Read on Twitter
If a “nail biter” in the United States is any candidate, left or right, winning by 3M votes (aka a 2% lead in the popular vote) then it is far beyond time to rethink what we, as Americans, consider a democracy.
The narrative of America the republic is often espoused by the majority party in the Senate; reminding that the rules are there for the future when they as the majority may be the minority. The time for that rhetoric has passed.
We are living with the Constitutional consequences of the Electoral College, and the failure to undo the Connecticut Compromise as a way to fully realize Reconstruction after the Civil War – combined with the direct election of Senators in 1912.
The Electoral College as written in the original US Constitution was and is far from perfect. In fact, it was almost immediately updated in 1803 by the Twelfth Amendment which essentially established the two party system.
The Connecticut Compromise established in the US Constitution that the membership of Senate shall be two Senators from each state. It was however, largely in response to the 3/5ths Compromise which codified the way in which slaves would be counted for representation.
This deal with the devil was due to the fears from the small states of the larger southern slave states having the power to buy the government from simply buying more slaves.
This imbalance in representation (not to mention slavery itself) largely contributed to outbreak of the Civil War, but was never truly fixed as part of the Reconstruction that followed.
No answer was given to the question "if the southern states could no longer buy the government now that owning slaves was illegal why then should the Senate remain a non-representative house of the legislature?"
At the time Senators were not directly elected. They were selected by the state legislatures. Looking at this seeming footnote of history in the context of the ideals of a representative democracy does have significance.
Specifically it is much harder to win and hold a state house year after year, as opposed to winning a single state-wide election once every 6 years.
In 1912 the US allowed for direct election of Senators. On the surface this looks like a win for democracy: the people selecting their leaders, but removing that indirection actually diminished the power of the minority within those states.
Previously their elected representative to the state house could lobby on their behalf to have a candidate selected to the Senate that represented their values. Now it was the will of the majority party.
As this has played out for 108 years it is clear that America has fallen from its founding ideals of a government "By the People, For the People, and Of the People". We are now a government "By the rural minority, For the rural minority, but Of the People".
