My point is, and it remains, that the problem is not technological.
Is it possible now to instantly poll all citizens, at any moment, on a question of law? Absolutely. Indeed we've had that technology for decades -- since the 50s at least with tabulators and telephones.
The point I am making, and which I was originally being downvoted for making, is that technology is not the point. Social dynamics are the point.
Ancient Athenians lived in a geographically small area, such that the several thousand citizens could all participate in any matter of public policy, lawmaking and justice if they so chose to. Many did so.
Periodically, a particularly charismatic leader would arise and obtain of great power. The Athenians, acting entirely within the limits of their constitution, eventually came undone. In the process they killed Socrates for asking annoying questions and wracked the Peloponnesian peninsula in war for many years, which is how they came undone.
The Romans established a Republic as a reaction to the demise of a monarchy. It was riddled with inconsistencies, but contained many of the features we now recognise as common. For example, there was one lawmaking body elected from a limited franchise (the Senate) and another from a broader franchise (the Tribunes). They tussled frequently, but each jealously guarded its privilege. Rome, an obscure city whose only natural advantage was in being found athwart a salt trade route, came to dominate much of the world while still exercising representative democracy.
In practical terms, what does a direct democracy with proxies buy us? The main advantage is, in theory, to assign power, through proxies, on topics to experts. That is, it's meant to be a meritocratic-democratic fusion.
Fine, except:
* How do you define a proxy's limits? I say "Bruce Schneier has my proxy on matters of cryptography". What does that cover? Simply voting on NIST competitions? Mandating the use of SSL in banking? Some say in the operation of the NSA? Here come thousands of nasty court cases to settle the boundaries.
* What about conflicts of proxy? If I give Bob my proxy on "the internet" and Jill my proxy on "fibre optics", whose proxy prevails when the question is about regulating Google's purchase of dark fibre?
* What about generality? We can assumably assign proxies to any level of generality or specification. Say that Ashton Kutcher, who holds 3 million proxies good for any subject, weighs in against Bruce Schneier over crypto, only holding 500,000 proxies on crypto alone. Is that the outcome you want?
* Demagogues! Bob, who has 500,000 proxies on education policy after a lifetime of careful study, experience and rumination, is suddenly exposed as being gay. Fox News hints he's in league with the devil. Overnight Glenn Beck cries a bit and acquires 2 million education proxies.
* Transferable proxies / sub-proxies. Beck's proxies cause Bob to be outvoted. Beck's viewers, who have now tuned into World's Greatest Unicycle Crashes III, forget that they ever assigned that proxy. 6 months later Beck sub-proxies the 2 million he still holds to the CEO of EvilCo. Hilarity ensues.
The proxies are what we have today with Congress: elected representatives. It's my understanding that the reason it was created is because technically it was too difficult to allow everyone to vote on every law.
I'm saying: eliminate Congress. Allow people to vote directly on all bills. They can read various opinions online (no advertising allowed).
Pedantically, what we have in a Congress or a Parliament is trustees. They exercise but do not own the power.
> It's my understanding that the reason it was created is because technically it was too difficult to allow everyone to vote on every law.
It was created that way to prevent the tyranny of the majority.
"A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
- Federalist No. 10.
Think of it as defence in depth. Do you pin all your security hopes in file permissions? Of course not: you demand randomised address layout, auditing tools and so on and so forth.
In short, you want defence in depth. Representative democracy is a defence against majoritarianism.
> I'm saying: eliminate Congress. Allow people to vote directly on all bills.
Who will write these bills? How will they be proposed? Is there a minimum number of sponsors required, if so, how many? How do bills lapse? How are they amended during discussion?
Well, we in Washington State have some experience on these things, as does California with the initiative process.
Who will write the bills? Tim Eyman, Industry Groups, Costco, and other Lobbying Groups.
Who will get sponsors? Probably the same. They'll probably pay for it. The same forces that pay for lobbyists will pour into the direct democracy process, like they've taken the initiatives.
