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EDIT: I just realized what you did with your Biden and Obama examples. Counterexamples: Bush the Younger and Trump were both elected despite losing the popular

EDIT: I just realized what you did with your Biden and Obama examples. Counterexamples: Bush the Younger and Trump were both elected despite losing the popular vote — in Trump's case, bigly.

rayiner 3y ago
But that’s my point. Trump won more states than his share of the popular vote by winning some of the exact same states by which Obama won more states than his share of the popular vote. Clinton did the same thing, twice (even if you give half of Perot’s votes to him). What you’re talking about isn’t a structural disadvantage to Democrats. In fact it’s a natural advantage to Democrats, who are in theory the party in opposition to concentrated capital in Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Regardless, it has nothing to do with amendments. It only makes a difference in very close elections (0.5% for Bush, 2.0% for Trump). In any case it makes a difference you’re nowhere close to the mandate for amending the constitution anyway.
- dctoedt 3y ago
  > you’re nowhere close to the mandate for amending the constitution anyway. And that's my point. We can think of government as a complex machine controlled by software that's designed to limit what the machine's operators can do: • The prerequisites for updating the software are onerous. • The updating process is jealously "guarded" by any number of special interests who wield outsized influence and, by and large, prefer things the way they are, thank you. So as a practical matter, it's essentially impossible to update the machine's software — even when updates would be useful to accommodate changes in circumstances. No competent engineer would regard that as acceptable. (It's a bit reminiscent of the liberum veto in the Sejm [parliament] of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth [0], albeit not quite as bad.) Small wonder that lawyers have responded by hacking the system, using, e.g., the 14th Amendment and the All-Writs Act. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto

EDIT: I just realized what you did with your Biden and Obama examples. Counterexamples: Bush the Younger and Trump were both elected despite losing the popular vote — in Trump's case, bigly.

rayiner 3y ago

But that’s my point. Trump won more states than his share of the popular vote by winning some of the exact same states by which Obama won more states than his share of the popular vote. Clinton did the same thing, twice (even if you give half of Perot’s votes to him). What you’re talking about isn’t a structural disadvantage to Democrats. In fact it’s a natural advantage to Democrats, who are in theory the party in opposition to concentrated capital in Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Regardless, it has nothing to do with amendments. It only makes a difference in very close elections (0.5% for Bush, 2.0% for Trump). In any case it makes a difference you’re nowhere close to the mandate for amending the constitution anyway.

dctoedt 3y ago
> you’re nowhere close to the mandate for amending the constitution anyway. And that's my point. We can think of government as a complex machine controlled by software that's designed to limit what the machine's operators can do: • The prerequisites for updating the software are onerous. • The updating process is jealously "guarded" by any number of special interests who wield outsized influence and, by and large, prefer things the way they are, thank you. So as a practical matter, it's essentially impossible to update the machine's software — even when updates would be useful to accommodate changes in circumstances. No competent engineer would regard that as acceptable. (It's a bit reminiscent of the liberum veto in the Sejm [parliament] of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth [0], albeit not quite as bad.) Small wonder that lawyers have responded by hacking the system, using, e.g., the 14th Amendment and the All-Writs Act. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto