Comment by yamtaddle
3 years ago
Right, there are two failure modes in the US governmental system, basically:
1) Things the founders got wrong on purpose. We've fixed a bunch of these, by e.g. broadening the franchise and ending chattel slavery with that whole Civil War thing. The way our Senate is composed is arguably an un-fixed one of these—it's that way on purpose, but it's, you know, bad.
2) Things they got wrong by accident. These are usually cases where politicking, application of game theory, and bad actors in general conspire to make things work differently than they were intended. This is stuff like the system stabilizing at two viable political parties, and the way the electoral college has worked in-practice almost from day one (but not the way the electoral college favors low-population states, because that part was on purpose, so would go under point 1 if we're regarding it as an error)
You're conflating something being bad by definition, in an inexcusable fashion, with simply not liking it. There's nothing inherently bad about the upper chamber of a bicameral legislature being explicitly not designed to represent individual people in a perfectly proportional manner.
As originally designed, the US is not a nation with a strong central federal government that happens to be made up up 50 weak states and a handful of territories and districts. It's 50 strong states who happen to be united under one central but relatively weak federal government. In that context, having States represented equally, without regard to their populations, makes complete and total sense.
Completely by chance, that happens to indirectly overrepresent people you disagree with. That's unfortunate (depending on your ideology), but it certainly doesn't make the entire system broken or bad.
> You're conflating something being bad by definition, in an inexcusable fashion, with simply not liking it
I would love to know what this by-definition version of "bad" is. That's a remarkable finding.
I think they got the Senate right by not allowing direct election the 17 Amendment screwed that up.