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I mean it’s really about identifying rules that are anti majoritarian. On the federal level, the filibuster is an obvious example of a an anti majoritarian rul

I mean it’s really about identifying rules that are anti majoritarian. On the federal level, the filibuster is an obvious example of a an anti majoritarian rule that creates perverse incentives. Going deeper, the way that the individual houses are structured gives significant power to committee chairs who gain power through seniority and fundraising for their parties, which creates centralized points of leverage for lobbyists. What we’ve seen over time is that fewer and fewer bills get passed, and individual bills themselves get larger. This is a result of rules and customs changing within the house and senate themselves that have made it harder and harder to pass small bills, so everything gets rolled into monster packages and the process get more obscured to people who are on the outside. The thing is that all of these rules get set by majority vote. Leadership elections happen by majority vote. Changing rules can happen without consent of the other house. The issue is that there’s very little understanding or focus on why they are important.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
The structure of the U.S. government was explicitly designed to be anti majoritarian. For many people, in fact probably the majority of the population this is a feature.
- TchoBeer 4y ago
  The ability for a small number of extremely wealthy people to dictate what laws should not be passed is not protection of the minority, and if it was intended by the founders (which in some ways it was, though not in the form it takes today) then it should be opposed.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    The founders never even intended that the majority be able to vote. Really, their core quibble with the Crown, and the sticking point that prevented any peaceful solution (because compromise would have seriously threatened the political power of the nobility in Great Britain), was that they wanted rich people to have the franchise and to be able to hold high-level offices, not just aristocrats.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    The problem is, when the majority rules, the result is inevitably a shitshow. The founders understood that, which is why they set things up the way they did. Nothing has changed since then. If anything it's even more true, given the new and extensive ways the elites have to manipulate majority opinion.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      There are numerous countries in the world that are literally democracies, not republics, where the majority does in fact rule. Quite a few of them are not shitshows. So I consider your first sentence to be proven false.
  - PathOfEclipse 4y ago
    I think where the founders got it wrong is not expecting the population to be so ignorant and easily swayable. For instance, school voucher measures, which would benefit so many people, tend to get shut down due to lobbying efforts from rich and powerful teacher's unions: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2016/11/13/teachers-unions-faulty-economics-and-school-choice/?sh=fcbfdb17c73f https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2016/11/13/teach... If people were wiser and did their research better, these kinds of campaigns would be ineffective and the rich would lose their sway. The founders also probably didn't expect our government to grow so large and so corrupt. The richest and most corrupt entity in the United States is the government itself. The vast majority of the government is not even beholden to people at all in any way, shape, or form. This includes the tens of thousands of employees in the federal bureaucracies, as well as organizations like teacher's unions who are funded indirectly by tax dollars. Many, if not all, monopolies today are also artificially created by government policy, allowing for an unholy union of corporations and the government.
- TimTheTinker 4y ago
  ^ this. It turns out a government will more effectively avoid flagrant injustice if its structure makes it difficult to accomplish anything quickly without supermajoritarian agreement.
  - comte7092 4y ago
    Example?
    - andromeduck 4y ago
      War on drugs.
      - comte7092 4y ago
        I’m not sure how higher supermajority requirement would have prevented the war on drugs from happening. There was alignment both at the elite level and the popular level in support of those policies for a long time. It functioned because the minorities it target were politically weak.
      - TimTheTinker 4y ago
        That's not a positive example of what I was referring to. A positive example would be something that would have passed if the majority party wanted it when the minority party was against it.
- comte7092 4y ago
  The pieces I talk about having nothing to do with the constitution, and they aren’t really a part of any explicitly planned design. Now, do people claim that anti majoritarianism is good? Sure. Clearly there are people who benefit from this system. In addition, a lot of people do justify it who seemly don’t directly benefit economically, simply due to an ideological affinity.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    > The pieces I talk about having nothing to do with the constitution, and they aren’t really a part of any explicitly planned design. Huh? Congress derives its authority from the constitution, at least in the U.S.
    - comte7092 4y ago
      Nothing about what I wrote had anything to do with what congress is authorized to do. It was about the internal rules of the house and senate, and the process by which they are made. None of that is prescribed by the constitution.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        > Nothing about what I wrote had anything to do with what congress is authorized to do. It was about the internal rules of the house and senate, and the process by which they are made. If you genuinely don't understand how congress came about and why their actions are accepted by the other branches of government, I would recommend doing some reading of history.
        comte7092 4y ago
        Ah yes, the classic condescending response. It must be the case that I simply haven’t read enough, simply because my understanding differs from yours. It can’t be possible that my points are a result of careful study over several years. Speaking of careful study. I suggest that you go back and actually read what I wrote and address what I said. Please inform me where in the constitution there is a prescription for what the house and senate rules must be. You keep talking about congressional authority. I will reiterate, that is completely tangential to my points.
- Mechanical9 4y ago
  It sounds like you are trying to justify an anti-majoritarian stance with majoritarian consensus. If you are against majoritarianism, you should probably find another way to make your case. Here, let me help you out: It's better for a small minority of people to make the rules. A small minority of people agree with this, thus it is correct.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    No? Clearly there are things desired by the majority of the population that are not desirable because of downstream effects. There are thousands of comments and posts on HN every year describing examples.
pdonis 4y ago
> 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.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  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)
  - pdonis 4y ago
tromp 4y ago
There should be incentives to keep bills simple. Perhaps the threshold for passing a bill should increase with the bill's length.

