What are the signs that democracy is failing in the United States. Here's a comprehensive list:
- In 2020 Donald Trump tried to forcibly steal an election he lost.
This is true, and a substantial chunk of the Republican Party and Fox News eagerly helped him. That's about as anti-democratic as it gets. But also keep in mind that (a) they failed, (b) every court case went against them, and (c) all the folks involved have been indicted in state and federal courts, some of them multiple times.
Am I missing anything? I don't think so, but let me take on a few common arguments that are sure to come up:
The Electoral College is anti-democratic. It's not, really, but in any case it's been around since the beginning of the Republic. A liberal Democrat won the Electoral College in the most recent election.
The Senate is anti-democratic. Again, not really, but it's also been around since the beginning of the Republic. Democrats currently control it.
The Supreme Court is very conservative. True, but not because of any failure of democracy. It's partly due to happenstance and partly due to hardball politics.
The Dobbs decision rolled back abortion rights. This is bad, but not anti-democratic. Hell, even a lot of liberal legal experts thought Roe v. Wade was bad law.
A small rump of Republican extremists has gummed up Congress. They've tried to gum up Congress. For various reasons, they've mostly failed.
That same rump is trying to impeach Joe Biden for no particular reason. Yes, and it's nauseating. But they failed and mostly made laughingstocks of themselves in the process.
After the 2020 elections Republicans tried to undermine the voting process. This has a kernel of truth in some of the voting laws passed in red states, but it's been going on for decades. Most of it is fairly ordinary politics, and it's never succeeded.
Donald Trump will weaponize the Justice Department, the federal bureaucracy, and the military if he wins the White House in November. Maybe, maybe not, but corruption is different from anti-democratic. Anyway, he'll need help from Congress for most of this. And he has to win a democratically held election first.
Conservatives are very loud and annoying. Yes they are, and I'd add that they're unprincipled, paranoid, racist, and meanspirited. But that's a whole different kettle of fish than being anti-democratic.
Conservatives keep winning elections. Indeed they do, but in entirely democratic ways. This is more a failure of liberalism than anything else.
I know, I know: I'm being Pollyanna. Maybe so. But Republicans have had anti-democratic impulses for decades and it's never amounted to much. Mostly they're just infuriated at the fact that they keep losing. Women, minorities, atheists, gays, poor people, and the disabled have all made steady progress despite the best efforts of conservatives to stop them. Conservatives have little to show for their efforts of the past half century except tax cuts for the rich.¹ That's small solace for most of them.
Anyway, look around. Look at the country compared to ten or twenty or thirty years ago. Does it seem less democratic? More authoritarian? I'd say just the opposite. Daily life has become so democratic it almost hurts, and the heavy hand of the police state has been slowly but steadily reined in. That's why cops are so mad these days. It's true that we're more polarized and angry than usual, but that's got nothing to do with the amount of freedom or liberty we enjoy.² We are freer, richer, and, yes, more liberal than we've ever been.
¹And, more recently, abortion. But that's turning into a Pyrrhic victory which they don't seem to be taking much satisfaction in. Public opinion hasn't changed; the number of abortions hasn't changed; and politically the whole thing has been a disaster.
²It's largely because of Fox News, but that's a topic for another day.
Joe Biden is a liberal democrat?
Not even remotely. A little hyperbole on Kevin's part.
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The word "liberal" has changed meaning drastically within the last 40 years, so to answer this "question" would involve parsing out both what KD thinks the word means, and what you think the word means.
That said, he's the most progressive president of my lifetime, relatively speaking.
... but nothing like Sanders or Warren or AOC or Tlaib or, well you get the picture.
I absolutely agree with your statement "most progressive president of my lifetime". Also my lifetime (I'm mid-50's), by the way. I think that mostly illustrates how not progressive presidents have been basically forever. But, I'll take it because I just don't see the U.S. electing anyone to the left of Biden.
Of course he is. Go issue by issue, and he is left of center.
Israel vs Palestine… he’s left of center? Don’t think so, guy.
In 2020 Donald Trump tried to forcibly steal an election he lost.
and when alito's court says there's nothing to be done about that in this election cycle... also not anti-democratic?
by your reckoning i guess putin is merely corrupt
The idea that the Supreme Court is a well-functioning democratic institution is comical
In this country, votes are not equal, due to the electoral college and the Senate. The people on SCOTUS who are undermining due process (etc.) were almost all appointed by someone who lost the popular vote.
How non-democratic does it have to be to count?
And confirmed by easily the least democratic institution of any democratic country.
