Aftermath

                Now that the Republican Party has proven just how venial and bankrupt it is during the sham impeachment trial, I think we should start making an early list of what to do next.  For now, the list doesn’t need to be exhaustive as much as it needs to be prioritized – what do we have to do first.  The most important problem we face is how to make voting a meaningful and democratic activity again, one that creates a government which is representative of the people and is more immune to the kind of minority power grab now underway, at both the federal and state level.  What Republicans have made clear is that they cannot be trusted to participate in a fair and democratic society, but the current voting system makes it almost impossible to relegate them to irrelevance they so richly deserve.

                There are two main problems with the way we hold elections, and they reinforce one another.  The first is that we’re locked into a two-party system.  The second is that we have structured our elections so that territory is more important than people.  These may seem unconnected, but the modern Republican Party has fused them into a minority stranglehold over what used to be a functioning, if elitist and oligarchical, democracy.  Addressing only one of these issues will not fix the rot at the heart of our electoral futility. 

                The two-party system has ossified into something it never used to be.  Each party used to have a continuum of voters that somewhat overlapped with each other.  In other words, ‘moderates’ could be found in both parties that had more in common with each other than they did with the more extreme members of their own party.  That simply doesn’t exist anymore.  There may still be a few moderate Democrats, but there is no corresponding moderate wing of the Republican Party for them to work with.  Increasingly, the two-party system has come to represent two different nations who have little in common with each other.  The Republican response to the House Managers in the Impeachment Trial is basically that Democrats are bad people who lie and hate America.  To talk of bipartisanship in our government is like retelling some Homeric epic of a bygone era.  It doesn’t, can’t and won’t happen.

                Political representation depends on people feeling that their vote matters.  In a two-party system it gets harder and harder to see how that is true.  Most people who vote want change, but that change never comes to their lives.  The people that voted for Obama and then voted for Trump were frustrated more than they were political or ideological.  When AOC said that in most countries she and Biden wouldn’t be in the same party, she was telling the truth.  In most advanced democracies a multi-party system allows people to leverage their vote to create a consensus around how to govern.  Our parties are increasingly a test of loyalty that squeezes out the legitimate concerns of minority viewpoints.

                The problem we have in moving to a multi-party system is that so much of how we structure elections is based on where people live.  I live in a Congressional district that elects on representative.  This zero-sum arrangement makes the two-party system impossible to defeat.  If each state has so many representatives based on their population, shouldn’t that whole population pick their representatives instead of having them divided up by gerrymandered districts.  If Michigan has 10 representatives, then let the population vote for a range of parties to pick those representatives.  If the Green party gets 20% of the vote, that party picks two representatives, and they then have the leverage to form a block of representatives to move legislation through the congress instead of being locked in a voting minority of a larger democratic party apparatus.  It is time to give the power back to small groups of people and take it out of the hands of corrupt party operatives. 

                From there we could move to deciding the presidency and the senate in the same manner.  We will not get relief from the shameful spectacle that Trump and his allies are manufacturing without changing the way we elect our politicians.  Like so many things in this formalistic democracy, the two-party system has outlived its democratic function.  My hope is that this would lead to a more regional governmental sensitivity, making us like the EU on steroids.  We should have the same laws and freedoms, but we don’t need to be exactly the same all the time.  Remember this when you watch – actually I can’t recommend that you watch – the absurdist drama in the Senate.