What will we get from it? A bunch of bills, all looking for no taxes, no gay marriage, and a pony. Meanwhile, the important stuff will quietly get looted by People With Lawyers who now have no more oversight.
Anyone who lives in Washington and California knows the contradictory results you get from this. If you ask the people "hey, do you want stuff?" they vote "yes, we want stuff". If you ask people "hey, do you want to pay for it" they vote "no, we don't want to pay for it".
Or <Insert Foreign Power>. E.g. here's a look at the contributions by state from California's prop 8: http://projects.latimes.com/prop8/ - about 29% of the overall funding came from out of state.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, because you give realistic objections to the simplistic 'solutions' being proposed. It's easy to be 'contra' something, but it's juvenile to be against something without have a better alternative.
I'm saddened to see he's being down-voted. His arguments are rational and sophisticated. I think people are just disagreeing and that's not a good reason to down-vote.
That said, I down-voted you. Don't reduce this argument to name calling. People are voting up my arguments; you seem to be in the minority in not finding the alternative I'm suggesting to be better. That's fine. I wouldn't belittle you for it.
You're not suggesting an alternative, well maybe in the most abstract sense, but in your post several levels up from here there is not even a hint at how to address even just the most obvious flaws in letting people vote for each bill. There's no 'argument' made, just a cry for revolution - of the type that is very common amongst high school and undergraduate students; rising from a simplistic world view that fails to recognize that there is a reason why we've some to the situation where we are now, and that radical, sudden changes very seldom lead to the outcomes that they were designed to lead to. 'Juvenile' was not name calling; it's an (albeit unqualified and broad-stroked) description, or maybe rather 'characterization', of the argument and the context that lead to it.
There are over 13,000 full-time lobbyists for the 535 representatives in Washington, and their only job is, when legislation goes the way of the public and not the way of their sponsors, to use their financial muscle to bribe a different outcome.
Despite decades of the public electing officials who say they'll fight it, it has only grown worse. You don't seem to have valid alternatives other than to be deeply shocked at the notion of changing it.
So I don't need to explain myself to you. I don't need to go into details. I don't need to get your permission. None of us do. You had decades; your turn is up.
The future will see open government and direct democracy via the internet as the obvious, logical next step of politics. The internet has transformed nearly every industry -- and now it's simply time to consider transforming politics.
And those students, radicals and "juveniles" who are launching it, won't care what you think. You had your chance. You fucked up. Now it's our turn, whether you like it or not.
Huh? Did you even read any of my previous posts? I don't care about how 'the internet will transform politics', and of course the current process is suboptimal, but those discussions are so repetitive boring and trite that I really can't be bothered with it. Nor did I ever try to. I was merely pointing out that your 'argument' isn't an argument in the honest intellectual sense of the word, it's just a cascade of slogans, and at first I thought it was going to be covered with a thin veil of content, but at least now you acknowledge that you're not interested in that and that you prefer to retreat to spouting empty rhetoric.
Of course you don't need my permission, why would I care, I don't even know you. I just thought that you were debating on content, and was annoyed that the one person who was providing sound reasoning was being downvoted for it.
Anyway, good luck with your revolution, be sure to post back when you're done.
By 'you', I mean everyone who is satisfied with how things are.
What I'm saying is there are 13,000 full-time employees of rich clients, each representing a bus-load of money, whose job it is to stop what people want if it conflicts with what their wealthy sponsors want. That system cannot stand. It is rotten to the core.
I'm telling you that it's not about us or the people on HN. Politics have been gamed and the people know it, and they will change it. The internet has revamped industry after industry; politics is next. You can call it revolution. You may think I'm crazy and extreme. But I (and others) see something disastrously broken and are willing to use modern technology to fix it.
No, you need to read history and learn about the success of democracies, that only third-world countries now are not democracies -- it's been that successful, and that all I'm suggesting is that instead of electing a Michelle Bachmann to vote on the laws, you can skip her and vote directly.
What on earth makes you think that direct democracy will eliminate the efforts of lobbyists? The money will just get redirected toward news and information outlets, because nobody will actually read the bills they are voting on.