Yes, like how they decided Roe v. Wade in 1973? When they invent major new laws, it goes badly. So now we are in the position of having to sort out the mess they created in 1973. But we are finally having the debates we should have had in the 1970s. If majorities get their ways, eventually abortion will be legal to some degree in every state.
Also, the SC was not meant to be democratic. In fact, it was intended to be a check against Congress passing unconstitutional legislation. It was to be a check on stupid populism (like Trumpism) and so on. It's worked well. In our system of checks and balances, it is one of the most important.
No, it wasn’t. Judicial review was invented by the Marshall Court in Marbury v. Madison.
From supremecourt.gov:
While the function of judicial review is not explicitly provided in the Constitution, it had been anticipated before the adoption of that document. Prior to 1789, state courts had already overturned legislative acts which conflicted with state constitutions. Moreover, many of the Founding Fathers expected the Supreme Court to assume this role in regard to the Constitution; Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, for example, had underlined the importance of judicial review in the Federalist Papers, which urged adoption of the Constitution.
Hamilton had written that through the practice of judicial review the Court ensured that the will of the whole people, as expressed in their Constitution, would be supreme over the will of a legislature, whose statutes might express only the temporary will of part of the people. And Madison had written that constitutional interpretation must be left to the reasoned judgment of independent judges, rather than to the tumult and conflict of the political process. If every constitutional question were to be decided by public political bargaining, Madison argued, the Constitution would be reduced to a battleground of competing factions, political passion and partisan spirit.
Despite this background the Court’s power of judicial review was not confirmed until 1803, when it was invoked by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison.
Several years ago, a journalism study group (sorry, no citation) determined that the United States no longer had enough reliable, accurate news service to sustain democracy. That is, we're about at the level of a medieval village where people believe in nonsense like certain neighbors are witches, god has caused the latest disaster, the king is all knowing and all powerful, and most everybody gets their "news" via gossip (aka "social media").
Time for my daily complaint about this place not having a thumbs up/down function.
Thumbs up.
(At least replies here appear below the comment and not at the bottom of 50 other comments. So there is that.)
👍👍
Whether or not the Electoral College and the Senate have existed since the Constitution was written, they are NOT democratic. The voices of the people are not equally applied in either institution.
Correct. Also, Kevin’s argument completely elides that their anti-democratic features are much more pronounced than they used to be, because of population sorting. When I was a kid it was unthinkable that someone could become president via the EC while losing the PV. It’s happened twice now in the past 25 years, and could happen again this year. The EC is the only reason Trump has a chance. I’m a big Kevin fan, but this post is Pollyannish in the extreme, and very disappointing.
Nobody thinks there's a realistic chance that Trump could possibly win the popular vote this year! In any other democracy in the world he'd be cruising to a jail cell.
+1
Would love to see Kevin's math on this. I don't see how you can declare the EC democratic when it is possible to lose the popular vote and still win the election. The Senate is even more ridiculous where states with less population than a midsize city still get 2 votes (and the DC and Puerto Rico get none).
Of course the Electoral College and the Senate are democratic. You are objecting to them not being purely democratic enough. Personally, I am all for abolishing the Electoral College. But would it make the US dramatically more democratic? No.
Since Drumpf (not to mention Bush II) would never have been president and would still be banging out spite tweets on a (almost certainly) Musk-free Twitter between cheating at golf and Big Mac binges, I'd say: Yes.
+1
The impact of the Electoral College has been to introduce a slight bias in elections which may favor one candidate over the other. It can have an impact only in very close elections. So in that sense, the impact on democracy is small.
However, the fact that Trump won the 2016 election has been so harmful, I get it that the Electoral College really needs to go. Yes, the Electoral College really hurt us in 2016.
Here'swhat worries me.
Last time, Trump tried to undo the results of the election after the fact, by attempting to prove that there was widespread fraud. That fraud did not exist. Even the most conservative of judges had no evidence on which to find in Trump's favor. Win for democracy.
But this time, it seems apparent that a good deal of the effort is going to be on election day itself, with intimidation and obstruction of polling places the priority. If it works, the onus will be on Democrats to show that voter suppression was (a) illegal and (b) influenced the outcome. And that is going to give conservative judges a lot of cover to rule in favor of Trump.
Rather than confirming the election results, we might be counting on the courts -- and specifically the Supreme Court -- to reverse them. How much confidence do you have under those circumstances?
+1
I came here to post something like this. I’m concerned about the intimidation of electoral workers.
