Saying the quiet part out loud
People act like this is new…
It’s the same reason they keep ranting about “cities want to tell you how to live” and defending the electoral college.
They’ve never wanted democracy, because they’re out numbered. They only have that power they do through disproportionate representation.
… and cheating, gerrymandering, and outright lying. They know they arent representing the majority and are trying to delay the inevitable demise of their power in every way possible.
They don’t even have to cheat when it comes to the Senate. It was purpose made to provide disproportionate power to lower population areas. It is an explicitly anti-democratic chamber.
Which is a good thing…to a degree. A check against pure populism is necessary for any healthy Democracy.
But the ratio is completely out of wack nowadays, and doesn’t align with how the country exists now. Democrats have to work much harder to get control of it, but Republicans have to do very little to keep it.
It’s a structural flaw that is continually getting more destructive and Republicans become more brazen. The chamber that elects our Judges doesn’t even have rules in the Constitution for how it must operate. That’s such an incredible oversight I don’t get how it took until now for it to be abused.
Cribbage players are massively underrepresented in Congress, so we need a third chamber that’s designed to give equal representation to cribbage and non-cribbage playing Americans. It’s only fair, and we all know that fair and equal are good. Maybe we should have a fourth chamber where trans people have equal representation too, to keep Republicans from continuing to try to trample their rights.
Land shouldn’t vote, people should vote. No, I don’t think rural Podunk should have equal representation to Metropolis. One person, one vote. That has absolutely nothing to do with “populism” by the way.
It’s also the reason they always say “We’re a republic, not a democracy,” despite the fact that a republic is a type of democracy. They abuse language to justify the fact that they don’t want everyone to vote, only the people who vote for them. They also don’t govern for all of their constituents, only those that contribute to their power. It’s definitely not new.
A republic is simply a state without a king or other hereditary monarch. Often the leader is chosen democratically, but not always.
For example, China is a republic but not a democracy. The US is a democratic republic, which makes the claim “this is a republic not a democracy” even sillier.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
–Jean-Paul Sartre
What I always like to do is point out that Republicans are about “picking our bosses who will make hard decisions we might not like” vs “doing what the majority wants”.
I think a good government could use a little of both. But “majority wants” should be 99% of the laws, with only 1% being “hard, unpopular decisions”. Republicans prefer 100% “unpopular decisions”
Majority of white hetero Christians in the 30s through 60s wanted to outlaw gay people, cannabis and harmless psychedelic mushrooms, and imprison black people for protesting with guns.
Fuck you and majority rule. Minorities also deserve voices.
Perfect! Now it’s the old bastards that grew up from that era as a minority in power making the choice to try to keep things like they were in the 30s through 60s!
I know you’re trying to say “majority rule isn’t always a good thing”, but the alternative of “let a small group of people make decisions for everyone else” is just as bad and often times worse. It’s though the changing of minds of the majority that societal changes happen.
This is not an open question in liberal representative democracies.
You set the basic rules of the game and the minimun set of universal rights down at the constitutional level so they’re not accessible to change without massive consensus, then let the rest be subject to political legislative action under majority rule. People get the ability to express themselves under equal treatment from the law protected by consitutional rights while majority consensus sets the short-term decision-making.
If you want to actually have a functional one of those you also set a proportional electoral system, which makes smaller parties have a say through the frequent need to aggregate coalitions. This mostly works.
I swear, Americans have a fantastic knack for pretending it is physically impossible to resolve basic problems. “Sensible measurement units? If only we had the technology”.