As long as voting costs nothing, and the work comes from someone else, nobody is going to take it seriously.
Instead, attach the voter's name to the bill, as either yay, nay, or abstain. When their position is proven wrong, fine them to cover the damages their mistaken choice cost.
As is, voting is unjust. It leads to abominations like the draft.
> Who will write these bills? How will they be proposed? Is there a minimum number of sponsors required, if so, how many? How do bills lapse? How are they amended during discussion?
Do you think this sort of thing makes you clever? In every idea there are implementation details. What's your point?
Unless you're saying that these things will somehow be radically harder under the proposed system, and if so say how, it doesn't need saying.
> Representative democracy is a defence against majoritarianism.
No, representative democracy is often proposed as a defense for such.
We can routinely see our politicians playing to the masses so obviously if it works it's only in a round-about fashion.
OK, the Roman system was better, because it had checks and balances.
You could do the same with direct representation. Have a constitution, wich can only be modified by a 2/3rds majority. Require a 2/3rds majority to execute philosophers, start wars, and murder the male population of subject states.
And Socrates was not just a kindly old Zen master, preaching peace and understanding. He was a bright guy, but as he developed philosophy he also preached against democracy in favor of some kind of military dictatorship run by philosopher kings. Some of his students led bloody revolts, overthrew the democracy, and executed hundreds of democrats before they were eventually toppled. He wasn't quite the Osama Bin Ladin of Athens, but he was responsible (in a sense) for a lot of deaths. But he couldn't be executed for that, because there was an amnesty; so they got him on some trumped up charge related to his religious skepticism.
Of course, his more philosophical (and less political) followers (i.e. Plato) painted his execution as a great miscarriage of justice.
"some kind of military dictatorship run by philosopher kings" — while Plato advocates this through the mouth of Socrates, most scholars believe it's Plato using Socrates as a hand puppet in this and many other later dialogues, not an actual recollection of things Socrates might have said, as is more likely for some of Plato's earlier dialogues. Forgive me the nit-picking :-)
He was a bright guy, but as he developed philosophy he also preached against democracy in favor of some kind of military dictatorship run by philosopher kings.
It seems like you're attributing the ideas in The Republic to Socrates. Of the Socratic dialogues written by Plato, some of them were fairly faithful representations of conversations Socrates actually had and others used Socrates as a fictional character to argue for Plato's ideas. The Republic falls firmly in the latter category.
I'm late to the table and you might not read this, but something conspicuously absent from this conversation is a discussion of the representative nature of the US government by _state_.
The higher legislative branch gives more weight to states as individual entities for very precisely balanced reasons. In a very real sense it is not representatives that act, but states themselves.
This has been incredibly important, because it further decouples the population from the decision. Sparsely populated states have traditionally had different concerns than urban states: the Popularist Party of the late 19th century was sharply divided along these lines.
In other words, the popular vote is disregarded because different 'types' of people shouldn't have too much power: the density of cities should not grant that population dominion over the agrarian folk.
People complained about the popular vote being for Gore without realizing that the system was still functioning as intended: the states vote for the president, their votes being determined by the population within. Those foolish states that split their electoral votes make themselves irrelevant!
In other words, the popular vote is disregarded because different 'types' of people shouldn't have too much power: the density of cities should not grant that population dominion over the agrarian folk.
In practice, the system grants sparse populations dominion over the majority. There's no well-thought-out philosophical reason for this, by the way, this was just a compromise states like Virginia had to make to get states like Rhode Island to agree to the Constitution.
Philosophically, people are people. Why should they be effectively disenfranchised for choosing to live in cities rather than in the mountains?
>In practice, the system grants sparse populations dominion over the majority.
Not so! Populism _failed_, but it wouldn't have even had a chance to represent the interests of the agrarian states if statehood were not more important than sheer weight of numbers.
>There's no well-thought-out philosophical reason for this, by the way, this was just a compromise states like Virginia had to make to get states like Rhode Island to agree to the Constitution.
