A reader recently sent me a link to an article from Governing with a provocative title suggesting that the current crisis with democracy should be blamed on the states. The article pointed to a variety of problems that this blog and many others have frequently addressed, including the Electoral College, gerrymandering and vote suppression, and the structure of the Senate.
Despite the article’s title, the problems identified in the article can’t fairly be attributed to the states, although some of them (gerrymandering and vote suppression, certainly) are activities conducted by the states. The very real problems the article enumerates–and a couple it doesn’t–are more properly designated as structural.
One of the problems with a population that is largely civically-ignorant is the widespread belief that we just need to elect the “right” people who support the “right” policies, and longstanding issues will be resolved. Very few Americans recognize the structural roots of our dysfunctions, and consequently, there are few, if any, efforts to address them.
The linked article identifies several of these structural impediments to a genuinely democratic system–defined as a system truly reflecting the will of the voting populace. I’m well aware that there are a number of scholars and pundits who are unenthusiastic, to say the least, about such a system; they remind us that the Founders were leery of “the people” and created impediments to what they characterized as mass prejudices and popular passions. (Indeed, the Bill of Rights is correctly identified as a counter-majoritarian document.) Most Americans today, however, give at least lip service to the notion that a democratic system, in which elected officials act in ways that reflect the expressed will of the majority, is the ideal.
We don’t currently have such a system, and as the linked article reminds us, the constitutional prerogatives of the states in our federalist system are largely to blame.
Consider all the ways states serve to frustrate the will of the people. First, the Electoral College, which votes state by state, has already installed five presidents whom the voters had rejected nationwide. The many additional near misses make frequent future recurrences a statistical certainty.
The U.S. Senate is even more counter-majoritarian. As of 2023, a majority of the U.S. population is clustered in states that together get only 18 of the 100 senators. The minority get the other 82.
We can blame the Founders for the Electoral College, but the clustering of the population is a more recent demographic reality–and even more damaging. That said, even among the Founders there were those who failed to understand why their “states’ rights” colleagues insisted on the equality of states, which were, after all, artificial creations, rather than the equality of the people who lived in them. As the article reminds us, Federalists like James Madison were bitterly opposed to what they saw as a grossly undemocratic Senate. “Ultimately, however, they accepted the proffered compromise (equally populated House districts, plus states as Senate districts), but only as an unavoidable concession to get the required nine state ratifications.”
One result of this empowerment of states rather than people has been a gradual shift of voting power to rural inhabitants at the expense of urban Americans. (One study found that a rural vote counts one and a third compared to a vote cast by a city dweller.)
As the article reminds us, states have used their prerogatives to suppress votes and–in states that allow initiatives–to overrule the results of popular votes. (In Indiana, which lacks a referendum or initiative, no rational observer would suggest that majority members of our legislature even try to reflect the will of the people.)
Making matters worse, in the U.S., changing structural defects is incredibly difficult. That’s why the effort to eliminate the Electoral College is through an interstate compact rather than a Constitutional amendment. As the article reminds us, the U.S. Constitution has been described as the hardest in the world to amend.
It requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress, followed by ratification by three-quarters of the state legislatures (or a constitutional convention process that has never been used).
Winning a two-thirds vote in the already counter-majoritarian Senate is hard enough, but ratification by the states can be harder still. Only recently, states that represented just 22 percent of the U.S. population were able to block the Equal Rights Amendment, against the wishes of states representing the other 78 percent.
If and when we emerge from our current descent into fascism and autocracy, we need to address the structural issues that have facilitated that descent–including a thorough revamping of the Supreme Court.
In my little corner of Hell, the people are fighting against alternative energy for the most ridiculous reasons imaginable, while wanting the county to bring in large data centers for jobs. Data centers don’t create jobs because they are full of machines, but they do require excessive water and electricity. Higher demand means higher prices. Their fears about solar energy can be easily dispelled with a 2-minute internet search. They are too lazy and too ignorant to verify the information for themselves.
When I use the word “oligarchy,” their eyes glaze over. The majority have no clue what it means, even though we are clearly ruled by an oligarchy that has chosen a deranged imbecile to rule over us. What does that tell you about the oligarchs?
