The Failure of Our Democracy

Whee! A little lite reading for today!

With the elections approaching and the pressure mounting to select a Democratic nominee to stand against McCain, I’ve been considering our democracy, it’s processes, and it’s flaws. I won’t even start with the whole Electoral College bit, but will instead move straight into a little discussed aspect of our system: proportional representation. If you ask the average Joe on the street, they think we have it. We don’t.moron2.jpg

I was all set to do the math and build a chart based on the number of seats each state currently holds in the House of Representatives proportionally compared to each state’s population when I stumbled on this gloriously complete version in Wikipedia.

If you live in Wyoming, you share one representative with 522,000 of your friendliest neighbors. If you live in Arizona, you share with 792,000 others. That’s just for the reps. Senate-wise, if you live in Wyoming you share one senator with roughly 250,000 cowboys. If you live in California, you share Feinstein with 18,276,000 people. That’s EIGHTEEN MILLION two hundred seventy six thousand people. Hmmm. I bet that’s not quite what the framers had in mind.

But we haven’t even gotten to the actual discussion of proportional representation. We live in a winner-take-all democracy. In other countries, they enjoy the penultimate form of democracy: proportional representation, aka coalition government. In the US, we sell to the highest bidder. The loser is not represented at all. Here’s a quote from an article in the Boston Review:

Polls show most Americans would like to see a third party electing candidates at every level of government, but only three of our nearly eight thousand state and congressional legislators were elected on a minor party ticket–all of them in Burlington, Vermont.

Buncha hippies! Those Vermont people are crazy! Yeah, crazy cool. I want to see a share of Green Party seats. And Libertarians. Yeah! More Libertarians!

Chaser:
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courtesy of http://commonsenselogic.blogspot.com/

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May 13, 2008 | Filed Under Thinking Too Hard | Leave a Comment