Why no mention of Trump and MAGA threatening all perceived opponents with violence? We know that many Republicans are afraid to go against them not just for fear of primaries, but from fear of violence and harassment against themselves and their families. Trump incites the crazies to stalk and attack jurors, judges, law enforcement, journalists, lawyers, etc etc. Violence and threats are pretty antidemocratic.
+1
This is the best point regarding recent harm to democracy.
Yes. Already many election officials have left office due to harassment and threats.
In 2020 Donald Trump tried to forcibly steal an election he lost - He came dangerously close. Not the force part - I don't believe the Jan 6 insurrection could ever have succeeded. Basically a few officials in swing states kept their oaths and allowed the election to proceed normally. Those people faced massive threats and we basically got lucky. There is a world where that could have gone the other way, and we may yet get to live in that world.
The Electoral College is anti-democratic - A Democratic candidate needs to win by 3-4% overall in order to win because of the skew towards rural states.
The Senate is anti-democratic - Yes the Democrats currently control it, but it would require Herculean efforts and a lot of luck to keep it even if they win way more Senate vote counts overall.
In a 50-50 country, any small anti-democratic measure can easily tip the scales.
Ye Gods Kevin. This is you at your worst Pollyanna self.
I am an optimist too and there has been "liberal" progress on many
issues, but your first point trumps all the rest, so to speak:
"In 2020 Donald Trump tried to forcibly steal an election he lost.
This is true, and a substantial chunk of the Republican Party and Fox News eagerly helped him. That's about as anti-democratic as it gets. But also keep in mind that (a) they failed" ....
For now, Kevin, For now.
"Anyway, he'll need help from Congress for most of this. And he has to win a democratically held election first."
No he won't, and yes he will, but he won't.
I'm no constitutional expert but I don't think anything can stop him if he gets back in the Oval Office, which he won't.
I'm no constitutional expert but I don't think anything can stop him if he gets back in the Oval Office, which he won't.
There's a modest chance that, if Biden wins in November, he'll have a Senate majority (and he'll almost certainly have a House majority if he wins).
But if Trump wins, there's probably a 95% chance he'll have both chambers of Congress. If I'm advising Donnie, I tell him to order the Senate to create a filibuster carve-out for judicial reform bills, and then promptly increase the size of the Supreme Court to, say, nineteen judges. And then (obviously) appoint MAGA loons who will rubber stamp the MAGA agenda.
Then it really is game, set and match, autocracy uber alles. Far-fetched? Maybe, but the events of 2016-2021 would have been seen as the stuff of bad political thrillers to someone in, say, 2014.
Disagree with a whole of this:
- Al Gore and Hillary both lost the Electoral College but won the MAJORITY of the popular vote. Joe came within a hair's breath of doing the same, with a significant popular vote majority. All this within the last 20+years. Electoral College is absolutely undemocratic.
-The Senate is absolutely undemocratic since tiny states that have more cows than people get the same number of representatives as big states with 39 million people.
- SCOTUS now acts like politicians in robes, and has a dramatic impact on how this country is run.
- After how close we got to an actual coup in 2020, the attitude displayed here is baffling. What if that Orange fuckhead was successful in his fake electors scheme, or if the recalcitrant members of the board of elections in certain states held their ground and didn't certify the election results, or if the Georgia officials tried to find those 11,000 votes Trump needed, of if someone else was the VP and didn't certify the election in Congress on 1/6?
Yes. If the electoral college and senate misallocation aren't anti-democratic what are they. I'd love to see KD define his terms.
It is not a binary, undemocratic or democratic choice. It's a spectrum. I think what Kevin was saying was that it is less democratic than it could be but still mostly democratic. And I think he is right.
Just because the blowback from anti-democratic achievements of the right has been a political disaster (to some degree, I guess, but not enough of one to reverse the loss of rights) doesn't mean that they weren't successful. By definition, they have been enormously successful in rolling back democracy these past few decades.
This really comes off as an older white guy who has it pretty good thinking that things can't be all that bad for everybody else. Completely failing to neglect the conservative takeover of the courts for the express purpose of suppressing democracy has the appearance of this not occurring to you because their decisions haven't impacted you personally. Remember when they gutted the Voting Rights Act? That's just the second-easiest example, after the overturning of Roe, which was anti-democratic in ways beyond the simple fact that large majorities supported Roe. There are plenty more examples and they're not hard to find, but because Donald Trump (barely) failed in his coup attempt in January 2021 then democracy is F-I-N-E.
