The Trumpian governing class is a fundamentally unserious political entity. But po

The Trumpian governing class is a fundamentally unserious political entity. But power has a way around that modest…
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The idea seems to be that since a given voter’s participation in a state election represents a greater share of the overall vote than their participation in a national election, the more democratically consonant election is the state election. Thus, the reasoning goes, a state’s true democratic choice for president is whoever the state legislatures want to go with, not who the state’s voters want to go with.
This argument, offered by an editor at a well-known conservative publication, is that it is consistent with a respect for democracy for us to prioritize the results of an election in which thousands of people participated over an election in which nearly 160 million people participated.
There are many problems with this argument. A major one is that the smaller contest wasn’t a presidential election; it quite literally was not an election designed to pick the president. The larger election, on the other hand, was explicitly designed to deliver a result about who should be president.
Also, the scope of an election, from the perspective of an individual voter participating in it, has no bearing on its “democraticness.” Whether an individual’s relative share of the vote is one out of 100 voters or one out of 1000 voters tells us nothing, by itself, about the democratic resonance of either election.
A scenario in which 10 people are in a society, six out of the 10 vote “Yes” on some measure, and the regime implements the “Yes” result, is just as democratically responsive as the thousand-person society in which 600 out of the 1000 vote “Yes,” with the regime implementing the “Yes” result. Note that each individual’s share of the overall vote will be far greater in the 10-person society than it will in the 1000-person society, but that won’t be a reason for a member of the smaller society to see their vote as more democratically resonant than an individual’s vote in the larger society. The individual from the smaller society enjoys a more powerful electoral voice, sure, but that says nothing about the smaller society’s race itself being more reflective of democratic will than any other race.
When the argument says, “If democracy means one big pool where your vote is practically meaningless and you barely get a real choice,” the mistake just flows from this conceptual confusion. This is not a passable conception of democracy.
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On definitional divergence
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Electoral democracy takes into account total vote count — it’s a function of whether whatever social change we’ve got in mind reflects the popular will, which is measured by ascertaining the judgments of more social participants, not fewer.
What makes the scenario in the original argument flagrantly undemocratic is that it takes two election events and privileges the one that is (a) less reflective of the popular will and (b) less connected to the relevant outcome: picking a president.
It strips the political voice of tens of millions of people because the way those voters used their voices frustrates the commentator’s inner sense of his own political significance. It unjustifiably privileges certain voters by prioritizing their capacity to have what they see as a more meaningful share of the vote rather than prioritizing society’s capacity to get as close as possible to reflecting the true popular will.
All of this makes it a stunningly anti-democratic argument masquerading as an appeal to democracy.
Misunderstanding Democracy, Part 2
The second misunderstanding involves the following picture, which spread widely in the wake of a viral video shared by Kamala Harris on the eve of the election that attempted to elucidate the distinction between equality and equity.
Image for post
The misunderstanding doesn’t come from the picture itself, or from the video shared by Harris, though I find both overly simplistic. Rather, the misunderstanding comes from the counter-deployment of this picture as a justification for the Senate’s model of representation, which ensures each and every state, regardless of size or status, has exactly two senators. As one person put it: “The reason I love this cartoon is that it accidentally explains the logic of the Senate.”
Is this accurate? Does the picture’s distinction between equality and equity unwittingly justify the Senate’s model of representation?
I think applying it to the Senate is misleading. Here’s why.
In the picture, the three people on each side uncontroversially possess equal status and worth. It’s not right, as a matter of basic fairness, for them to have differential access to whatever civic resource baseball is supposed to represent. Obviously baseball is not just baseball, here. If this were just about a ball game, it wouldn’t make sense; when a parent stays up later than their kid, and as a result enjoy privileged access to late-night games, that’s not some sort of unjustifiable inequality. To keep matters simple, let’s say the baseball game represents political voice, and let’s say all three people are of voting age.
The problem arises when we substitute states for people. When we do this — so that the cartoon shows three states rather than three people — it means the arbitrary construct of states, not people, ultimately get treated equally or equitably. This changes the fundamental dynamic, as states are collections of varying numbers of people.
What we find when we make that conceptual shift is that in order to treat states equally, we have to treat people unequally. States, after all, are bundles of people. It’s as if the tall person in that picture, now substituted for a state, stands in for 1,000,000 people. At the other end, the short-person-turned-state represents 100,000.
When we shift our thinking from seeing each as numerically one person, and instead see them as bundles of people of varying numerical size, the question we ought to ask is why the bundles ought to receive an equal measure of legislative representation in the Senate?

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This question doesn’t preclude that there exists a good justification for putting states on a senatorial par — it merely argues that “they are being treated equitably” isn’t one of them.
Why is that? Consider what happens when the collection of one million and the collection of 100K are allotted the same measure of the good in question: it means the group comprised of 100 million gets treated unfairly.
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For some arbitrary reason — that is, for a reason neither specified nor defended in the picture itself — the individuals comprising the smaller group enjoy a greater share of political power than the individuals comprising the larger group. Why should that be?
It’s obviously not the picture’s fault, since the picture wasn’t originally intended as a defense of Senate representation. No, the cartoon’s original logic is that it’s right for some public good to be equitably distributed to entities possessing equal value. But the counter-application of the cartoon as a defense of Senate representation gets things backwards: it preserves arbitrary privilege and in so doing ensures that a massive political inequity gets cemented at the individual level. In short: if states get equally resourced, it means the people across those states do not.
So if the baseball game is something like “political representation” or “political voice,” it means that the cartoon’s logic on the equity side entails that a cluster of 100,000 people ought to have the same aggregate voice as a cluster of 1,000,000 people. But aggregates are made up of parts: the individual votes that comprise the vote totals. And when you individuate political power from that larger pie, you end up with the units in that smaller group having a greater political voice than the units in the larger group.
Again, that outcome may be defensible on other grounds, but not based on the notion of equity depicted in the cartoon.
John Rawls and the Foundations of Liberalism
Critics confuse the promotion of liberalism with an endorsement of all that springs from its well. Rawls shows why that…
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It’s perhaps a bit cheeky to ding the Senate’s model as undemocratic when it was never designed to reflect that value in the first place. But I’m only challenging it here on those grounds because that’s precisely what some people tried to argue — that is, they tried to make the case that the picture’s conception of “equity” applied to the Senate, as though we’re supposed to see the way political representation works in the upper chamber as equitable or democratically fair. It is neither.