The undemocratic nature of our institutions means that conservatives might well succeed in overriding popular sentiment for many years to come. That’s why state legislatures draw districts in a way that ensures the party that gets the most votes doesn’t necessarily get the most seats. That’s why you see new voter ID laws and resistance to restoring voting rights to felons who have served their sentence. Most young people identify as socialists instead of capitalists, and on the whole people want a far more progressive set of national policies on economics, foreign policy and immigration than are currently being practiced.īut demographic changes do not automatically change the power structure, and it’s likely that we’ll see a conservative white minority taking extreme steps to cling to power in the coming decades. By 2045 the US will lose its white majority, and despite Trump’s efforts to whip the country into a xenophobic frenzy, the American people are becoming steadily more sympathetic to immigrants. The good news is that America is becoming an ever-more-diverse and in many ways more progressive country. But there is something perverse and troubling about a system in which the person who gets the most votes loses the election. It’s difficult to know how elections would have gone in its absence – after all, people would campaign differently if success were measured differently. The electoral college is, of course, its own problem. When you step back and look at the situation objectively, it’s utterly farcical to call the US government democratic.
#WHITE BOY IN A POLITICAL SCIENCE CLASS BINGO FULL#
A constitution written by slaveholders is being interpreted by a tiny room full of elites who have been given no meaningful popular approval. What matters is the opinion of nine elites, in many cases appointed by presidents who did not win the popular vote. It simply doesn’t matter where the people of the US stand on union dues, campaign finance reform, or abortion. Ian Samuel has pointed out the remarkable fact that, thanks to the way the Senate is structured, the senators who voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the court represent 38 million fewer people than the senators who voted against him. It consists of just nine people, all of whom went to Harvard or Yale and two-thirds of whom are men.
The supreme court is the highest branch of government, in that it can overturn the decisions of the other two branches. But it’s worth reflecting on just how deep the disenfranchisement really is.
We hear a lot about how the electoral college, the US supreme court and gerrymandered districts are undermining democratic rule. Though popular opinion may overwhelmingly favor universal healthcare and more progressive taxation, these policies are said to be “politically impossible” because the millionaires who populate Congress do not favor them. As Jamelle Bouie points out, the Senate has “an affluent membership composed mostly of white men, who are about 30% of the population but hold 71 of the seats” out of 100. James Madison was explicit about the function of the United States Senate – it was “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority”. That set of rules has been very effective at keeping the American populace from exercising power. The framers quite deliberately constructed a system that would prevent what they called “tyranny of the majority” but what is more accurately called “popular democracy”. People today are bound by a set of procedural rules that were made without the input of women, African Americans or native people. The constitution itself is an outrageously undemocratic document. White men have never made up the majority of the US population, and yet from the country’s beginnings they have made up most of its political decision-makers.