibly disproportionate amounts of federal spending (military bases, road funding, etc) - far more than they contribute, I can go on.
Hell, in some cases the states themselves have been explicitly drawn to increase the amount of rural power - the only reason the Dakotas aren't a single state is so they'd get extra senators and representatives.
Again, you are coming off as a member of a rural minority who is crying that they don't have total and utter political power over the urban majority. You already have a hugely disproportionate amount of power, influence, and funding in the American system.
A vote in Wyoming is already 3.2x more potent than a vote in California based on electoral weighting, and the same is effectively true for most other areas of the government that involve voting in any form. How much higher, exactly, do you think that should be?
Cities are much more diverse than rural areas in terms of ethnicity, religion, economic class, linguistics, etc. To claim that city dwellers have "similar needs/wants" simply doesn't make any sense.
And having "similar needs/wants" doesn't have a logical connection to justifying taking away their voting voices.
No, it isn't. One person, one vote. If there are more farmers than city dwellers, the farmers have more say. If there are more city dwellers than farmers, the city dwellers have more say.
If you break this argument down, it gets really muddled.
Let's pick a state - Kansas, nice and rectangle. Let's say it was empty, and 10 farmers moved in and divided it 10 ways. They are happy to themselves on their huge plots of land, doing their own thing.
One farmer needs extra cash, so sells off a dozen acres. That dozen acres puts in a neighborhood of 20 houses. Now that 20 houses controls the entire state, effectively. They decide people shouldn't be able to own so much land, and owning more than 10 acres is illegal.
Sure it's contrived, but you start to notice how it's not as simple as 'majority rules is best.'
If you were to break down the argument even further, let's say Kansas had a farmer that owned 90% of the land. The remaining 10% of the land was shared between 1000 people.
Why should that single farmer be allowed to control the entire state over the rest of the 1000 people?
I'm making the argument that one concentrated area should not control the fate of a much larger area. I'm not, however, asserting that the larger area should control the fate of the concentrated area, either.
I think the issue we're all dancing around is that state lines really need to be re-cut. The rural areas have more in common with each other, the urban areas have more in common with each other.
Cut the urban areas into their own states (eg take the metro NYC or Chicago area and make them their own states) and then merge a lot of the "empty land" in between to try and equalize the population somewhat. End up with somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 urban states and 15 rural states.
Yeah, I got downvoted, but I was really trying to be philosophical and frame an opposing side. I walked around a while thinking on it, and that's all I came up with - more states. Our nation would look really gerrymandered, I think.
I actually think less states. Like, even 15 rural states is probably a stretch, it probably would be closer to 8. There really isn't a point to having like 30 states that have less than a half million people in them.
I would slice it into something like:
* Appalachia Region
* Gulf Region
* Great Lakes Region
* Heartland region
* Rockies Region
* Cascadia Region
* Desert Region (Southwest US - need a better name but I'm coming up with a blank.)
* Maybe a Northern Shield region? Could just be part of the rockies region.
Those areas all have common environmental concerns and life experiences, and would bring a sufficient number of residents to be worth bothering over. Then you have the metro areas as their own states, enclaves within the larger regions. If metro areas grow out you would probably would have to have some mechanism to vote to transfer counties/districts between states.
Never going to happen of course, the number of political barriers is insane. And Republicans would never ratify any such plan that rearranged states as any sensible arrangement would unwind the disproportionate power they wield based on the current arrangement.
The only mechanism that could conceivably be achieved is splitting blue states up, and it's not really a good one since populations are so concentrated - imagine trying to split New York City into like 5 independent states, it would just be completely impossible to administer in practice.
In reality we will just keep bumbling along with our current system that immensely, disproportionately advantages the rural states and rural populations. Unless the country goes into an actual civil war, of course, which is not as unthinkable as it was 4 years ago.
The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say.
Moreover, why does people's location on a 2d grid matter at all for grouping people under representatives? Why not the first letter of their surname? Their age? Maybe the altitude of their home? Seems just as arbitrary.
> The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say.
This is a rather short-sighted position. There's a reason the tyranny of the majority was avoided, and it's because the majority will always vote for their own benefit. If they do so, it almost always hurts the 49%.
You have to balance the needs of a state as if it were a living organism. You can't simply optimize everything for the heart when the lungs have needs as well, or the body dies.
I keep hearing people say this, and it baffles me. If the majority of people feel a certain way, who's to say it's not the right way? If you start picking this apart it really just comes down to "yeah but the majority can sometimes be wrong", which, I have news for you, applies to the minority as well.
At the end of the day, representative democracy exists instead of "pure" democracy because there's issues scaling the operation of government into something where everybody votes on everything. So we decide to have 1 representative for every N people. To do this, we need to break people into cohorts somehow, such that each cohort is roughly the same size. There's lots and lots of ways to do this, but we seemed to have settled on geographic locations, and sizing so that they (mostly) have similar numbers of people.
But since populations can be extremely concentrated in some areas, cohorting people by geographic location becomes less and less useful. It seems to me in an ideal world, everyone would be randomly assigned to a cohort via some sort of consistent hash, and they would be evenly distributed. Mind explaining to me why this would be inferior to cohorting on geographic location?
You seem to assume there is a 'right' or 'wrong' answer. There is not. For example, we have California suffering from catastrophic mismanagement of their water resources. You have one group who wants to move more water into the population centers, essentially taking the precious resource from the rural areas (farmland, which is rather important). You have another group who refuses to build more reservoirs or dams to better manage the water (because NIMBY). And then you have the minority, the folks in the rural areas.
Nobody is right or wrong, they just all have different priorities. Regardless of those priorities, the resources must be allocated to ensure the entire ecosystem can continue to survive. The only solutions to accomplish that are going to be compromises. But unfortunately, the groups in the population centers have managed for an incredibly long time to avoid compromise. So, now California finds itself in an unenviable position of battling drought and fire nonstop.
> I keep hearing people say this, and it baffles me. If the majority of people feel a certain way, who's to say it's not the right way?
Because, as parent said, the majority will usually benefit themselves even if it means harming the minority. If I belonged to some 51% group, why would I not vote to double my wealth, even if it meant stealing from the other 49%? And before you say 'I would never vote for that', it's never worded that way, but more subtle policies that would achieve the same thing.
That applies to the minority as well. The minority will benefit themselves even if it harms the majority and involves stealing from the 90%. NIMBY policies are exactly that where wealthy landowners vote and use their wealth to exclusively benefit themselves over everyone else. Rural voters can do the same thing where they vote in people and ways that explicitly harm the larger city as some sort of perceived revenge policy.
Which then goes back to the person you responded to: That the majority and the minority can both make wrong policy decisions.
I think the great irony of the arguments I see surrounding the tyranny of the majority is that often in rural areas or with rural politicians you'll see them employ this argument. Something like 'we need to protect our way of life from city folk' or 'we're not bothering anyone and want to be left alone'.
But then those same rural politicians will then make the opposite argument against other minority populations (such as people whom are LGBT or among race lines) and that we shouldn't let a small minority control our state or that who cares what they think. They switch rapidly from 'tyranny of the majority is bad' to 'tyranny of the minority is bad'.
Politicians gonna politic. That doesn't mean that the 'tyranny of the majority' doesn't exist, but they're just using the words to try to score points.
I caution people not to let politicians become their mental picture of the constituency.
I live in the Netherlands. A tiny country. It would be to this country's advantage if such a mad, insane rule as this were in place.
No one ever suggests it because it's obviously ridiculous.
LOOK at the results of America's screwed up voting system! A deranged madman in power, the economy in collapse with no rescue even planned, and a virus growing exponentially with no plan to fight it.
You just said it yourself though. You live in a country where the entire population would fit in one metropolitan area of the US. What would work for your country wouldn't necessarily work for ours because we have people living in dramatically different conditions spread across thousands of miles and over 300 million more people to deal with.
We have a state with 100,000 square miles and only 600,000 residents. We have another state that has a little more space but has 40 million residents. Their circumstances are so vastly different that the policies of one would be very unlikely to work well for the other.
> LOOK at the results of America's screwed up voting system! A deranged madman in power, the economy in collapse with no rescue even planned, and a virus growing exponentially with no plan to fight it.
America uses first past the post. It isn't great, there are many better systems later developed. If we were to improve our voting and party system it would benefit the entire country massively.
Just one example: city people trying to ban guns statewide while rural people live in places with dangerous wildlife (and more) will cause preventable deaths. In a city far more freedom must be curtailed in order for people to tolerate living near each other and rural folk often live out there precisely because they can't be happy making that trade-off.
Yes but why is "city/rural" the only dichotomy anyone bothers to fixate on? Why not skin color? Age?
You could just as easily say "old people are trying to pass laws that make lives miserable for young people, we really ought to have fewer representatives for old people", and it would make exactly as much sense as saying the same thing about a geographic location. There are a million different ways you could slice people up into representatives, but we end up settling on geographic location because... reasons, I guess.
I've met two 40-50 something ex-Oregoners who've said the same thing. They were extremely libertarian, and truly unlike anyone I'd met before. Almost like they came from some foreign(to me) culture. Both complained about how the population influx of Portland ruined the state, whatever that means, and both left looking for new adventures. I'm really curious what Oregon in the 70's-80's was like. The way they described it almost reminds me of Appalachian culture.
You will still find those types in Roseburg, Medford, parts of Clackamas county (I'm looking at you, Damascus), etc, where they refuse to pay for things like local libraries. Ask them why Coos Bay is full of drugs and see what sort of look you get from them.
Do you have examples of state level legislating in Oregon that you think needs to be changed? The big right-wing bugaboos in the PNW tend to be about federal policy (c.f. land use regulation), and the most impactful progressive laws tend to be at the city government level (Portland's $15 minimum wage, say).
I mean... what exactly are you complaining about? The straw ban?