Sure. /s
By definition, they have been enormously successful in rolling back democracy these past few decades.
By definition? Really? They've had one main success: stealing the 2000 election.
I agree the right has had a fair number of policy wins. But that's not the same as "rolling back democracy."
You may not have noticed this, but Democrats have done very well three elections in a row, and currently hold both the White House and the Senate. That's a funny outcome for a democracy that's been "rolled back" by Republicans.
There are things I don't like about our constitutional system. I'd prefer we switch to the Westminster model. Barring that I'd like to see deep reform of the Supreme Court (I'd eliminate lifetime tenure, and require a super majority to strike down Congressional statutes).
But no, our democracy endures.
Dear Jasper
"a super majority to strike down Congressional statutes"
I've never seen this suggestion before....this may be more tenable than packing the Court...
I will have to think on this, but seems like a good and doable idea.
But, what is a super majority? ^-3 or 7-2? Curious as to people thoughts on this. Best Wishes, Traveller (I suppose I see the Supreme Court even more of a danger than Mr Trump)
I've never seen this suggestion before....this may be more tenable than packing the Court...I will have to think on this, but seems like a good and doable idea.
It would be in keeping with Marbury vs. Madison, which IIRC was a 2/3rds vote. So my proposal really isn't al that radical. It might not even require an amendment. I think in our system we realistically need some form of judicial review (it's possible to operate without it; UK doesn't have it; but I think our system would on balance be worse if we completely jettisoned it). But it's used too promiscuously, and it has been one of the forces turbocharging the politicization of our judiciary.
I would challenge "all the folks involved have been indicted in state and federal courts, some of them multiple times." If you change "all" to "a few of" you get an accurate statement.
The Supreme Court appears to be ready to cancel the Revolutionary War and install Trump as King, but that’s ok because first he has to win a democratically held election.
He has to win the electoral vote, which is not the same thing as a truly democratic election.
As quite a few commenters have already posted, it's not the past that concerns me it's what happens if Trump wins and worse what happens if the SCOTUS gives him blanket immunity.
Why would he need a anything from SCOTUS?
He will simply ignore them and that is it.
Once he replace the people in the administration with his acolytes, the only that can stop him is the army or actual rebellion.
This post doesn't really make any sense. The meaning of democracy appears to shift back and forth, often deviating far from any recognizeable definition of democracy.
Kevin may feel freer, richer and more liberal than ever....but that doesnt really have much to do with the state of democracy in the US.
The fact that we now often see power being wielded by people who have not received a majority of the vote seems critical to this analysis, as is the attempted overthrow of the democratically elected president, plus the continued massive support for those who tried to overthrow the government...but Kevin breezes past these with a quick 'so what?! look at my meaningless chart!'
There is no definition of Democracy that involves a 9 person super government that oversees all decisions by elected official and are appointed for life terms by people who have received a minority of the vote. This may be our method, but it is not democracy.
ugh...
Yeah. Life is good! 😂
Let’s all vote for trump and see what happens next.
And look, those wonderful lefty college students are doing their best to support good liberal causes like Hamas and Islam generally.
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Are you aware this post is dishonest, or are you just an idiot, only you can answer this question.
Why do you think this is Dishonest? It seems to be a direct quote from Reuters.(..and that Tic-Tok woman was assassinated in Baghdad today). I don't know, Best Wishes, Traveller
Can we declare war on SCOTUS for overturning roe v Wade and setting women’s rights back here?
Clearly that’s the liberal thing to do according to you.
But you’re an idiot so who cares what you think? Not me.
This has been today's chapter of "That thing you're worried about? It's not a big deal to me, Kevin Drum".
The Electoral College _is_ anti-democratic, or at least designed very deliberately by the founders to be counter-democratic. Remember how it's supposed to be made up of sober, rational pillars of communities in order to provide a stabilizing influence against the populist mob? This is middle-school-level civics.
The Senate _is_ anti-democratic, for basically the same reason, and again, Mr. Drum should be embarrassed for stating otherwise.
The Supreme Court is currently filled with hardcore reactionaries _because of a failure of democracy_. Since 1992, Democrats have won the popular vote in presidential elections 7 times and gotten 5 justices appointed to the Court. Republicans have won the popular vote once and gotten 5 justices appointed to the Court. This is what we call a systemic failure.
The Dobbs decision is a failure of democracy in that it was not a position supported by the majority of the population. The Republicans have gummed up Congress enough to have damaged the country's credit ratings and to have allowed unknown hundreds or thousands of Ukrainians to be killed. Donald Trump _will_ weaponize the government in ways that don't need Congressional action thanks to the aforementioned reactionary Supreme Court.