How is that not a well-thought-out philosophical reason? Balancing the needs of states is what enabled the Union. You act as if the compromise was not based in real, valid needs on behalf of the states. Rhode Island needed incentive to join. Virginia needed incentive to join. A two-senator Senate and a two-representative plus population-based-count representative HoR is the result: an _elaborate_ philosophical compromise, balancing power on several axes.
You're looking at it the wrong way: cities have much, much more by way of population. The most populous states would _steamroll_ everyone else if weighted solely by headcount, assuming they acted in unison--which has historically been the rule and not the exception.
The mistake you're making is treating states as primary. States--and, more generally, federalism--are a means to an end. The purpose of government is to serve the interests of people. Rhode Island is a legal fiction delimited by imaginary lines; you and I are real people. The people who live within the imaginary lines of Rhode Island are just as important as anyone, but those million people are no more or less important than any other arbitrarily selected collection of a million people. Why should it matter where they choose to live, or where the imaginary lines are drawn?
In the United States, states are largely a historical accident stemming from the way North America was colonized. No one actually decided to establish a federal democracy in North America and divide it into states, different people from entirely different countries just happened to colonize different parts of the continent without ever intending that New Amsterdam and Jamestown would ever fall under the same American government. The Constitution was a political compromise based on the fact that thirteen of those colonies broke away from the mother country and needed a federal government. The Founding Fathers weren't gods, they were the same breed of hypocritical, self-serving politicians you see in any era, a scarce few wiser than the others for sure, but the same ugly sausage-making all the same.
I'm saying it's not a mistake, it's a decision, which of course has its drawbacks and pitfalls. Hypocritical, self-serving politicians can still have understandable and even rational motivations and arguments.
Believe me, I ain't putting no fathers on a pedestal. But you seem to like putting them in a cesspit.
Comments
My point is, and it remains, that the problem is not technological.
Is it possible now to instantly poll all citizens, at any moment, on a question of law? Absolutely. Indeed we've had that technology for decades -- since the 50s at least with tabulators and telephones.
The point I am making, and which I was originally being downvoted for making, is that technology is not the point. Social dynamics are the point.
Ancient Athenians lived in a geographically small area, such that the several thousand citizens could all participate in any matter of public policy, lawmaking and justice if they so chose to. Many did so.
Periodically, a particularly charismatic leader would arise and obtain of great power. The Athenians, acting entirely within the limits of their constitution, eventually came undone. In the process they killed Socrates for asking annoying questions and wracked the Peloponnesian peninsula in war for many years, which is how they came undone.
The Romans established a Republic as a reaction to the demise of a monarchy. It was riddled with inconsistencies, but contained many of the features we now recognise as common. For example, there was one lawmaking body elected from a limited franchise (the Senate) and another from a broader franchise (the Tribunes). They tussled frequently, but each jealously guarded its privilege. Rome, an obscure city whose only natural advantage was in being found athwart a salt trade route, came to dominate much of the world while still exercising representative democracy.
In practical terms, what does a direct democracy with proxies buy us? The main advantage is, in theory, to assign power, through proxies, on topics to experts. That is, it's meant to be a meritocratic-democratic fusion.
Fine, except:
* How do you define a proxy's limits? I say "Bruce Schneier has my proxy on matters of cryptography". What does that cover? Simply voting on NIST competitions? Mandating the use of SSL in banking? Some say in the operation of the NSA? Here come thousands of nasty court cases to settle the boundaries.
* What about conflicts of proxy? If I give Bob my proxy on "the internet" and Jill my proxy on "fibre optics", whose proxy prevails when the question is about regulating Google's purchase of dark fibre?
* What about generality? We can assumably assign proxies to any level of generality or specification. Say that Ashton Kutcher, who holds 3 million proxies good for any subject, weighs in against Bruce Schneier over crypto, only holding 500,000 proxies on crypto alone. Is that the outcome you want?
