Do I need something to say more than others? Doesn't everyone deserve something to say too?
Making this about white people is stupid because it has nothing to do with the reason the Electoral College is here in the first place.
God forbid your 100% monopoly be reduced to 98.2. I do have to appreciate the honesty though, he's saying what the entire GOP is thinking.
“All the small states, like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wyoming, Montana, Rhode Island, will all be–you’ll never see a presidential candidate again, you’ll never see anybody at the national stage come to our state. We’re gonna be forgotten people,” he said.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, zero visits were made to Vermont, Wyoming, Montana, and Rhode Island. Maine had 3 and New Hampshire had 21.
Equality is oppression to the bigoted.
Oh, gee, and thats any different than potus hopefuls only campaigning in swing states?
Fuck off ya racist cumstain.
Do you want some cheese with that whine, racist?
The electoral college needs reform, at the very least because its not accurately representing either urban nor rural Americans in a healthy manner. I support the idea but it clearly needs to be updated and fixed.
He said the thing you're not supposed to say
There's already one right now, working on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
And recently Colorado is seemly becoming newest state to supporting the agreement, judging the both state levels got this passed and with support from the Governor will signing it. Seen in this the Hill article
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/431425-colorado-governor-will-sign-bill-aimed-at-bypassing-electoral-college
I'm pretty sure he doesn't mean us poor white democrats, nah, they throw us in with the Blacks and Spanish.
fuck you, everyone has a voice and everyone has a right to be heard. Poor, Rich, White or Black.
You're not supposed to say it because it's wrong and had very weird implications.
now this guy needs a gag order
The euphemism is dying
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dBJIkp7qIg&list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ&index=7
"Fly-over" states already have representation in the House and Senate. If a person is supposed to represent the nation as a whole, then no one state's vote should count more than another. Simple as that.
"people" as in your people. Its beyond insane how much rural interests dominate this country when they represent the smallest fraction of the actual voters
Considering how much they hate cities already, the cities getting equal representation might as well spark insurrection
I argued against this in the other EC thread though. While I get people are mad about Trump's upset election, there's nothing really insane about it. It's a republican check on 'the people', who are inherently sectarian and self-serving, themselves. The point of a liberal republic is to reconcile the many different parts of a free society that 'the people' are actually broken down into so as to allow the peaceful transfer of power, and the electoral college permits exactly that. Otherwise, why should your 50+1 dominate theirs if their 50+1 yields more freedom for them? This is why a large and complex society does not deserve a simple solution like abolition of the EC.
One flaw about in this debate is that opponents of the EC work to justify the inherent 'for us to be equal, we must be unequal' zero-sum nature of proportional representation after leveling that same accusation against the EC. It's confusing since these same opponents seem completely unaware that what allowed Trump to collapse the Blue Wall was a metropolitan neoliberal from a political dynasty ignoring that area in favor of the 'dynamic, forward-looking places', causing a lower turnout and an Obama-Trump voter effect concentrated in that area, despite the fact Trump performed the same or slightly worse than Romney. Even more confusing is the fact that the left upholds civil rights and the 14th amendment its based on as a republican check on the people, which it is, yet will then turn around and damn the EC if it denies them state power.
But I guess that so long as we cloak in the language of democracy the upsetting of balances within the country and incentivizing the same behavior that caused 2016, this is okay. The lesson we should be taking away is that the state, least of all central government, cannot be reformed to be some popular organ that represents all equally and justly. The far-left realizes this to its credit.
It's a republican check on jack shit. Fucking mind-blowing that you'd seriously believe that dictatorship from the minority is in any way preferable to the majority holding power. The EC doesn't solve any problem whatsoever, it creates them. Heck, it can't even do the one thing it's supposed to do, which is preventing a demagogue from attaining power.
WRT to the rural/city thing, I'm of a mind that everyone's voice is equal in national matters but people from the hills shouldn't be able to dictate way of life to city folks or vice versa.
My town is a perfect little microcosm of this. Here's an example. First, understand that I live in a town that, until recently, was very rural. Over the past 10 or 20 years, it has been gentrifying hard as city people wanting "quieter country life" move out here into fresh suburban subdivisions. This has resulted in a radical shift in the town's population - the majority are now city slickers with no concept of rural life.
Well, despite this, we still have a lot of farmers who keep animals - horses, pigs, chickens, etc. - inside of what are technically city limits despite not having anyone around them for miles.
