> it’s really about identifying rules that are anti majoritarian.
You say this as if anti majoritarian is a bug. It's not. It's a feature. The US system is supposed to prevent tyranny of the majority. That's why there are checks and balances in it. That's why the Constitution limits the powers of the branches of government, and why further limits were put in place in the Bill of Rights. The US system is not supposed to be a tool for the majority to enforce its will on everyone. It's supposed to be a tool for protecting everyone's basic rights and limiting government to certain particular functions, not to allow it to do whatever a 51% majority wants. That was the original idea of the founders of the US system.
I would say that, if anything, we have too much majoritarian thinking in the US today, and I would support amending the Constitution to put more roadblocks in the way of a 51% majority being able to simply run roughshod over everybody else.
> all of these rules get set by majority vote
Yes, and this is an example of too much majoritarian thinking; whoever has the majority in either house of Congress takes that as permission to gerrymander the rules however they like to favor their preferences.
There were a whole lot of things in the US system of government that were put there on purpose but have turned out to definitely be bad. The fact that an element is a "feature" doesn't mean it didn't turn out to be a bad idea, in practice. If a tiny minority of rich people & companies can leverage our "anti-tyranny-of-the-majority" features so well that their use of it is practically the only use... that's broken. "It's that way on purpose" isn't a rebuttal to "it's broken".
There's a reason we don't push our system on other countries even when we're the ones setting up a new government—it's basically a ho-hum fact among people who are into that kind of thing (so, the ones who tend to end up in charge of directing the creation new governments—at least in charge of the boring details) that the US system blows goats, but some of the ways that it's broken also mean that it's nearly impossible to fix without a revolution. This has been essentially regarded as a fact in poli-sci circles since... I dunno, probably the early 20th century I'd say (Germany and Japan didn't get our system after WWII, notably, and that wasn't by accident)
> There were a whole lot of things in the US system of government that were put there on purpose but have turned out to definitely be bad.
I don't agree that there were "a whole lot", but yes, some of the original features were bad. The founders knew they couldn't avoid that, which is why they included an amendment process. Which has been used to fix a number of the original features that turned out to be bad.
I also don't agree that the brokenness in the current US system is due to too much use of anti-majoritarian features. I think it's due to too little use of such features. (Well, that and simply ignoring the Constitution altogether when it is politically expedient.)
> The founders knew they couldn't avoid that, which is why they included an amendment process.
Our bad election rules make coalition-building to accomplish even very popular things really difficult if powerful interests oppose them, and it's getting worse the more sophisticated the game-playing within our set of rules gets. Moreover, a bunch of the reforms we need would threaten the power of those who could, realistically, work to effectively change the system (see again: broken election process) so they simply will not happen.
We have trouble accomplishing things with overwhelming popularity in the general population that don't need an amendment—amendments are all but dead under modern electoral and political game conditions, and fixing that would require... an amendment. Key reforms that would fix the very deepest problems are about as likely as a literal miracle happening.
But these rules are only 10-20 years old. They're not part of the original intent you talk about.
Appeals to authority of dead people’s political documents is propaganda.
Just because we can invoke historical story does not mean we abide it today.
The majority inherently rules whether it’s US Constitution or the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Not really sure how you get to a system of material comfort and logistics we have without majority buy in to not fight and kill.
I wish people would realize how silly they sound reciting the dead peoples chants when the literal world clearly shows majority rule is not so bad literally. For whatever reason quite a few folks prefer to fight over which vain elders hallucinations and diatribes are the one true social system when the reality is providing real stuff to survive is all society really is about.
> dead people’s political documents is propaganda.
Yours is no less propaganda.
People do cultural learning, pretty much everything you use from technology to medicine and yes politics is overwhelmingly based on dead people's ideas. That is the basis of us as cultural beings.
You're right with cultural learning we might inherit noise too, but you'll have to fight against the content of those ideas, not dismiss from mere historicity. If an idea has merit, it will be timeless.
Disagree I have to fight them. Every political system is eventually jettisoned by generational churn.
Medicines we keep using keep proving their value to the present through experiment. We have binned plenty discovered in the past but later revealed to be snake oil.