I read an article this week about Leonard Leo, the billionaire who helped bring us the conservative Supreme Court. He’s now spending his wealth destroying public schools. The Heritage Foundation’s goal is to entirely eliminate public schools. One of their options is to provide parents with a credit, similar to a debit card, that allows them to purchase educational materials and programs for their children. One of the options is homeschooling. Can you imagine the type of parents who demand homeschooling to keep their kids away from minorities and “woke teachers?” What does that say about the intelligence (or lack thereof) of our future students?
We may be the only country in the world racing to lower its standards. It’s why China is surpassing us and will likely continue to do so in the future.
p.s. If anyone watched a snippet of Pam Bondi’s disdain for democracy during the Oversight Committee, you would get confirmation that Trump’s insiders know there will not be an election in ’26 and ’28.
This newsletter clearly explains why the root of the problems in our government do not change, no matter which party wins in any election.
TS, I have to agree with your assessment regarding the coming elections, as i have noted before.
“Oligarchy?’ Too many syllables. Education about the real world? Too many hard concepts to learn.
Civil ignorance/ Rampant.
Teach critical thinking? No longer….
We all know too much.
By “we all,” I mean collectively. Many struggle with knowledge overload from just what is required for day-to-day living. Reading books to continue learning throughout life has been replaced by watching TV or playing with our phones, resulting in a diet of canned entertainment full of commercials. We can even consume today without ever looking up.
We deserve what we did to the country. We did not avoid it. Perhaps if we had spent more time outside talking to neighbors writ large, we would have noticed what was happening to us, but we didn’t. We squeezed in more entertainment instead.
The damage from our inattention to each other has been done. The only question now is how we recover into a functional society, not what was but what is sustainable.
As long as we have a system of education that does not address civics, we will have an electorate who have a right to vote but no idea what the elected offices require and how officeholders are empowered by the rule of law.
The Indiana Constitution links education and informed voters as the foundation of the state and its governance.
https://www.in.gov/history/about-indiana-history-and-trivia/explore-indiana-history-by-topic/indiana-documents-leading-to-statehood/constitution-of-1851/article-8-education/
The original language has been changed by legislation over time as its foundations have been eroded by those who use wealth and lust for power along with entitlement to keep the polity as ignorant and powerless as possible.
Knowledge is power. That power is what those who are currently in power fear the most. Teaching 6th graders about civics is, in MHO, throwing pearls before swine. Too much time passes before that knowledge/power has any relevance to them.
The time to provide that knowledge and its power is when those who reach their majority will have a tool and the understanding of its use.
Too often, voting becomes a popularity contest or mindless conformity to cultural norms, without thought or clear understanding of what is at stake, performance at best.
Until people are confronted with direct consequences, positive or negative, they almost never understand what it means to be an informed voter. In Indiana, that means that the number of actual voters ranks at the bottom almost every election cycle. As a result, we get the super-majority in power for two decades. Elitist and arrogant, they claim to have superior abilities to rule while they rob the voters of consent and money.
The states are smaller by population, thus easier to manipulate than the country as a whole. It is what we are seeing as dump seeks complete authority to rule by attacking states individually. His handlers know that it would be much harder to attack the whole rather than its “weakest” (by their definition) parts.
RESIST.
JD,
If you’ve read the game plan of Trump & Miller, they want to initiate the ancient Insurrection Act due to the rebelling populace, whom they call “Antifa.” This is why they are going after blue cities in blue states. Sending in ICE and the National Guard will cause a rebellion or “RESISTance” by the people living in those communities.
Those of us showing up on October 18th for NoKings, are we playing right into their hands by showing the right-wingers that Antifa is trying to fight against the government? How will Fox News describe the NoKings protests?
As of yesterday, there are nearly 2,500 groups registered to protest across the country on October 18th.
If we change our history books to eliminate any mention of the wrongs that we have done, like slavery, or the Trail of Tears, how can we ever teach the young people about things like civic duties, rights, and responsibilities? We have a long road ahead just to counter what’s happened in the last ten years.
Now many red states are requiring the Prager videos be played for the kids. I would like to suggest that, if a teacher is required to play that junk they might follow it up with an episode of “Adam Ruins Everything.”. I think you can find an episode that counters everything in the Prager videos.
As I understand it modern Ireland got rid of gerrymandering to their benefit so maybe we should do the same. I am not educated on the electoral college but I hear a lot of people don’t like it so maybe it should go too. But its hard to get anything done policywise when their are so many “adversarial” people in government. I am frustrated with both parties and I believe a lot of people feel that way as if it truly is a fight between the have and have nots. So not even specifically a Democratic verses a Republican problem.