In the suburbs, some people were keeping chickens in their backyards. This annoyed other suburbanites and resulted in a vote to ban the keeping of livestock inside of city limits. Obviously this dramatically affects the rural people here - who are no longer allowed to keep their livestock, despite living on large, hundreds of acres properties. It required virtually no effort from the suburban people who far outnumber the rural people to rectify the annoying chicken problem next door to them, and they didn't realize or didn't care about the effects it'd have on people further out, because they have never been in those people's position and had no real way of sympathizing.
Now a lot of those farm/ranch properties have been sold off and are being bulldozed and turned into more subdivisions. Go figure.
I realize this is kind of a tangent but I wanted to share this perspective since it came up in here.
That's why you divide the country into small, more specific districts where people share similar issues and aspirations, and give those districts sufficient political power to rule on matters that solely concern them.
That's still not an argument to give all the power to a representative that only a minority supports. In your example, giving power to the rural minority over the urban majority is even worse than the opposite.
I agree, that's why I led in by first saying rural people shouldn't be able to dictate to city people.
Right, bad reading on my part.
Do you think rule by a select, elite group of politicians who aren't reflective of the country as a whole is a good thing?
Not at all, but I also think the idea that institutions not navigable by the average person just need to be reformed by a popular movement to be more democratic is a fantasy. I would also say this renewed disdain for the more marginal, less developed parts of the country that elected Trump is a natural outcome of that belief and also the left wing equivalent of a common criticism of conservatives: that they waste time chauvinistically attacking parts of the people as the obstruction to freedom or democracy rather than the elite and porky.
It's the same principle of advocating for your own dispossession. The average person doesn't gain any more power over government with the EC gone, a section of politicians who come from the heights of the country do. At the same time, that reform forces divisions within the people because there is unequal stake in their leadership, yet all are equally ruled by it.
What you get is not a healthy democracy, but more social imbalances (in this case vulgarly trampling over the city-countryside divide) that force sectarianism, division, and polarization. Anything popular, mass, and directly democratic past a local level is exponentially more prone to that, and you haven't actually reduced the gap between a governor and the governed. You've just forced the latter to eat each other.
I don't think you can have democracy without decentralization.
Don't bother trying to improve society, because it's just too hard.~Tempcon 2019
Literally gibberish. The will of the majority is what the majority of voters decide, end of. Don't try to drown your lack of argument in irrelevant nonsense.
LMAO, still have that old hate-boner against France, don't we? It's funny that you're so predictable, I can simply copy+paste previous responses of mine:
Please excuse me for a moment while I go cry my eyes out about our history of ~socialism~ which brought me 35h weeks, paid leave, a high enough minimum wage to survive, legal union protection, strict laws that protect me from abusive firings, public retirement funds, cheap education and a functional healthcare system that doesn't break my bank whenever I catch a cold.
Boy oh boy, do I wish I grew up in some US right-to-work state instead, where I could get laid off if I so much as refused to suck my boss's dick, where I'd have to work several jobs to be able to feed my family, where I wouldn't have been able to afford quality higher education, where I'd have to keep working until I keel over because I wouldn't be able to save for retirement since I'd live paycheck to paycheck, where I'd have to brush off various health issues instead of getting them checked out, all while being told I deserve the situation I'm in because my countrymen convinced themselves that anybody can make it big as long as they work hard, and that conversely, if you're poor then it's your own damn fault for being lazy.
Your asinine interpretation of democracy and your stupid insistance that tyranny of the minority is what it should strive to be is entirely foreign to us French nationals, and thank god for that. I'm glad that our history of syndicalism, anarchism, and the popular front brought us progressive and life-changing policies, and that as a result we aren't stuck in the past like you are, defending an archaic system that has been obsolete since the invention of the telegraph.
Maybe you should try calling into question your country's own flaws before flailing about and making wild, irrelevant statements about countries you evidently know jack shit about.
Oh! You mean like they currently do by solely campaigning in swing states, which are the only states that matter in a presidential election thanks to, you guessed it, the electoral college? How fucking ironic...
You obviously have no fucking clue what you're talking about. Inform yourself about the nature of the EC, how it functions, and the numerous flaws and side-effects that accompany it before you try to appear smart while spouting nonsense.
The point was the will of the majority does not exist because it varies so wildly across time and by issue. This is because 'the people' do not exist as a cohesive political force beyond a certain level of scale, they are broken down into finer competing interest groups because we live in a complex society in a complex world. Your idea of the people is necessarily based on such divisions, excluding both the rich and the rural, in a testament to the fact that every conception of the people to date has been built on the exclusion of others whether reactionary or foreign.