This is a contender for one of Kevin Drum's worst posts.
Right. The old vestiges of a bygone era of buggies and horses remain as brakes to the future of this Republic. Our technology would appear magic and our thoughts and culture would truly be alien to the Founders. Why do we grasp at fetters that we're meant to reign in power, when at the very least we have new ways to do it? And I'm positive every single one of the Founders would have stroked out at our police - they would have screamed that we were occupied. Nothing like our police existed then and although crime today would spin their heads around, they would suggest solutions not armies.
As for worst post, probably not. He just moderating...
imagine how quickly Trump would have been nailed if he were poor. That is what is wrong with our democracy. Justice isn't. blind when it comes to money.
Hard to see how we can even have a democracy if any man is above the law. The Supreme Court is about to tell us if any man is in fact above the law and therefore will tell us if we still have a democracy.
Help me out here, how isn't the Senate anti-democratic. One main feature of democracy is one-person-one-vote, the Senate completely violates this with its equal representation.
The EC could be democratic is it weren't for the two vote allotted for the Senate. If the House were expanded so that districts did contain at least approximately equal numbers of person, then the EC would be more democratic, but still not democratic. The EC would then be at best a middle man between a voting populace and the EC.
Hopefully, Kevin will explain his thinking. I see lots of commenters here are similarly perplexed.
It is not a binary choice, democratic or undemocratic. There can be less and more democratic. The Senate is mostly democratic in that each of the Senators is elected by direct popular vote.
Of course, democracy is not the only objective of our constitutional framework. Nor should it be. As you recall, they also feared pure democracy could lead to tyranny and included various checks that were not particularly democratic.
I've been reading Kevin for a long time, but if I'd just come across this blog and this was the first post I read, I'd conclude the writer simply had no clue, and not bother with it again.
Or, perhaps, was an economist, and judged well-being by overall standard of living.
Kevin, yesterday someone named Crissa told one other quite rational and polite commenter to "Fuck off" and then told another one (me) "Fuck you," among their about 23 comments about Teslas.
I guess there isn't a moderator other than you here. But this commenter should be banned. This kind of thing is obviously counterproductive and unacceptable for a comment stream at a blog like this.
😂. Crissa presents online as a very angry and bitter transgender person of some sort, but who can say for sure. This is in keeping with its shtick.
Justin's right. Prickly is the word. Poke with care.
Are you wringing your hands right now about this? Did they use…. BAD WORDS?!
Crissa is a fucking moron, but tbh you’re not far behind with this bullshit. Grow up/grow a pair/whatever other euphemism you need for acting like an adult.
Sure, it is accurate to say that all or most of the people involved in Jan 6 have been indicted. Hell some have even been convicted. But, the leader of the pack will now almost certainly not see a courtroom in any jurisdiction before the next election of which he is the GOP candidate.
If he and the GOP gets slaughtered in November, then I'd say democracy is doing just fine in this country. If it is close or, god forbid, he wins, then I'd say democracy will soon be dead in this country.
In other words, I'd say the right conclusion is that democracy in America is on a knifes edge.
My jaw dropped when KD blitely declares the electroral college and senate misallocation not anti-democratic.
Let's review the chef's kiss of anti-democracy:
Obama is president, Scalia dies, and the only reason Garland doesn't go through is our, say it now together, anti-democratic method of electing Senators. McConnell piously declares it is up to the people to speak.
The people speak and choose Hillary Clinton by several million. 538 people vote otherwise and we get Trump, then Gorsuch. Muah! (Followed by Kavanaugh and Barrett.)
Really, KD, what is this democracy of which you speak? What's that you say? We could always amend the constitution? Apparently you forget two senators per state is unamendable. I remember another post when you said we should just stop talking about constitutional amendments, they ain't gonna happen. You're right on that, they ain't. Because our constitution has a, wait for it, anti-democratic amendment process.
But the constutution itself was democratically formed, you counter. Yeah, by the standards of 1789 it was, white men of property, different time. Very progressive for the time, 3/5 clause and all. Yet we, (women, non-whites, the unpropertied included) remain bound to their unamendable decision. Naively I respond that being bound by our ancestors seems not so democratic.
Gore won, so did Hillary. 538 people voted otherwise and we got Bush and Trump. If Biden wins this fall and 538 people vote otherwise will you still say the electoral college isn't anti-democratic? How many times would it take?
