America and Minority Party Rule

Politics and religion
22

Problem with this is it’s hard to determine where gerrymandering is occurring. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious, but many times not. And the incentives for state-level offices are different than and conflict with those for district-level ones, so gerrymandering can be a wash there. Drawing districts is hard. Compact is not always best, nor would it always return proportional results. California’s solution (an independent commission with an elaborately neutral selection process) is probably the best temporary solution. Long-term, optimization algorithms should be employed, with well-established criteria so that the work of the algorithms can be checked for malfeasance.

I’d say that along with this, we need more justices. It would take some of the partisan pressure off of the Court.

If I had one wish that could be granted, I’d like to get rid of first-post-the-post voting and replace it with ranked choice in every election.

23

Fixing gerrymandering doesn’t do anything about the senate, and that problem is only going to get worse. And changing senate allocation to be more proportionate ends up making the electoral college at least a little bit better by default.

24

Yeah, though I tend to think that making maximally compact districts in uniform shapes, while perhaps not always resulting in an optimal situation, would often serve a more important purpose of eliminating any possibility of intentionally exploiting the system.

25

Not that I am a fan of gerrymandering or the electoral college.

Gerymandering reduces the accountability of elected officials. My local rep is a safe Republican. Next door over is a safe Democrat. Either one can do a pretty poor job and know that it’s pretty unlikely he will lose the next election.

The electoral college means that changing a thousand minds in Ohio or Florida or Colorado is important. Changing a thousand minds in Texas or New York or South Carolina is worthless… and as a result, a disproportionate number of political capital and government resources go to the former grooup of states. Might as well be the illustration in the dictionary under “dysfunctional.”

However, fixing these two problems would not really address the issue of minority government. The key pieces here are

  • Internet politics
  • The entrenched power of the two parties
  • The tactical superiority of Republicans

When it is next to impossible for other parties to succeed, the two major parties are going to have very large tents, coalitions of very different sorts of people. In the ahistorical era of my youth, network TV news made it very tough for the junior members of either coalition to do much about the fact that the party assumed their votes, tossed them crumbs, and then pursued the goals of the senior member of the coalition.

That situation crashed, as network TV gave way to cable and then the internet. Those junior coalition members can organize a lot better, with the result that dissent within each party is a much bigger deal. Used to be the anti-immigration and fundamentalist wings of the Republican Party got rhetoric and symbols, now they insist on power. Same thing falling out among the Democrats.

So the new reality is that the balance of power between the two parties depends less on the apparent number of troops in each army, and more on the ability of each party to actually turn out that vote. Dems are still stuck in this rut of thinking that they can win this battle with ever more intense proof that they are right, both factually and morally. The Republicans figured out that the way to unite disparate forces is in intense opposition to something, much the way we might have united against foreign enemies in the past. Republicans turn out to vote, despite the fact that they disagree on trade or immigration or whatever, because they are intensely focused on fighting the enemy: liberalism, which is coming to change the culture of their neighborhoods. Washington and the elites are going to tell them how to live, how to raise a family, who they have to be nice to, how to worship, and so on.

THAT is why things have turned out as they have.

To make it worse, this maneuver makes it very difficult for the Dems to respond in kind. The gut reaction of many frustrated Dems is to imitate the Trump thing and get crude and rude and angry. The problem with that strategy is not that it is morally wrong, but that the Trump thing has already done some significant realignment of the coalitions, such that people willing to “vote for nasty, as long as he is my nasty” have migrated towards the GOP, while people that would stay home rather than vote for the morally questionable have migrated towards the Dems. (Think a lot of Republicans would have stayed home if it had been their candidate who mucked around with an email server, so that the other party couldn’t pry?) My prediction is that a crude/rude/angry campaign would splinter the Dems far more than it did the Republicans.

But this is the situation which has given the smaller party the upper hand. Trump’s repugnance and his mistakes might conspire to undo the damage, but don’t count on it.

26

I don’t want to change the Senate. It’s procedure has been badly corrupted, but the institution is fine and doing its job as the minority bulwark against majority oppression.

27

It can’t do that job. Barring the odd Dem wave, Republicans will control the Senate. If they also control the House, then they can do whatever they want. When they don’t control the House, they can block whatever they don’t want. So that means we get conservative legislation or no legislation. Which means permanent minority government. The one exception to this stalemate - the ACA in the first two years of the Obama Presidency - basically drove the Republicans insane because they couldn’t block it.

I don’t know what the solution to this is, but it’s a bad problem.

28

This is exactly why it would not pass Congress.

29

The only way this really gets fixed is not pleasant.

30

Yup. See the article linked at the very top of this thread. The senate is the keystone of minority party rule in the US - it locks the republicans into effective control of congress, and it contributes to the disproportionate representation of rural states in the electoral college.

And given the number of minority-oppressing pieces of legislation that come out of a republican-controlled congress, I’m not willing to take the hypothetical argument that people would pick on the Dakotas over the actual problems with people trying to take rights away from the LGBT community.