continued from downstream…

re: #369 Blind Frog Belly White

The belief that we’re a nation of rural small towns perverts our politics. It is the most popular excuse for antidemocratic institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College - that “The Cities” shouldn’t dominate. Suggest that maybe people in small towns are no better than anyone else, and you trigger this kind of reaction. It gets real old, real fast, and doesn’t reflect well on the triggered.

The more you travel around the country, the more you realize what the numbers REALLY look like. Walk around a neighborhood in Queens or Miami or LA or Minneapolis and then realize there are more people in that one neighborhood than in all the small towns combined in a lot of smaller states. And yet that neighborhood shares its senators (and EC votes) with tens of millions more people, while each of those little states gets two Senate votes and at least three EC votes.

And it’s an impossible structure to change, because the amendments that would change it require a significant percentage of those small states to vote quite clearly against their self-interest.