Nothing will change if we don’t change the system. And we can today….
Drew, thank you for your insightful article. We love to hold on to the American Dream, and folks don’t seem to wake up even when this is a nightmare for the voting minority.
We have an 18th century system in place that basically is divide-and-conquer. Naturally, the worst comes out where the majority has fallen asleep and dominates the voting minority without paying real attention.
We all love We The People, and there is a tendency to put that in place. But the system is not We The People. The system is divide-and-conquer. When push comes to shove divide-and-conquer wins the day.
It can get changed because the US Constitution demands that already today. I hope you are interested in the first small step we can take.
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The US Constitution is a complex document. It gives Fed and State governments freedoms. These freedoms were declared sufficient enough to ignore the 14th Amendment demand of putting the better voting system in place. But the beauty is that cities and counties were not given those freedoms. They just behave as if they were given those freedoms. Here is a visual:
A: Fed and State were given constitutional freedoms.
B: The Constitution demands that the better system is put in place.
Cities and Counties only have B that they must follow. They behave as if they have A, but they do not have A.
Divide-and-conquer is not allowed at the local level. We can therefore take the first step today. The local situation is also a good first step to get acquainted with the inclusive form of democracy. It is really a different system. If you want an example? Here.
Compared to nations with the actual We-The-People system, our poor are substantially poorer than their poor. Our divide-and-conquer system allows a deeper entrenchment, because the voting minority does not get any seats at all in our system.
To the left, our segregated little districts where we fight over the one seat. Just 50 percent plus one vote gets the seat. Our system discriminates systematically. Always.
In the We-The-People system to the right, almost 90 percent of the voters can point their finger to the person or party they voted for when, in this example, there are eight seats.
There are no voting minorities in proportional voting.
Once we are familiar with the We-The-People voting system, we can start changing the state voting system. State constitutions are far easier to change than the US Constitution.
My personal note on this is that the larger the states are, the more important it becomes to limit the number of parties to six or something like that. Having twenty little parties is not helpful. At the local level, there are no worries that that will happen, because there are often no more than twelve seats on a council (so that would probably be three to five distinct parties at most). It can be fully proportional without any problem. It is a safe location to learn how that other system works.
We can hold the feet of our local representatives to the fire and demand our Constitution-given better system today. We have had it with divide-and-conquer. We were promised We The People. We can get We The People today.
