The United States is the oldest major continuing and contiguous democracy in the world. We are still governed by a magnificent albeit dated document, the US Constitution (last amended almost three decades ago), that was originally drafted, and its basic initial amendments (the Bill of Rights) passed, over 231 years ago. There were 13 states then, and 94% of Americans made their livings in agriculture. Flintlocks, muskets and crude canons/mortars were the main arms, naval fighting vessels were powered by sail, armies by horses and human muscles, and long-distance travel was implemented by horsepower or foot power… occasionally by a mule or an ox or two.
Factories were powered by horsepower, human muscle or crude water or wind wheels. The primary business of cities was trade, a little manufacturing, but these urban centers were primary support systems for a nation driven mostly by farm goods. The New Jersey Compromise was driven by rural communities, hence low concentrations of voting populations, who mistrusted those urban trading centers (with high concentrations of voters) and the folks who ran them. While appropriations were centered in the House of Representatives – who were selected based on populations – the Senate was created to preserve rural political power of rural states, no matter how many people lived in urban areas. Two Senators for each state, regardless of population. The Senate controlled what the colonists believed were the prestigious decisions: approving judicial and other major federal appointments as well as treaties with other nations.
States have great political power in a few democracies (like India), but for most democracies, passing their constitutions in much later eras than did the United States, cities are true power. Think London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna… as opposed to Sussex, Burgundy, Umbria, etc. Their constitutions are more amendable, reflecting the flexibility that accelerating change required, as industrialization replaced agriculture as the main source of wealth and power. Cities ruled. Farming communities followed. But not in the United States. If you weight the voting power of city dwellers against rural voters, a rural state vote is worth about 1.88 times the power of a city vote.
My recent Republican Prophylaxis - Suppression & Conversion blog speaks to our bizarre use of an electoral college and state-determined congressional districts to elect federal officials, especially the President. The blog explains a powerful judicial reluctance to touch gerrymandering, even when it is unfairly used to keep incumbents in power and opponents out regardless of true popular preferences. The vast expanse of red, in the above map built on congressional districts, suggests that the United States is securely in the hands of the red Republican Party. But the map with red and blue dots, reflecting actual voting preferences resulting in an urban mainly blue reality, suggests that we are primarily a blue Democratic nation.
The last constitutional convention (1787) was held in Philadelphia as our nation was being formed. The Bill of Rights was the first major set of amendments (ratified in 1789, taking effect in 1791). As the constitutional provision cited above suggests, amending the Constitution was purposely made very difficult. From “1789 through the beginning of 2013, approximately 11,539 proposals to amend the Constitution have been introduced in the United States Congress. Of these, thirty-three have been approved by Congress and sent to the states for ratification. Twenty-seven of these amendments have been ratified and are now part of the Constitution.” Wikipedia.
Speaking of that last, 27th Amendment, which required an intervening election before Congress could implement any raises it gave to itself, it passed in 1992. Pretty innocuous and uncontroversial text, right? But it took 203 years (it was proposed in 1789) to pass! And in these supercharged polarized times, what do you think the odds of amending the Constitution are today? Precisely. We actually believe that our Constitution works well, even as five presidential elections in US history did not give an immediate victory to the candidate with the majority of the popular vote. George W Bush and Donald J Trump won their races despite the fact that the majority of the popular vote went to the other candidate!
You even have to ask yourself if the world of flintlocks, dealing with the notion of citizen soldiers being able to retain the guns in peacetime, would have issued the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) to all citizens in a world of semiautomatic assault rifles and oversize magazines? Exactly, who are we as a nation… that we were not when the Constitution was created and the various amendments added?
It is a combination of voter suppression under our arcane legal political structure that led The Economist) in recent years – as determined in its Democracy Index of 167 countries; the latest released on January 22nd – to describe the United States as a “flawed Democracy.” Simply, our system of government is not truly representative and is easily distorted by a demagogic rogue president. But at least, a truly representative map helps us understand the scope of the incongruity between an ancient legal structure and dealing in a modern era.
According to Carolina A. Miranda, writing for the November 13th Los Angeles Times, “the electoral map as we know it distorts the size of the different voting populations. The state of my birth, Wyoming, is the 10th largest U.S. state by area, but with a population of only 579,000 people, it has only three electoral votes. Yet its broad swath of redness plays an outsize role in our electoral maps. New Jersey, by contrast, with 9 million people and 14 electoral votes, takes up far less room.
“Naturally, this design reflects the design of our electoral system, in which the votes for president are tabulated by state in a winner-takes-all fashion — part of the electoral college system (which, frankly, has no place in a 21st century democracy ). But as these maps continue to be widely employed by media across the political spectrum, they systematically reinforce the idea that the U.S. is either Red Territory or Blue Territory without overlap or exception. And that is wrong.
“In response, designers have been trying to find better, more nuanced ways to visualize election data — such as the unusual honeycomb-patterned map, created by the politics site FiveThirtyEight, which shows electoral college votes from the 2016 election to scale. Likewise, Greg Albers, an L.A.-based digital publisher who writes about issues of digital literacy, created an experimental map that shows the U.S. in gradients of purple.
“During this election, France’s Le Monde has experimented with more proportional graphics , showing the number of electoral votes for each state laid over a geographical map — so Wyoming is marked by three red blocks, while New Jersey gets 14 blue ones. And the New York Times has also been experimenting with map design on its election site, including a Blokus-style electoral votes map, but the page opens with a traditional electoral map and you have to click through to find the alternates.
“[In the first week of November], a series of GIF maps created by Karim Douïeb, co-founder of Jetpack.AI, a data science company based in Brussels, went viral for showing different ways in which election data might be displayed in map form. His designs, first released in 2019, visualize election returns in ways that give more texture to where and how Americans are voting… As he notes in an online presentation : ‘Acres don’t vote, people do.’… Douïeb says he was inspired to create his maps after seeing a tweet posted last year by Lara Trump (a former TV producer who is married to Eric Trump) that showed a traditional county-by-county map along with the inscription, ‘Try to impeach this.’… While designing better maps won’t fix the fractures in our electoral system, they can help tell a better story about who we are and the spaces that we share.” Maybe, given our Constitution, acres actually might be voting!
I’m Peter Dekom, and given our current polarization and demographic configuration, applied under our existing constitutional form of government, the United States, even with a new president, is in for a very long, rough political ride.
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