Hard to Swallow Pill for the Left

If elections in America reflected the popular will, we’d be experiencing a near-uninterrupted period of Democratic governance. The sole exception, in 2004, is when a Republican incumbent who lost the popular vote the first time ran for re-election and won.

I know we’re just supposed to ignore all this, because “that’s just how it is,” but think about how much of an outlier that makes us. In no other democracy in the world can the loser win. Do other countries roll their eyes at us when we try to lecture them about democracy? This might be why.

This would also be less of a problem if the Republican Party, having won elections that they should have lost, governed with an ounce of humility, and helped work to pass some of the policies of the true majority. But they don’t even do that when they *lose,* and they sure don’t do that when they win.

Republican policies are unpopular and often disastrous, but our system is designed to prop up rural power with electoral affirmative action such that the GOP will never suffer the kind of true reckoning that in a functioning democracy would cause them to turn inward and correct course.

And all that is before you get to Jan. 6 and the GOP’s failure to disavow and punish Trump over his breaking the peaceful transition of power with the most treasonous acts by a sitting President ever.

We don’t have a Left problem in this country, we have a Right problem.

It’s even worse in the Senate — this time by explicit design.

The Founders intended every state to have 2 Senate votes regardless of population, basically, but their theory was incorrect. They thought voters would be more attached to their state than to a national Party. Not an insane theory.

However, the rise of partisan politics basically skewered the Founders’ grand Constitutional designs, and it didn’t take that long either. The Founders hated partisan politics, or claimed to. They went on to found political parties anyway. Rabid partisanship has left the checks-and-balances theory very dead in the water, since politicians care more about their party than about the institutional body they serve and even the state or district they are from.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/congress-inaction-partisanship/670486/

Ah, but whining about the system does win elections, and more importantly, actually changes things. See: Civil Rights Movement