MichaelZuo 4y ago

The structure of the U.S. government was explicitly designed to be anti majoritarian. For many people, in fact probably the majority of the population this is a feature.

TchoBeer 4y ago
The ability for a small number of extremely wealthy people to dictate what laws should not be passed is not protection of the minority, and if it was intended by the founders (which in some ways it was, though not in the form it takes today) then it should be opposed.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The founders never even intended that the majority be able to vote. Really, their core quibble with the Crown, and the sticking point that prevented any peaceful solution (because compromise would have seriously threatened the political power of the nobility in Great Britain), was that they wanted rich people to have the franchise and to be able to hold high-level offices, not just aristocrats.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  The problem is, when the majority rules, the result is inevitably a shitshow. The founders understood that, which is why they set things up the way they did. Nothing has changed since then. If anything it's even more true, given the new and extensive ways the elites have to manipulate majority opinion.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    There are numerous countries in the world that are literally democracies, not republics, where the majority does in fact rule. Quite a few of them are not shitshows. So I consider your first sentence to be proven false.
- PathOfEclipse 4y ago
  I think where the founders got it wrong is not expecting the population to be so ignorant and easily swayable. For instance, school voucher measures, which would benefit so many people, tend to get shut down due to lobbying efforts from rich and powerful teacher's unions: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2016/11/13/teachers-unions-faulty-economics-and-school-choice/?sh=fcbfdb17c73f https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2016/11/13/teach... If people were wiser and did their research better, these kinds of campaigns would be ineffective and the rich would lose their sway. The founders also probably didn't expect our government to grow so large and so corrupt. The richest and most corrupt entity in the United States is the government itself. The vast majority of the government is not even beholden to people at all in any way, shape, or form. This includes the tens of thousands of employees in the federal bureaucracies, as well as organizations like teacher's unions who are funded indirectly by tax dollars. Many, if not all, monopolies today are also artificially created by government policy, allowing for an unholy union of corporations and the government.
TimTheTinker 4y ago
^ this. It turns out a government will more effectively avoid flagrant injustice if its structure makes it difficult to accomplish anything quickly without supermajoritarian agreement.
- comte7092 4y ago
  Example?
  - andromeduck 4y ago
    War on drugs.
    - comte7092 4y ago
      I’m not sure how higher supermajority requirement would have prevented the war on drugs from happening. There was alignment both at the elite level and the popular level in support of those policies for a long time. It functioned because the minorities it target were politically weak.
    - TimTheTinker 4y ago
      That's not a positive example of what I was referring to. A positive example would be something that would have passed if the majority party wanted it when the minority party was against it.
comte7092 4y ago
The pieces I talk about having nothing to do with the constitution, and they aren’t really a part of any explicitly planned design. Now, do people claim that anti majoritarianism is good? Sure. Clearly there are people who benefit from this system. In addition, a lot of people do justify it who seemly don’t directly benefit economically, simply due to an ideological affinity.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  > The pieces I talk about having nothing to do with the constitution, and they aren’t really a part of any explicitly planned design. Huh? Congress derives its authority from the constitution, at least in the U.S.
  - comte7092 4y ago
    Nothing about what I wrote had anything to do with what congress is authorized to do. It was about the internal rules of the house and senate, and the process by which they are made. None of that is prescribed by the constitution.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      > Nothing about what I wrote had anything to do with what congress is authorized to do. It was about the internal rules of the house and senate, and the process by which they are made. If you genuinely don't understand how congress came about and why their actions are accepted by the other branches of government, I would recommend doing some reading of history.
      - comte7092 4y ago
        Ah yes, the classic condescending response. It must be the case that I simply haven’t read enough, simply because my understanding differs from yours. It can’t be possible that my points are a result of careful study over several years. Speaking of careful study. I suggest that you go back and actually read what I wrote and address what I said. Please inform me where in the constitution there is a prescription for what the house and senate rules must be. You keep talking about congressional authority. I will reiterate, that is completely tangential to my points.
Mechanical9 4y ago
It sounds like you are trying to justify an anti-majoritarian stance with majoritarian consensus. If you are against majoritarianism, you should probably find another way to make your case. Here, let me help you out: It's better for a small minority of people to make the rules. A small minority of people agree with this, thus it is correct.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  No? Clearly there are things desired by the majority of the population that are not desirable because of downstream effects. There are thousands of comments and posts on HN every year describing examples.

pdonis 4y ago

> 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.

yamtaddle 4y ago
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)
- pdonis 4y ago

tromp 4y ago

There should be incentives to keep bills simple. Perhaps the threshold for passing a bill should increase with the bill's length.