Lawrence O'Donnell: "The United States Senate Is An Unfixable Crime Against Democracy"

[sapien85]

The Senate was intended to be less democratic from the beginning. They used to appiappoint senators with no elections. This is working as intended. Fix gerrymandering in the House first.

 

[TarNaru33]

do americans really believe that everything can be measured on a scale from liberal to conservative?

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Not everything, but most things do have a category it falls next to.

 

[Deleted member 9035]

Changing how the senate works will be extremely difficult. Start with comparatively simpler stuff like getting rid of the electoral college.

 

[Euler]

Not all votes are equal in the US. It's a ridiculous excuse of a democracy.

 

[Deleted member 40797]

The humorous part is that we were taught this in high school civics and history - this is less an edgy statement and more a reminder of facts and the intentions of the founders.

 

[kingkaiser]

Turns out the country which so desperately wanted to spread democracy all around the world is the least democratic of them all. The irony of history.

 

[danm999]

The Founders fetishised the Roman Republic and Ancient Athens which while they had voting and nominally derived their authority from "the people", actually weren't democratic in any sense we would consider meaningful today. So they designed a system like those ancient societies where the wealthy ran everything.

Had those societies somehow survived to the 21st century you'd see them in exactly the same predicament, it's just that they were swept away by external forces.

 

[Pwnz]

I think the Senate was originally a check on fervent populism, but with how the political landscape and states ended up its heavily biased representation for rural people.

 

[Cocaloch]

In my opinion the problem isn't the structure of the Senate per se, it's just that States were continually added without much consideration of how that would break the original design. There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of a body where smaller states get to have more relative representation, the problem is allowing states with populations less than that of most major cities to exist. The simplest and least controversial way to correct that is to implement a sort of Wyoming rule to the Senate, and give D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood based on their larger populations. Maybe even bundle the Pacific territories into a third state.

The next step would be figuring out whether using Wyoming's population as a baseline even makes sense given modern demographics. However, merging small states together would probably be logistically impossible and politically unfeasible. But given the narrow margins in the Senate, you really only need 2-3 more states to get things back to sanity.

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Did you miss the whole build up to the civil war?

It's absolutely a problem with the core structure, as are most of America's problems. The US is simply far too old and lacks the flexibility of the British constitution.

I think the Senate was originally a check on fervent populism, but with how the political landscape and states ended up its heavily biased representation for rural people.

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The Senate was originally a way to get the small states to agree to a federal power. The entire country is built on a political compromise from 1789 that's meaningless in the modern day.

The Founders fetishised the Roman Republic and Ancient Athens which while they had voting and nominally derived their authority from "the people", actually weren't democratic in any sense we would consider meaningful today. So they designed a system like those ancient societies where the wealthy ran everything.

Had those societies somehow survived to the 21st century you'd see them in exactly the same predicament, it's just that they were swept away by external forces.

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This is questionable. Generally speaking this isn't quite right. The ancients were more used as metaphors. The Framers were much more interested in their view of the Commonwealthman tradition than Greece or Rome directly. Meanwhile the Federalists were actually interested in a real state and how it actually ran so they looked to Britain.

In fact the whole aim of the Federalists was to avoid being Rome or Athens.

do americans really believe that everything can be measured on a scale from liberal to conservative?

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This isn't an American thing. Most people are dumb and lazy so they prefer to oversimplify things.

 

[samoyed]

Considering the average level of civics Americans have I don't think a 3-dimensional pyramid or other complex non-binary structure would be able to convey much information. You have to talk at the level your audience can grasp.