Every now and then I'm drawn to reflect on the profoundly un-democratic nature of our democratic republic. The health care debacle reflects this truth profoundly, and so does the census map I received yesterday.The Senate of our republic, much like the Senate of Rome, does not remotely reflect the demographic realities of our country. Apportioning equal power to all states in the Senate does not protect the rights of the small states; it destroys the rights of everyone else.
Also, like the Senate of Rome, most of our Senators are petty and sniveling dilettantes who have legalized the most wretched corruptions and who are threatened by nothing so much as the possibility that Caesar, or the president, might actually have a good and popular idea. Because that, of course, would be "a threat to the republic".
A glance at my census map informs me that California has a population of 34,000,000 and Montana has a population of 900,000. Yet they carry equal weight in the Senate. This does not protect the voice of the 900,000; it destroys the voice of the 34,ooo,ooo.
California's people have the same voice as Montana's, even though their are 34 times more of them. So, the people of California actually have 1/34 the power per person as the people of Montana.
When a man who represents more cows than people is allowed to single-handedly steer health care reforms that tens of millions of people are clamming for, and that will effect every single person in this country, that is not a democratic process.
The way power is apportioned in our Senate is a direct result of a compromise with slave states to entice them to join the Union. After committing this mortal sin in order to win the favor of the south, the south repayed the north with treason, secession, and civil war.
And after all that, we still maintained the system born of sin, the attempt to give states with low (free) populations the same power as those with enormous ones.
Montana was no slave state, of course, but it and others like it have been grandfathered into this anti-democratic apportionment of power that was first designed to bribe slaveowners into loyalty.
Who voted for Max Baucus? He represents half the population of his state. That's 450,000 people. And how many of those people are adults who went out and physically voted for Max Baucus? 100,000? And how many people voted for Barack Obama? How many dozens of millions?
You do that math. But however you dice it, the sum product is not democracy.
1 comment:
I'll grant that the apportionment is not democratic, but slavery was not the only rationale. That peculiar institution was always bound up with the issue of states' rights, but just because slavery was evil doesn't mean that wanting to preserve state sovereignty over and against federal power therefore is. "Guilt by association" in that respect is a fallacy. The reservations the southern states had about ratification were indeed inextricably linked to their dependency on slave labor, but there plenty of northerners (Patrick Henry?) who were just as suspicious of states like Virginia lording it over the little guys. If the rationale is to be re-examined (and I think you make a great case that it should be), then its original logic should be represented fairly.
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