The American Republic is broken. Too much power has been centralized to the top with little representation from the bottom to hold those in power accountable in any way.
There are several solutions to this problem. Unfortunately, most of them involve violence, usually initiated by the FBI and ending in your arrest at the hands of the very assholes you’re trying to hold accountable.
So, instead of advocating for armed insurrection, which is coming sooner than most people think but not soon enough for most, I’d like to suggest some tweaks to our existing system in order to prevent some of the major issues we’re seeing these days.
For one thing, representation isn’t just limited to popular representation. This is where elected representatives are representative of a certain proportion of the population. Popular representation is a basic form of representation is very palatable for the dumb masses. It makes sense in our minds and even midwits think of themselves as sophisticated when advocating for it.
But there is another form of representation that is arguably more important. It’s called regional representation. This is where a representative represents a particular region, and necessarily a population.
The best way to break this down is to look at Congress. You have the House of Representatives, which is (in theory) where popular representation happens. And you have the Senate, which is where regional representation happens.
The idea is that the House is where the popular voices happen and the Senate is where the regional voices happen.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the case because in both houses of Congress, our representation has been twisted and diluted by power-hungry maniacs who don’t give a flying rat’s ass about the people they are supposed to represent.
The problem doesn’t stop at the Federal level either. Each and every State government is a mess when it comes to proper representation.
Ideally, you see, we should have a popular representation with a small ratio of representative to populace. For the House, this was originally supposed to be 1 in 30,000 people. Now it’s closer to 1 in 800,000 people. Do you think your House member really represents you when he’s got hundreds of thousands of other people to represent, many of whom don’t or can’t vote?
As for the Senate, originally they were chosen by the State legislatures but that was switched to the popular vote with the passage of the 17th amendment (at least they bothered to pass an amendment to take away your representation). So now Senators only represent the most populous region of their state and not the whole state, or at least as much of the state as they can.
The same can be sadly said for most State legislatures. They follow the same pattern of a higher popular ratio of representation and diluted regional representation.
So how do we remedy this?
At the State level, the popular representatives need to have a proper ratio. I’d say that one elected official must represent no more than 10,000 eligible voters. The eligible voters part is the key because if you are not eligible to vote, for whatever reason, then you shouldn’t have a voice anyway.
As for a State Senate, there should be one State Senator per county in each state. Or two per county in each state. But each county would have equal say in this chamber. Said senator would be elected by the popular vote of the county. This ensures that the more populous areas don’t rule over the less populous areas and these regions can come to some sort of compromise.
The Governor, or whoever happens to be the State executive, should be chosen either by the State legislatures or by wining the most counties, as executives must represent as much of the region they are to govern.
At the Federal level, the changes are simpler. Increase the House representative count to meet the 1 in 30,000 ratio where those 30,000 are eligible voters only. For the Senate, either repeal the 17th amendment or create a kind of electoral system where the Senator has to gain the majority of county votes, not popular votes. At least then he is representing the majority of his state and not one or two large cities.
The Electoral College must be changed to be similar in that it’s chosen based on the counties, not the people. That way, a single populous county can’t simply change the Electoral system based solely on it’s virtue of having a ton of people living there.
This does, more or less, follow the spirit of the original Constitution. Popular representation was confined to a single chamber in Congress while regional representation took care of the other chamber and the President.
Now there are flaws in my design, mostly because the design is about managing people and people are corrupted from the start, especially those who seek power. I’m sure if everything I outlined was implemented perfectly, there were be tons of people who find a way to game the system to their advantage.
The idea here is not to strive for perfection, but to strive for a better system that will hopefully mitigate the inherent problems in our own system. And our own system has some big, gaping problems that allowed a handful of people to basically take power.