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The past four years have shown us how precarious our democracy-adjacent system is. It's time to make the U.S. more democratic. My latest for @ForeignPolicy https://twitter.com/ForeignPolicy/status/1333493537112027138
Democracy hasn't been saved - yet. Yes, the corrupt anti-democratic candidate lost. But the undemocratic systems that allowed an unpopular criminal to be elected in the first place have not changed. It could happen again. Now is the time to fix that.
Voter rights - ending the corrupt and egregiously racist practices of voter suppression, as well as making voting easier for the poor, busy, and vulnerable across the board, has to be at the top of the list. Democracy means people get to vote.
The Electoral College has given 2 of the last 6 elections to candidates who didn't win the majority of the vote. It is undemocratic. Let's get rid of it.
Gerrymandering skews legislative seats and unbalances representation. There are ways to apportion districts more fairly; let's institute them.
The cap on the size of the House of Representatives means that each Representative in the US represents 10x OR MORE as many people as in peer countries, so we're not even doing *representative* democracy very well.
STATEHOOD FOR DC NOW!
The primary system is convoluted, ridiculously long, expensive, and unfair.
Tradition, or, "changing it would be haaaard" can not be an excuse for undemocratic processes. We have seen the risks of these systems over the past four years, and now is the time to fix them.
The party system, as we saw both four years ago and this year, will not winnow out undemocratic and bigoted candidates; indeed, party leaders will get behind them if they think it leads to power. Make the primaries more democratic.
We have evidence now that "vetting" by the media is not enough to eliminate criminals who lie outright and obviously.
We have seen that the redoubted checks and balances of U.S. government did not stop abuse of power, corruption, and efforts to undermine an election; there is no reason to think they will do so in the future.
And, as we have learned, no norms or conventions will compel an autocratic criminal, once in power, to govern for the common good rather than their own enrichment.
If our elections were decided by a simple popular vote in 2016, none of that would have happened. If we had ranked-choice voting; if voting had not been suppressed; if representation in congress weren't skewed by gerrymandering and disenfranchisement; it wouldn't have happened.
If our country was the democracy it claims to be, it wouldn't have happened.
Let's make it one before it happens again.
Let's make it one before it happens again.
(I don't believe in perfect systems, and no one has yet come up with a perfect democracy. Even if we make these reforms, the system can be gamed. But FFS, let's not make it any easier for the comemierdas than we have to.)
Not all of the reforms I mentioned will be easy. Some are not terribly difficult and have not happened largely because of inertia. Some will require a lot of work. All will face opposition. But we should be entirely clear that that opposition is undemocratic.
Some of these reforms can be achieved through creative work-arounds like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would make the Electoral College obsolete (by popular vote, no less!) without requiring it to be dismantled. https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation
In any case, democracy was never supposed to be easy. But we MUST stop settling for self-congratulatory pretend democracy.
Another obstacle will be the understandable urge to focus on issue areas, on undoing some of the policy damage that has been done over the past four(-and forty) years. Calls for procedural reform may sound boring. But it may be the easiest way to meet those policy goals.
Public opinion on most issues is significantly closer to Democratic positions - in some cases, to progressive positions. On gun control, health care, abortion, taxes, roll of govt, so-called Representatives are not representing the majority of the people. https://twitter.com/existentialfish/status/1323752032000450570?s=20
Allowing elections to reflect public opinion more accurately — surely the goal of any supporter of democracy — would instantly shift the Overton window of political discourse to be more aligned with what people actually want out of their government.
This should be an easy call for the Democrats. Less voter suppression, higher voter turnout, & direct popular votes should result in a better showings for Democratic candidates. Removing gerrymandered districts would be likely to increase Democratic representation in Congress.
Statehood for DC would change the balance of the Senate at a stroke. More importantly, all of those changes would make the country more democratic. And yet, official statements on any of these issues are full of caution and doubt.
Making these changes goes up against tradition and promise difficult battles. But both principle & interest urge the administration to commit to reform now. It’s our best hope of protecting ourselves from another wannabe dictator manipulating our flawed system to his own benefit.
