A very nice write-up, Lela, and definitively a good tone throughout the article.
I do have some points to make, perhaps just one, and that is about democracy. Democracy is a system of government by the whole population, and that means we do not have it.
As soon as we are divided in districts, we are not a democracy because voters have to compete with voters to get their one representative.
Basically, what we have is mostly minority rule, and democracy is always majority rule.
In 2006, I was able to calculate that the average Senator was voted into place by a little over 59 percent of the voters.
The decisions made in the Senate are often close to that 50% mark needed for a win, but with the filibuster that is then 60%. I’ll use that.
0.60 x 0.59 = 0.354. Definitively a minority decision. Majority rule compounded by majority rule is most often minority rule.
In Proportional Voting, majority rule is not compounded. It occurs just once.
With 100 seats, for instance, 99.01% of the voters are guaranteed they can point their fingers to the person of their chosen political color.
With the same decision, 0.60 x 0.9901 = 0.5941. Definitively a majority decision.
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I am writing this not to be correct about the word democracy.
This is important to understand for what is going on today. With most decisions being minority decisions we are actually governed by a political elite. This is not a small layer, but a rather broad layer for an elite.
Yet the political elite only needs to please the majority to remain in place. And that is where things are not going well today.
Naturally, the financial elite is well off and will so in any system. Then, the majority needs to be pleased to a good extent. Yet the very large underbelly of the United States is not present in our representatives. We have a democracy for the majority; we do not have a democracy for all.
In US history, we can see how the financial elite was always able to pull decisions in their direction, and the modern idea we have of the US was actually forged by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. This was only possible because of the enormous crisis. To bring that point home with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the elite was putting their money in the stock market, and not per se in society as a whole, to the point that the stock market contained a lot more money than its actual value.
I hope you see how a nation politically out of whack (because not a democracy but only a democracy for the majority) ends up investing in parts that are beneficial for the majority, but not for the nation as a whole. The New Deal is not the backbone of society anymore, and the financial elites have gained a lot (I’d say since the 80s). In our society, there is a tearing sound one can almost hear when looking at the right information.
We are not disagreeing on much. But I miss the deeper perspective that we have a system in place that is not a natural democracy. There are reasons why there is so much spin in politics because the system does not deliver fair representation, but winners only. And when it comes down to winning, then almost anything goes as long as it brings the win.
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The Founding Fathers did give us a gift, because it looks like the local level of government, cities and counties, must have Proportional Voting in place.
Cities and Counties are not mentioned in the US Constitution; the Framers left them out because they did not want to empower that level to avoid the young nation to be torn apart by too much local empowerment (based on our being a relatively diverse nation, even in the beginning; New York was always a melting pot with the Dutch being a minority group and many different Europeans in that town and New Netherlands from day one).
That was smart of the Framers, to leave the local level out.
But with their writing the Bill of Rights, we now also have a little door we can use to get Proportional Voting at the local level.
District voting is structurally separate-but-equal. And that is not allowed. We are segregated into districts first, and only then declared each other's equals.
The interesting part is that discrimination is never allowed for our governments, except where it is allowed. As such, we have 50 States that are each other's equals, while they are in no way equal. This is in the Constitution, so it is allowed. It may be strange to use the word discrimination while making unequal parts each other’s equals, but it is the correct word to use. It is positive discrimination for some States, and negative discrimination for others.
The States for themselves should not discriminate, but they do have several cop outs. First, they are part of the separate-but-equal setup with the Federal level, and next they are given considerable freedoms in the Constitution. They should put Proportional Voting in place, but they aren't doing it, and there is no good force available to make them change the State’s voting systems.
For the local level, there simply are no Constitutional powers that they can hide behind. They must hold elections that do not discriminate.
I am hopeful that we will get Proportional Voting in place at the local level. It will show so many people how they have been taken for a ride in our current voting system.
But it is also needed. Winner-take-all is tearing our nation apart. It is the same as in other nations where the presidential elections lead to a civil war, particularly when both candidates are running neck-and-neck. It is so hard to lose when just a single person establishes the difference between winning and losing everything. It is our voting system that establishes enormous amounts of losers — and that is why the tearing occurs: the losers truly get nothing.
In a good democracy, there is no empowered president, but rather a chancellor or prime-minister. They are not elected themselves, but they are the head that appeared out of the body that was elected. We have separate elections, and the head is not from the body per se. It is in the US Constitution, so this will not get changed. It is too complicated to fundamentally change the Constitutional setup for the Federal and State levels.
We are a segregated nation because our system is a segregating system. If it weren't for the Bill of Rights, we would not even be a nation to be proud of, so thankfully we do have the Bill of Rights. And one day, we will have a fair democracy at the local levels of government. Perhaps that will open folks’ eyes enough to then change the State elections, too. It requires just a majority of voters to change the State’s voting system.
Thank you for your article. It is a pleasure to read.
