Are rural voters the "real" voters? Wisconsin Republicans seem to think so

[Raidyr]

Getting rid of the electoral college would be a net gain in terms of democracy and equality. It seems more equal to give flyover states disproprotionate representation but it's explicitly undemocratic.

[.𓃉𓁿𓂎𓁿𓃉.]

nothing would stop them from conducting trade with each other. iowans export their corn across the country, but they don't have all the same laws or representation as new jersey. new jersey is an example of a place where cultural and legislative differences are apparent despite proximity to and economic subordinance to NYC. they both have different laws and different representation that (optimally) better suit their people, despite many people living in new jersey and working in NYC. someone from that area could be more informative on the outlook of that particular situation, whether it truly works or if some greater parity in laws would be better for the populace of that area.
people working across state lines is not uncommon, and trade between states is a backbone of this nation. rural and urban areas having different governments does not preclude them from interacting with each other. it would give these areas greater capacity for self-determination and likely more accurate representation for the needs and wants of these areas. state governments have passed bans on cities passing their own sanctuary laws, state governments have passed restrictive firearms laws geared exclusively for urban areas. regardless of where you stand on these issues, i don't think it is right that this happens.
it all depends on the context. some places wouldn't make sense if they were more legally separate entities, others are more fuzzy and would require more input, others still are clear as day. anyone who has lived in washington for a period of time knows that the place gets rural quickly the farther from the puget sound you get and it stays that way until the borders, eastern washington is literally on the other side of mountains from the western side and they're almost diametrically opposed to each other, in both geography and politics. in many ways there's more difference between these two sides than there are between many neighboring states. there might be less people on the eastern side of the state, but they're still people, ones who live lives different from those on the western side. their contexts are different, people's upbringings are different, and their cultural attitudes are different. i don't think either side would know what is really best for the other, and i don't think they should be able to dictate what the other should do.

the power imbalance is a problem inherent with how wealth is used in this country. wealth being such a major factor in the political arena is a primary source of tension in this country and we should be working to erase that issue as best we can. but hey, if a bunch of rich people living in the hamptons decide to cut away from new york, form their own state, and drop state tax rates to the floor, may as well let them do that so long as they accept they won't be receiving any infrastructure support from new york.i'm mostly joking
the difference between the rich and the poor is a more complex social arrangement then that between the rural and the urban. the problems that arise between them require being addressed in other ways. i sometimes dream of a 100% tax on income over $500k but that's more a gut feeling than anything

[zukriuchen]

again the rich and poor argument is only one example, consider it with white and black, religious and non-religious, or men and women. i don't mean to give increasingly ridiculous examples to the point of abstracting the argument, i just want to gauge why all the other societal divides get no mention, why urban and rural is clearer than rich and poor even though the latter is way more measurable, for instance.
my point is not that separating these governments would preclude them from trading - my point was that just like people with different economic backgrounds are interconnected, so are regions - however: if you were to divide a city's government up by wealth, nothing would stop a poor neighborhood from interacting and trading with the rich one, either. this is a third criteria filled on top of culture and voting intention. i find it that you have to single out "rich and poor" as an exception because the main argument does not account for why divisions other than urban and rural can't be justified the same way.

you have plenty of strong points, but i think it's best if you look towards the fact that the US already has districts and separate representation for people who live in different areas. yet this system, based on the very same idea of self-determination, is consistently used to decrease voters' political agency. do you get the contradiction?

gerrymandering exploits dividing lines that supposedly make it easier for citizens to choose the people who represent them, turns the system on its head, and instead makes it easier for the politicians to pick and choose their voters. does your proposal lessen this problem, or is the danger of exploitation even greater when you strengthen said dividing lines, and isolate power to now more easily controllable regions?

first we deal with finding reliable oversight, so the regional delineations aren't skewed in favor of powerful actors. that's one of, if not the, main enemies of accurate representation. while i'm sure good oversight is a part of your plan, it still seems like the main idea is that increasing the power of individual districts inherently increases their power of self-determination, and i think that's patently false. moreover i think the cultural justification - more specifically, the idea that rural and urban are two neatly defined camps - is not very strong.

