In recent days, weeks, and months at Outside the Beltway Steven L. Taylor has had a series of fine posts on the flaws in our electoral system including:
“The US’ Flawed Democracy”
“The ‘A Republic, not a Democracy’ Library”
“‘A Republic, not a Democracy’ Redux”
I do have one question which I don’t think Dr. Taylor addresses directly. According to Gallup, 27% of the people identify as Republicans, 29% of the people identify as Democrats, and 43% identify themselves as independents. In a fairer, more democratic system, why shouldn’t the composition of the Congress be 27% regular Republicans, 29% regular Democrats, and 43% something other than regular Republicans or Democrats? In other words in a fairer more democratic system why should the unrepresentative regular parties dominate the Congress?
I would also hasten to point out that the unrepresentative quality of the House and Senate can both be mitigated without amending the Constitution if districts were made smaller and the House were made larger and if states were routinely divvied up into smaller units, each with its very own pair of senators. California presently has a population an order of magnitude larger than the entire United States of 1790. In 1790 the House had 67 seats. California presently has 53. The notion that the present House is remotely representative is absurd on its face.
All that would require would be convincing representatives and senators to relinquish some of their enormous power which, as we should all know, is impossible.
Dave, what you want from this post is multi-member districts awarded on a proportional basis.
Just having more congressional seats is no guarantee that getting 43% of the vote would give you 43% of the seats. Look at Canada or the UK which use first past the post as in Congress, parties usually win seats not in proportion to the amount of votes. Then look at Germany or Israel; parties always get seats in proportion.
From what I understand; the Supreme Court has only ruled that multimember districts awarded on a winner take all basis is unconstitutional. No state has tried multimember districts awarded proportionally.
Illinois had something like that until 1980.
The point of my question is that Democrats in Manhattan are different from Democrats in Chicago are different from Democrats in Atlanta and that’s different from the national party.
There’s absolutely no incentive for the business élite to want a more representative government, and that’s exactly why you don’t have one and aren’t going to have one. They are thoroughly Marxist: they are class conscious and wage class warfare continuously, and to do this they need a government that that isn’t representative. They need a centralized, planned bureaucracy under the thumb of two centralized parties. The more Americans aren’t represented the stronger the Masters of Mankind become.
Most of my time over at OTB is spent engaging with Steven on these posts. Your question is one I’ve asked him on more than one occasion and I haven’t really received an answer. He primarily cares about votes cast, not the attitudes of the general public and uses the terms “majority” and “minority” in strictly partisan terms. I don’t agree with him on that issue and many others, but at least he’s respectful.
An example of my point is that although Chicago is indubitably Democratic a majority of Chicago’s voters wouldn’t vote for the policies pressed by the national Democratic leadership even taking into account that Sen. Dick Durbin is part of that leadership. The party has actually much more diverse views than one might think from the consensus of national leadership.