Our country’s constitution was thought of as a social contract by the founders. The enlightenment idea of a social contract had been around for about three centuries. It was an implicit agreement among members of society to cooperate for social benefits (like law and order, public health, defense etc.) by giving up some individual freedoms to the state. Only a small percentage of North Americans had a say in our social contract – white, property-owning, males.
A lot has changed in 230 years. Slavery was outlawed after a civil war. The native nations were subjugated and annihilated. The country expanded to the Pacific ocean. Women and people of color got the vote. Technology radically changed the way we live. At our founding, 1 in 20 Americans lived in cities, today 16 in 20 Americans live in urban areas.
We are raised to believe that each of us has an equal say in how things are run based on our vote. That couldn’t be more wrong and this warping of the poplar will is a large reason why the country is so bent out of shape politically.
A voter in Wyoming’s vote is worth 68 times more than my vote in California when it comes to the U.S. Senate but only 3.6 times more when it comes to voting for the President thanks to the Electoral College. A third of our country’s population controls two thirds of the Senate. It’s not fair.
It’s not fair because rural states don’t look demographically like the rest of the country – they are older and whiter. They don’t deal with the myriad problems of large cities or multitude of interests that come with them. They are typically controlled by a small number of powerful families whose interest is in keeping things exactly as they are: when you’re at the top, why would you want anything to change?
In our money-influenced electoral process, states like Wyoming, Kansas and Arkansas are cheaper to buy. Their local newspapers and television channels were purchased decades ago by the right wing, shutting off opposing points of view. Smaller populations require less advertising dollars per Senate vote.
Smaller states like Alabama and Kentucky are more easily captured by moneyed interests. The result is that our tax dollars flow to subsidize the social safety net in these states as their corporate-owned politicians compete to see who can dismantle public education, social safety nets, labor and environmental regulations the fastest.
The majority of Americans have been in favor of national health insurance, better public education and environmental protections for decades yet we can’t put a President in office or sway the Senate. The founders wanted the Senate and Electoral College to ‘slow things down,’ but let’s not bullshit ourselves: it was meant to slow things down to keep the institution of slavery intact. This denial of the popular will weakens us with cynicism in our institutions because they aren’t functioning properly. Political pressure will continue building the more out of step our elected government gets from the people.
There is no moral justification for a person in a state like Vermont or North Dakota to have so much more political power than a voter in California, Texas or Florida. A couple ways to fix this would be admitting Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia as states. It would give voice to a broader and more urban representation in the Senate more in line with our national reality. Washington D.C. has a larger population than Wyoming or Vermont. Puerto Rico has more people in it Alaska, South Dakota and Montana combined.
How about equal representation? Or is that just something we carve onto buildings and preach from textbooks?
Wes Clark Jr. 