Political Memes

Number of people per representative should be set based on the state with the lowest population. CA should have 68 reps as they have 68.5 times the population of Wyoming.

I don't think the Senator limit is okay. For instance, the city of Houston has more population than North and South Dakota combined (4 senators) and gets zero senators (Houston is consistently Democrat and is "represented" by two Republicans that do nothing for them).

100% agree with this we limited congress to the size of a building for some stupid reason

Second conversation. Why are some states large and others big shouldn't we chop them up more?

Specifically it fucks over CA and benefits states small enough they only get one Representative. Most of the rest aren't too bad.

If we can't expand the House, we could always chop CA into multiple states which also eases the gripes about the Senate some too. And maybe merge the Dakotas and create "Montoming" on the other end.

Somebody said states would secede if the coasts decided everything. Anybody ever researched this?

Dirty

Alabama as well

There weren't many slaveowners in urban areas.

Isolation breeds xenophobia

Urban areas tend towards D, rural tends toward R. Smaller population states have smaller, less populous urban areas, thus the discrepancy.

Why? My theory is that smaller communities can force out opposition, so they tend to have more uniform ideas (trends towards tradition) whereas larger communities have to compromise to make a healthy community, meaning more diversity of ideas and more empathy towards traditionally counter-culture groups.

because rural areas correlate with less educated populations, and people who have less education tend to vote Republican.

There's a lot of knowledge drain in republican states. People who go to university and lean left usually move out of the state, for 1. Being closer to like minded people 2. Lots of jobs and opportunities exist purely in cities

Basically people dont usually stay in red states if they lean blue

Abolish political parties.

I'm very curious to know how exactly you want to word this law to acheive the effect you're dreaming of without it being unenforceable, without it being weaponizeable as a mass voter suppression tool, and without creating a freedom of speech or freedom of assembly violation.

A fair voting system allows people to vote for whatever reason they want. Voters want to win. Banding together to focus and force multiply campaign resources increases chances to win. Political parties are an inevitability in a fair system.

I understand the vibe of your sentiment is to not allow political parties to grow to the overcentralizing control they have today. You're not particularly concerned about, say, a band of guys who meet up at the pub to figure out who they're gonna organize a collective vote for. At least I hope not, because the alternative sounds wildly dystopian. But like, what's the line in the sand between the two? How do you define the difference, legally?

Hey now, we don't want an actual democracy now do we? Think of the corporations. With all these broken up powers it's going to get really expensive to bribe them all to subvert the will of the people.

Break the powers of the president into multiple different offices.

As long as we're talking esoteric political ideas, the big one here is to split head of state from head of government. It might not affect the function of government much, because the head of state is largely ceremonial in modern systems, but it's I think it's super-important psychologically.

A lot of (most?) people have trouble thinking about the office of the President as an abstract concept separately from the person of the President. Therefore, the President becomes an avatar of the United States, taken to be the living embodiment of our identity as a nation. That's why so many people freak out about "the destruction of America" when a member of the other party, with values they don't share, becomes the President, and it makes elections feel like a polarizing, existential referendum.

By contrast, King Charles is the head of state in the UK, while the head of government (the prime minister) comes and goes, and a stable avatar of the nation, largely above politics. They have their share of major problems over there, to be sure, but at least the nation has a shared identity to rally around when needed.

More senators gives more power to the smaller states.

The whole idea is ass-backwards anyway. Assigning representation based on lines that were cooked up centuries ago over reasons that are mostly lost to time. It was a compromise to appease the southern Democratic Republicans who feared proportional representation meant they would get trampled on.

And maybe they would. But maybe that also just means that they should. They were worried about tyranny of the majority (i.e. democracy), and now we have tyranny of the minority.