[.𓃉𓁿𓂎𓁿𓃉.]

part of why i haven't mentioned those is because the thread's topic is related to the differences between urban voters and rural voters. they're more complex social divides, and issues that arise from them require different, likely deeper solutions. further atomization along those lines might lead to more accurate representation, but it seems like it would be more impractical to implement. while we have numbers for the rich and the poor, having different governing bodies for each class wouldn't help, at least I do not believe it would. at least in my state, with rural and urban, there's a point where you know you're in the sticks. you could probably draw a line where the majority of votes flip from democrat to republican.
i'm a proponent of localism, focusing more on the politics of your immediate surroundings and the people within than those national and global. perhaps this is a fantasy in an increasingly globalized world, but i believe that people would be happier if given greater autonomy on a smaller scale with people putting a greater focus in their local community.

why does the argument necessarily need to address those other divides? they have different contexts and would require different ways of addressing. there are no one-size-fits-all solutions, but a series of solutions that build up to a better world. i do think that looking at the differences between rural and urban is more important than most people seem to give it credit for, but it isn't necessarily the most pressing concern at the moment
gerrymandering is antithetical to my ideals. look at this.

https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/130/763b1f78-cc06-4cdb-93a1-dcd04b76bf4f/image.png

these are not communities, these are crafted exclusively for federal voting power. it does not represent the will of the people so much as it demonstrates the abilities of congressional staffers to minmax votes. i fully agree this is one of the most destructive forces to our democracy. more sensible districts that take into account the communities within the state is a necessary first step. i also think that such communities should have greater capacity for self-determination without fear of retribution from state government. government should be more focused on serving the needs of their people than wrestling for control. too much of the game is about federal and state rights, give me county and city rights.

absolutely agree with more reliable oversight, as i said gerrymandering represents nobody. individual districts shouldn't get more voting power on a federal or state level, but have more power to enact policy on the local level. some places do have a clear delineation between what could be considered urban and what could be considered rural. perhaps i am biased in my own experiences in Washington, where there isn't the same level of suburban sprawl that you can find in other parts of the country. you get 10 or 20 miles away from the puget sound and you hit hard rural territory, and as i said previously things pretty much stay that way for the rest of the state. i don't think it is fair that this portion of the state can dictate how the rest of the state should run when the contexts are so different between them, much like how i don't think it is fair that a rural majority, with rural contexts, can dictate how an urban area runs their own business.

[tempcon]

But you're hiding unequal stake within an average, which is the sort of thing that made past liberals conservative on the issue of democracy. Net or marginal gains like this don't overcome divisions, they complicate them by causing greater conflict between parts of society while cementing rather than eroding their differences. It's a real thing. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-are-shifting-the-rest-of-their-identity-to-match-their-politics/

The first expansion of the franchise was also a net gain, yet it also only made you ask "democracy for who?" more than before.

For example, New Jersey revised its state constitution to abolish property requirements in 1807, but at the same time prevented all women from voting (even wealthy ones who had been allowed to vote there since 1776) as well as all free blacks. New York acted similarly in 1821 when its legislature extended the franchise to almost all white men, but simultaneously created high property requirements for free blacks. As a result, only 68 of the 13,000 free African Americans in New York City could vote in 1825. When Pennsylvania likewise denied free blacks the right to vote in the late 1830s, a state legislator explained that "The people of this state are for continuing this commonwealth, what it has always been, a political community of white persons." While he was correct about the prevailing racist sentiment among white voters, free blacks with property had not been excluded from the franchise by the earlier Revolutionary state constitution.

So, I would say net gains are exactly the issue since inside the average is how freedom for some is dispossession for others. There's like an inherent disparate impact and zero-sum nature of government, probably because it's fundamentally nepotistic, that means it's inevitably antagonizing one part of society and enriching another. Like how a flat tax is a poor tax or free trade is the imperialism of the strong, something like the abolition of the electoral college is not even the rule of a few parts of the country, it's the rule of lesser evils they picked in elections distorted by money.

I think that's why cultural conflict is disturbing. It's less an opportunity for change and more like a source of political degeneration down to where the policy debate's underlying ideological conflict comes out and peoples' differing material stake in it becomes their essential stake. It's a force multiplier.
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The point is, your supposed net gain aside, you are not doing away with any unequal relationships in society, you're bringing them to a head by giving them a political character in relation to each other they didn't have prior through expansion of the state and greater regulation of the parts of society under it.
Of course, that's republicanism in action. How is this a bad thing? You can have a democratic argument for them not mattering, but you don't have one for ruling over them.
I didn't implicate any culprits of culture war, and I have no idea why you put that in quotes unless you've never heard of it usage outside of the right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war

I said we degenerate into that when a balance fails. I didn't suggest any bad guys or who actually initiates conflict or imbalance, I think it starts outside of government. The point of my examples was to show that the latter two are proliferated, not abolished, by state integration. I used left-wing ones first to show that's the case even given their leadership and reform.

We should be localists. We should be actively challenging the growing heights of political and economic power, which might as well be the same thing, and their dispossessing effects on the middle and lower portions of the country. That's defined in terms of class, geography, etc. Since the 19th century, capitalism has consistently eroded old societies while producing new ones that are more unequal, atomized, and prone to strife and unprecedented mass unrest. Only the middle class let us get past this, and it was built on a bubble in such a way that subsequent generations will not live like their parents.