You don't need to look any further than the sectarianism of the far-left and far-right, or vulgar popular/mass movements of left or right variety, as proof of this fact. Any ideologue or politician claiming to either represent the people or create a more transparent government for all is selling you bullshit that primarily enriches themselves and their friends. Government is flawed and incapable of representing all equally, it can only manage society and, if it is liberal, operate on a compromise of its parts.
One of those is the EC, which has been key to enfranchising the weaker parts of our large union because liberal government has the duty of protecting the marginal, small, and individual from the dead weight of the large, mass, and often irrational. It must balance the threats of both public and private tyranny to freedom. If at any point that government fails this balance and its rule is at the disproportionate expense of the ability of some to self-govern, then there is a serious problem.
People like you like to dress this up imbalance as ackchually a good thing because [insert corrective ideological crap here]. The reality is liberty and equality exist in a balance because beyond a certain point they contradict each other.
I make fun of you cheerleading the left in other countries because your ideas are ironically parochial since they were never going to be the basis for a democratic international order, which is why the 20th century saw you fall into our shadow as you faltered in the era of world wars, decolonization, etc. Ever since large states began to grow with modern times and alter the balance, whether it's the US, Germany, or Russia, France has declined in relevance.
That place on the margins has, like the Nordic countries, let you experiment with ideas that don't work for world powers since it hinders their competitiveness. America could never practice dirgisme/gaullism, for example. France is not a model that could be exported, which is good since you've gone through more republics than the socialists have gone through internationals.
Along the way you have touched on the left and right in ways we have not because at root your revolution was quite a bit more radical than ours. That popular spin on liberalism not seen as much in the Anglosphere led to immediate excesses and future political traditions that allowed the far-left and far-right to take root. I am not at all surprised that you birthed the first fascist party, had by far one of the largest communist parties in the west after WW2, and accordingly have Melenchon ahead of the socialists and Le Pen ahead of the republicans.
For the other things:
You know as well as I do that socialism is not minimum wage and that the right is more than capable of welfarism and state intervention. The european right is part of the reason that part of the world is more 'socialist' than us. Also, proportional representation is not some just alternative for all. You are trading the fight over swing states for the fight over who can best organize and turn out their populous safe states, which means tailoring your policies to those areas. At the end of the day, national elections never actually involve catering to the whole of the nation.
I mean, sure, if the victory condition for the electoral college is that it allows the person who lost the popular vote to win an election because they focused on Special Voter Jurisdictions where people matter more or something then yes it did succeed.
If the victory condition is for the American head of state to be elected by a representative crosssection of America then I'm sorry, no, it did not succeed. It failed dramatically in fact because the person who won has done little to nothing to effect the recovery of those states, without even taking into consideration monumentally embarassing failures like the Carrier "deal".
My dude, you are actively supporting an electoral system that gives some people disproportionate voting power over another. The idea that the electoral college as it exists today is less representative than one person, one vote, or a modified electoral college system that is more fairly representative is actually insane.
Sure it's unrealistic to expect every single presidential candidate to visit every part of every state in the union looking for votes but the system you are supporting actively encourages candidates to go after some states while leaving others behind because they don't feel like they can "flip" them from diehard blue or red. There is no question about who benefits under either system (again, putting aside the fact that we don't necessarily have to abolish the EC); everyone benefits in a direct popular vote because everyones voice holds the same power, while under the EC some people have special voting privileges. I guess if you wanted to get more abstract you could say the Republicans benefit too; of the five presidents who won the election but lost the popular vote, four were Republican.
Which gets to the crux of the point: If you think we need an electoral college because it lets Republicans win and because you think some Americans voices should matter than others, that rural Americans are a higher class of citizen than coastal ones, then sure the electoral college is a fine system, and I can see why someone like you would support it. But if you want the president of the United States to be elected fairly, by a truly representative sample of the citizenry, there is no reason not to drop it, either for direct vote or a more proportional hybrid.
The EC by design will prevent a tyrant from gaining power through a minority.
The problem is that the EC has not been working as designed for over a century, as its population distribution has been frozen in time when it was supposed to react and transform according to the census.
Unfreeze the EC so it can adjust to the times or abolish it and replace it with a 21st-century solution instead of clinging to a 19th-century system that's been stagnating since the dawn of the 20th.
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