If Your Side Wins, Do You Care How the Winner Was Selected?
www.theamericanconservative.com
Divisions over the nature of voting are pushing American democracy into a new phase.

The great constitutionalists, from Aristotle to Montesquieu to Madison, believed that the populace should have a voice, but they also thought, with Cicero, that the well-being of the people was the highest law. Survival and flourishing is most important, not pandering to popular passions.

Any small “r” republican knows that a good society divides up power among authorities, repositories, and mysteries, such that all are checked and balanced; neither the bounder nor the mobile vulgus can become tyrannical. Pluralist theory seeks both safety and stability in multiplicity. The wisdom of crowds—and brokering institutions.

  • Bongo_Stryker
    84·
    9 months ago

    And yes, yes, supporters of the VRA have their arguments, based on past discrimination. We might acknowledge that and then reply, what about present-day discrimination? The federal government has been discriminating against conservatives for the past six or so decades—doesn’t the right now have the right of redress?

    Indeed, if Blue thinks about designating favorites to seats, why shouldn’t Red? Maybe sometimes—oftentimes, in fact—what’s most important is that your side wins. After all, fair is fair: Since they’re doing it to you, you do it to them.

    The result of this approach would be a kind of representational equity

    Oh gosh, Republicans have been so oppressed! Republicans have suffered so much discrimination for the past 6 decades! It’s unfair! We need representational equity!

    Absolute nonsense. 6 out of the last 10 presidents were republican. if you look at the history of congressional elections since Johnson, republicans have been overall pretty evenly represented in Congress with some notable majorities.

    What makes republicans nervous is that over the past presidential cycles, they have been winning with decreasing popular vote margins, decreasing to the point that the last republican president won without the popular vote. To win the presidency at all, republicans must now rely on the electoral college, an unfair system that artificially boosts the voting power of rural and sparsely populated states - red states.

    But that doesn’t stop them from crying that they are the victims of unfair oppression and discrimination, while relying on gerrymandering and trying to restrict voting in ways that disproportionately affect minority (read: democrat) voters. They keep repeating the große Lüge (big lie). Shameless.