* Demagogues! Bob, who has 500,000 proxies on education policy after a lifetime of careful study, experience and rumination, is suddenly exposed as being gay. Fox News hints he's in league with the devil. Overnight Glenn Beck cries a bit and acquires 2 million education proxies.
* Transferable proxies / sub-proxies. Beck's proxies cause Bob to be outvoted. Beck's viewers, who have now tuned into World's Greatest Unicycle Crashes III, forget that they ever assigned that proxy. 6 months later Beck sub-proxies the 2 million he still holds to the CEO of EvilCo. Hilarity ensues.
I just don't see it scaling.
The proxies are what we have today with Congress: elected representatives. It's my understanding that the reason it was created is because technically it was too difficult to allow everyone to vote on every law.
I'm saying: eliminate Congress. Allow people to vote directly on all bills. They can read various opinions online (no advertising allowed).
Pedantically, what we have in a Congress or a Parliament is trustees. They exercise but do not own the power.
> It's my understanding that the reason it was created is because technically it was too difficult to allow everyone to vote on every law.
It was created that way to prevent the tyranny of the majority.
"A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
- Federalist No. 10.
Think of it as defence in depth. Do you pin all your security hopes in file permissions? Of course not: you demand randomised address layout, auditing tools and so on and so forth.
In short, you want defence in depth. Representative democracy is a defence against majoritarianism.
> I'm saying: eliminate Congress. Allow people to vote directly on all bills.
Who will write these bills? How will they be proposed? Is there a minimum number of sponsors required, if so, how many? How do bills lapse? How are they amended during discussion?
Well, we in Washington State have some experience on these things, as does California with the initiative process.
Who will write the bills? Tim Eyman, Industry Groups, Costco, and other Lobbying Groups.
Who will get sponsors? Probably the same. They'll probably pay for it. The same forces that pay for lobbyists will pour into the direct democracy process, like they've taken the initiatives.
What will we get from it? A bunch of bills, all looking for no taxes, no gay marriage, and a pony. Meanwhile, the important stuff will quietly get looted by People With Lawyers who now have no more oversight.
Anyone who lives in Washington and California knows the contradictory results you get from this. If you ask the people "hey, do you want stuff?" they vote "yes, we want stuff". If you ask people "hey, do you want to pay for it" they vote "no, we don't want to pay for it".
Or <Insert Foreign Power>. E.g. here's a look at the contributions by state from California's prop 8: http://projects.latimes.com/prop8/ - about 29% of the overall funding came from out of state.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, because you give realistic objections to the simplistic 'solutions' being proposed. It's easy to be 'contra' something, but it's juvenile to be against something without have a better alternative.
I'm saddened to see he's being down-voted. His arguments are rational and sophisticated. I think people are just disagreeing and that's not a good reason to down-vote.
That said, I down-voted you. Don't reduce this argument to name calling. People are voting up my arguments; you seem to be in the minority in not finding the alternative I'm suggesting to be better. That's fine. I wouldn't belittle you for it.
You're not suggesting an alternative, well maybe in the most abstract sense, but in your post several levels up from here there is not even a hint at how to address even just the most obvious flaws in letting people vote for each bill. There's no 'argument' made, just a cry for revolution - of the type that is very common amongst high school and undergraduate students; rising from a simplistic world view that fails to recognize that there is a reason why we've some to the situation where we are now, and that radical, sudden changes very seldom lead to the outcomes that they were designed to lead to. 'Juvenile' was not name calling; it's an (albeit unqualified and broad-stroked) description, or maybe rather 'characterization', of the argument and the context that lead to it.
There are over 13,000 full-time lobbyists for the 535 representatives in Washington, and their only job is, when legislation goes the way of the public and not the way of their sponsors, to use their financial muscle to bribe a different outcome. Despite decades of the public electing officials who say they'll fight it, it has only grown worse. You don't seem to have valid alternatives other than to be deeply shocked at the notion of changing it.
So I don't need to explain myself to you. I don't need to go into details. I don't need to get your permission. None of us do. You had decades; your turn is up.