In the meantime crazy-ass Supreme Court judges put in by vote-losing presidents excise the good parts of the constitution. Section 3 of the 14th amendment: erased. President gets immunity for ordering a rival assassinated? Hold on while I stroke my chin, hard case, official act.
Well if Trump wins I hope when he puts us up against the wall we are next to each other so I can say I told you so
You mean when Trump loses the popular vote but 'wins' anyway?
And yet we have guns all over, abortion is increasingly illegal, and rich people pay very little in taxes, all things which democracy would reject. Not saying America isn't a pretty good place nevertheless, but that's mostly because Republicans frequently make such a mess of things that despite the non-democratic parts of our system, the other party does, every few decades, get a solid chance to change a few things. Roosevelt and Obama being the key examples.
Others here have gone into detail, so I'll just content myself by noting that, as is the case all too often with Kevin, this post is intentionally contrarian, utterly simplistic, risibly Pollyanna-ish, and incredibly wrong.
There's one little original sin of American democracy that I note didn't come up in this summary.
Because when the American democracy was founded, Black people's rights not a part of it. Across half the country, people were owned as if property. This despicable state of affairs continued until the Civil War, and lingered afterward.
And state politics are still driven by the aftermath of the war. Southerners despised the Republican party: General Longstreet supported Black citizenship after the war and became a Republican, and as a result he has a grand total of one monument in his hometown and one at Gettysburg. Into the 1950s and 60s, Black people were not safe in white towns in the South, and their ability to vote was questionable at best. Even in border states, parts of northern states, and states that did not exist in 1865, things varied pretty wildly.
Cue the Civil Rights movement. LBJ changed the nation and made it more democratic at the cost of the South: Southern Democrats took a while to completely abandon the party, but by the 1990s the conversion was basically complete and the South was solid Republican.
Make no mistake: the Republican party now advocates stripping away the people's rights, whether it's by criminalizing medical procedures and jailing librarians for having the "wrong" books, or by expelling immigrants defined in a broad way (say, sending a four-year old raised in the US "back" to a country he never set foot in). And it would be naive to think that, when Trump talks about deporting people, he's thinking about people like his wife.
We're not talking the fringe candidates on the right: it isn't some populist who can't get votes who is talking about doing such things. That our democratic institutions mostly prevented Trump from implementing and maintaining openly racist policies in his first term does not guarantee that they will continue to do so.
There's a certain amount of cluelessness that goes along with a man who sees "liberal" identification going up on a chart and declares things are just peachy, when that man has no risk of dying because he got pregnant and lived in a state where doctors can't conduct a medical procedure until he's almost dead. Maybe you don't know anyone who Donald Trump's friends and advisors would like to kick out of the country, but I do. There's a large number of our friends and neighbors in this country who only recently received their full democratic rights, within living memory, and to think those rights are guaranteed now is to think that social progress is inevitable. That's the comforting thinking of someone whose rights won't be rolled back if he's wrong.
Kevin acknowledges Dobbs was bad but, hey, many legal experts thought Roe was bad too. Really? As a woman, and a woman who once needed an abortion, I find this blithe dismissal offensive. Dobbs put women’s lives at risk. All women of childbearing age are second-class citizens now. That’s not undemocratic? Are you kidding me? What if the court put strict limits on male health care? What if your life was deemed less important than cancer cells? This is an appalling viewpoint, Kevin. Thoughtless and appalling.
The electoral college was designed to empower southern white landholding voters
Madison admitted this
“There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.”
but to reactionary centrist Drum, it is not "anti democratic" cause reasons...
You're absolutely correct about the origin of the Electoral College. But you're leaving out a very important detail: EC votes are based on total congressional representation, which, at the time was directly tied to the 3/5ths formula.
This last part is obviously no longer operative. And so good liberal micro states like Vermont and Hawaii have their voices empowered just as much as bad conservative ones like Wyoming and South Dakota.
I think our Madisonian polity is highly suboptimal compared to the parliamentary systems operated by nearly all other rich democracies. But context is important. There's no binary "democracy" and "non-democracy" dynamic observable here. Just varying degrees of optimality/sub-optimality.
That VT also is disproportionately represented is not a argument for the EC.
That VT also is disproportionately represented is not a argument for the EC.
Correct. But I'm not making an argument in favor of the Electoral College. If it were up to me we wouldn't just jettison the EC, but the presidential system itself in favor of a parliamentary constiution.
Rather, I am making the argument that the EC is not ipso facto the attribute of a non-democracy. All democracies operate curbs on purist majoritarianism.