Donald Trump, who said in Pennsylvania on Sunday that he regrets leaving the White House in 2021, is ending the 2024 campaign the way he began it – dishing out a stew of violent, disparaging rhetoric and repeated warnings that he will not accept defeat if it comes.
That in no way makes it perfectly fine. It’s an undemocratic kluge when trying to get individual states that were acting as independent entities to sign on. The founders weren’t prophetic visionaries handing down the perfect democracy. They were horse trading for practical goals and dealing with the limitations stemming from literal horses being used to carry messages.
There’s a reason when we regime-change we don’t install clones of our own system.
There’s no reason to treat the US as a federation of states anymore, at least at the federal level. They’re not independent entities and haven’t been for a long time. There are certainly more differences in needs and beliefs within California than between North and South Dakota. That doesn’t mean states need to be abolished, just that they don’t have an independent nature in the federal government that justifies them having an equal say when deciding country-wide matters.
Nothing “makes sense” about giving each state equal representation, no more than expecting that state legislatures should be made up from two representatives from each town. Barely any other democracies work like this and there’s nothing unique to the US that demands a different system, it’s just the first and has some sacrifices for expediency that should have been ironed out long ago, except the people that the bug empowers value their power over democratic ideals and that power enables them to maintain it.
There’s other reasons for bicameral legislatures than giving unequal entities equal power, most of which are seen in the differences between the Senate and the House already. Senators are elected by larger constituencies, meaning they’re balancing issues from must larger areas and usually less extreme, they have longer terms giving them some resistance to quick changes in political opinion, and the split means certain tasks can be assigned to the different bodies based on whether it should be quickly reactive to changes or not.
That in no way makes it perfectly fine. It’s an undemocratic kluge when trying to get individual states that were acting as independent entities to sign on. The founders weren’t prophetic visionaries handing down the perfect democracy. They were horse trading for practical goals and dealing with the limitations stemming from literal horses being used to carry messages.
There’s a reason when we regime-change we don’t install clones of our own system.
see my edit
There’s no reason to treat the US as a federation of states anymore, at least at the federal level. They’re not independent entities and haven’t been for a long time. There are certainly more differences in needs and beliefs within California than between North and South Dakota. That doesn’t mean states need to be abolished, just that they don’t have an independent nature in the federal government that justifies them having an equal say when deciding country-wide matters.
Nothing “makes sense” about giving each state equal representation, no more than expecting that state legislatures should be made up from two representatives from each town. Barely any other democracies work like this and there’s nothing unique to the US that demands a different system, it’s just the first and has some sacrifices for expediency that should have been ironed out long ago, except the people that the bug empowers value their power over democratic ideals and that power enables them to maintain it.
There’s other reasons for bicameral legislatures than giving unequal entities equal power, most of which are seen in the differences between the Senate and the House already. Senators are elected by larger constituencies, meaning they’re balancing issues from must larger areas and usually less extreme, they have longer terms giving them some resistance to quick changes in political opinion, and the split means certain tasks can be assigned to the different bodies based on whether it should be quickly reactive to changes or not.