The future will see open government and direct democracy via the internet as the obvious, logical next step of politics. The internet has transformed nearly every industry -- and now it's simply time to consider transforming politics. And those students, radicals and "juveniles" who are launching it, won't care what you think. You had your chance. You fucked up. Now it's our turn, whether you like it or not.
Huh? Did you even read any of my previous posts? I don't care about how 'the internet will transform politics', and of course the current process is suboptimal, but those discussions are so repetitive boring and trite that I really can't be bothered with it. Nor did I ever try to. I was merely pointing out that your 'argument' isn't an argument in the honest intellectual sense of the word, it's just a cascade of slogans, and at first I thought it was going to be covered with a thin veil of content, but at least now you acknowledge that you're not interested in that and that you prefer to retreat to spouting empty rhetoric.
Of course you don't need my permission, why would I care, I don't even know you. I just thought that you were debating on content, and was annoyed that the one person who was providing sound reasoning was being downvoted for it.
Anyway, good luck with your revolution, be sure to post back when you're done.
By 'you', I mean everyone who is satisfied with how things are.
What I'm saying is there are 13,000 full-time employees of rich clients, each representing a bus-load of money, whose job it is to stop what people want if it conflicts with what their wealthy sponsors want. That system cannot stand. It is rotten to the core.
I'm telling you that it's not about us or the people on HN. Politics have been gamed and the people know it, and they will change it. The internet has revamped industry after industry; politics is next. You can call it revolution. You may think I'm crazy and extreme. But I (and others) see something disastrously broken and are willing to use modern technology to fix it.
Wow, you really need to read history and learn a bit about mob behavior.
No, you need to read history and learn about the success of democracies, that only third-world countries now are not democracies -- it's been that successful, and that all I'm suggesting is that instead of electing a Michelle Bachmann to vote on the laws, you can skip her and vote directly.
What on earth makes you think that direct democracy will eliminate the efforts of lobbyists? The money will just get redirected toward news and information outlets, because nobody will actually read the bills they are voting on.
As long as voting costs nothing, and the work comes from someone else, nobody is going to take it seriously.
Instead, attach the voter's name to the bill, as either yay, nay, or abstain. When their position is proven wrong, fine them to cover the damages their mistaken choice cost.
As is, voting is unjust. It leads to abominations like the draft.
No need to cry for me, the tide of votes seems to be turning.
I think you are right to object right now, but with time mindsets will change. Each new generation moving closer and closer to direct democracy.
Technologically it's already possible.
> Who will write these bills? How will they be proposed? Is there a minimum number of sponsors required, if so, how many? How do bills lapse? How are they amended during discussion?
Do you think this sort of thing makes you clever? In every idea there are implementation details. What's your point?
Unless you're saying that these things will somehow be radically harder under the proposed system, and if so say how, it doesn't need saying.
> Representative democracy is a defence against majoritarianism.
No, representative democracy is often proposed as a defense for such.
We can routinely see our politicians playing to the masses so obviously if it works it's only in a round-about fashion.
OK, the Roman system was better, because it had checks and balances.
You could do the same with direct representation. Have a constitution, wich can only be modified by a 2/3rds majority. Require a 2/3rds majority to execute philosophers, start wars, and murder the male population of subject states.
And Socrates was not just a kindly old Zen master, preaching peace and understanding. He was a bright guy, but as he developed philosophy he also preached against democracy in favor of some kind of military dictatorship run by philosopher kings. Some of his students led bloody revolts, overthrew the democracy, and executed hundreds of democrats before they were eventually toppled. He wasn't quite the Osama Bin Ladin of Athens, but he was responsible (in a sense) for a lot of deaths. But he couldn't be executed for that, because there was an amnesty; so they got him on some trumped up charge related to his religious skepticism.
Of course, his more philosophical (and less political) followers (i.e. Plato) painted his execution as a great miscarriage of justice.