As ephemeral gibberish does not exist it is naturally lost to time as those who memorized it die off. What’s literally true remains always verifiable by experiment.
I can find academic papers, political arguments we are in violation of the old ideas today anyway. How do we know we even abide them as intended and aren’t just abiding arbitrary math for staffing institutions described by the Constitution? They are not like organic chemistry where cause-effect is obvious. Does “America” give rise to society or people engineering together casually referring to some old gibberish when pressed? How do you test for existence of political ideology except by populist poll? Democratic majority rule. But that’s anti-America which is to prevent majority rule!
What I advocate is more like forgetting they exist by not teaching them. We can teach how to create together versus destroy each other, without the history lesson, and measure for impact literally to avoid carrying forward snake oil.
> The US system is supposed to prevent tyranny of the majority.
So instead, we get old-fashioned tyranny of the of the rich and powerful minority.
[dead]
The alternative to majority rule is tyranny of the minority, specifically the minority with the most power/voice/money. I think what you're arguing for isn't against tyranny of the majority, but a limit to the power of the federal government/more local government.
For instance, the majority of the country wants universal healthcare and legalized cannabis, yet the tyranny of the minority keeps blocking these efforts for their benefit. Without majority rule, we have a ridiculously dysfunctional government that doesn't represent the people.
> The alternative to majority rule is tyranny of the minority
Being anti-majority doesn't mean pro-minority.
It is about decreasing the weight of merely being in the majority as an input feature to optimal decision making. It is protecting against pseudo-relevance majority can pose as an overemphasized decision making strategy. This doesn't mean all ideas that manifest as majority is irrelevant, not at all, it is protecting against the false positives.
Mind you a lack of steamrolling with majority alone forces a downstream integration of opponent thoughts.
Think it like a collective intelligence architecture that is trying to make sure we don't get stuck in local optima.
That’s all well and good, but when these issues come up, people seemingly turn their brains off and repeat “tyranny of the majority” without evaluating the empirical reality of how these systems function in practice.
I’m amenable tot he notion that there should be some guardrails on simple majoritarianism, but it shouldn’t follow that all anti majoritarian rules are good.
We do have guardrails. The constitution puts various things off-limits to any sort of majoritarian process of regular governing.
Should there be more things off-limits? Should there be less? Intelligent people could disagree, but the off-limits category already exists and there is a process to change what is in it.
The original founders didn’t design the current iteration of senate and house rules. You didn’t need 60 votes in the senate to pass anything in 1795.
But in a way you’re right. “The founders” created a government that protected aristocratic interests explicitly. Most states had property requirements to vote when the constitution was ratified, and even higher property requirements to hold office. So you can definitely say that they would have been fine with a system that allowed moneyed interests to block legislation they didn’t like.
> It's supposed to be a tool for protecting everyone's basic rights and limiting government to certain particular functions, not to allow it to do whatever a 51% majority wants. That was the original idea of the founders of the US system.
The US Senate process to force an end to (previously unlimited) debate on an issue and hold a vote on the matter is not a feature put in place by the Constitution.
It's a rule put in place by the Senate in the 1900's.
> this is an example of too much majoritarian thinking; whoever has the majority in either house of Congress takes that as permission to gerrymander the rules however they like to favor their preferences.
This is literally how the Constitution specifies that the legislature will operate. The Senate sets it's own rules, by majority vote. This is how the "nuclear option" to change the Filibuster rule was recently implemented.
>Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) used the nuclear option Thursday morning, meaning he called for a vote to change the Senate rules by a simple majority vote. It passed, 52 to 48.
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/harry-reid-nuclear-option-100199 https://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/harry-reid-nuclear-op...
> This is literally how the Constitution specifies that the legislature will operate.
Yes, it is: each house of Congress is explicitly permitted to set its own rules of procedure. That is obviously not an anti-majoritarian feature of the Constitution. I didn't say every single provision in the Constitution was anti-majoritarian, or that the founders did a perfect job of implementing their ideas.
> The Senate sets it's own rules, by majority vote. This is how the "nuclear option" to change the Filibuster rule was recently implemented.
And also, of course, how the filibuster rule was put in place in the first place.