"some kind of military dictatorship run by philosopher kings" — while Plato advocates this through the mouth of Socrates, most scholars believe it's Plato using Socrates as a hand puppet in this and many other later dialogues, not an actual recollection of things Socrates might have said, as is more likely for some of Plato's earlier dialogues. Forgive me the nit-picking :-)
He was a bright guy, but as he developed philosophy he also preached against democracy in favor of some kind of military dictatorship run by philosopher kings.
It seems like you're attributing the ideas in The Republic to Socrates. Of the Socratic dialogues written by Plato, some of them were fairly faithful representations of conversations Socrates actually had and others used Socrates as a fictional character to argue for Plato's ideas. The Republic falls firmly in the latter category.
Oh yeah, The Republic is a scary book. An alternative title could be Brave Ancient World.
I'm late to the table and you might not read this, but something conspicuously absent from this conversation is a discussion of the representative nature of the US government by _state_.
The higher legislative branch gives more weight to states as individual entities for very precisely balanced reasons. In a very real sense it is not representatives that act, but states themselves.
This has been incredibly important, because it further decouples the population from the decision. Sparsely populated states have traditionally had different concerns than urban states: the Popularist Party of the late 19th century was sharply divided along these lines.
In other words, the popular vote is disregarded because different 'types' of people shouldn't have too much power: the density of cities should not grant that population dominion over the agrarian folk.
People complained about the popular vote being for Gore without realizing that the system was still functioning as intended: the states vote for the president, their votes being determined by the population within. Those foolish states that split their electoral votes make themselves irrelevant!
In other words, the popular vote is disregarded because different 'types' of people shouldn't have too much power: the density of cities should not grant that population dominion over the agrarian folk.
In practice, the system grants sparse populations dominion over the majority. There's no well-thought-out philosophical reason for this, by the way, this was just a compromise states like Virginia had to make to get states like Rhode Island to agree to the Constitution.
Philosophically, people are people. Why should they be effectively disenfranchised for choosing to live in cities rather than in the mountains?
>In practice, the system grants sparse populations dominion over the majority.
Not so! Populism _failed_, but it wouldn't have even had a chance to represent the interests of the agrarian states if statehood were not more important than sheer weight of numbers.
>There's no well-thought-out philosophical reason for this, by the way, this was just a compromise states like Virginia had to make to get states like Rhode Island to agree to the Constitution.
How is that not a well-thought-out philosophical reason? Balancing the needs of states is what enabled the Union. You act as if the compromise was not based in real, valid needs on behalf of the states. Rhode Island needed incentive to join. Virginia needed incentive to join. A two-senator Senate and a two-representative plus population-based-count representative HoR is the result: an _elaborate_ philosophical compromise, balancing power on several axes.
You're looking at it the wrong way: cities have much, much more by way of population. The most populous states would _steamroll_ everyone else if weighted solely by headcount, assuming they acted in unison--which has historically been the rule and not the exception.
The mistake you're making is treating states as primary. States--and, more generally, federalism--are a means to an end. The purpose of government is to serve the interests of people. Rhode Island is a legal fiction delimited by imaginary lines; you and I are real people. The people who live within the imaginary lines of Rhode Island are just as important as anyone, but those million people are no more or less important than any other arbitrarily selected collection of a million people. Why should it matter where they choose to live, or where the imaginary lines are drawn?
In the United States, states are largely a historical accident stemming from the way North America was colonized. No one actually decided to establish a federal democracy in North America and divide it into states, different people from entirely different countries just happened to colonize different parts of the continent without ever intending that New Amsterdam and Jamestown would ever fall under the same American government. The Constitution was a political compromise based on the fact that thirteen of those colonies broke away from the mother country and needed a federal government. The Founding Fathers weren't gods, they were the same breed of hypocritical, self-serving politicians you see in any era, a scarce few wiser than the others for sure, but the same ugly sausage-making all the same.
I'm saying it's not a mistake, it's a decision, which of course has its drawbacks and pitfalls. Hypocritical, self-serving politicians can still have understandable and even rational motivations and arguments.
Believe me, I ain't putting no fathers on a pedestal. But you seem to like putting them in a cesspit.