The funny thing is the electoral college was designed to counter exactly this event. In the case an absolute tyrant is going to get voted in, the electoral college is supposed to be the last chance to challenge it. But with the way the GOP is going, ain’t no one gonna challenge anything.

As they say, the devil will come bearing a cross wrapped in the American flag.

The electorial college is a threat to democracy.

This is correct and the actual point of the story.

I read the MSNBC article about this book last week and came away with “Wyoming’s 600,000 residents hold the same influence as California’s 39 million.”

Right?? Seems like gerrymandering is the bigger threat to democracy here.

So true.

As a resident of one of these towns, another issue is that many people who are knowledgeable or capable are simply trapped. Several years ago in the area I live we use to have an economic development council that sponsored some proposals on alternatives to the anchor industry here (coal fired power generation), I shit you not, one of the remarks made by the workshops was a reference to a 2017 WSJ article that stated "rural is the new ‘inner city.’”

Rural areas have, and I’m quoting someone who presented at a workshop “lower economic status, lower education levels, higher wage gap, poorer health, higher rates of teen birth, and greater impacts from the opioid epidemic.”

The largest obstacle facing the trapped knowledgeable and educated people in rural areas is the obscene fucking cost of housing and the double-negative we’re facing on having little equity and cheap housing, where we want to move somewhere desirable and progressive having housing that’s beyond our lifetime earnings potential.

For the ignorant, this feeds into the anger cycle of wanting to just burn the whole thing down, and for the reds they look at every way they can fuck things up for the rest of us as a middle finger back at the country for the squalor they’re stuck with. They’d rather burn the forest down than try to fix anything, because they’re also lazy. Lazy in the sense of not wanting or accepting change. They’ll work hard at what they know, but learning new concepts is pushed against.

That doesn’t make it right, and I agree with you on all counts. Unity would get them a hell of a lot farther than the same tired old Reagan rhetoric they peddle. I’m just extremely fortunate in threading the needle through economic transition and getting to stay at my house without worrying about having to move, and I don’t like the city after having grown up in the Bay Area California. What you said still resonates with me as I can tell you understand it. We have no action plan and no hope because these towns are full of people who would just rather be angry than change.

One thing you can be sure of is that they all have a dollar store.

I’m sorry… couch gun??? Like they just shove a gun into the couch cushions? What the hell kind of purpose would that serve? Opening a beer can or turning on the tv? Or are they all just living in constant paranoia of someone kicking their door in and trying to kill them?

The funny part is if one ever did want to attack these rural folks, the logical method would be use literal fire. A drone would prevent having to risk their weapons. Then let their ammo hoards do the work. Use the drone against anyone who flees.

They seem to think people want to break in and rape and pillage but they’re so over invested in fire power there is nothing much to steal and rape is more their thing than the left’s.

They are not ready for a real apocalypse scenario or an invading force because as you’ve noted, we all assume they are heavily armed and their defense begins and ends with their gun fantasies.

I support this entirely, but good fucking luck

I love the theory, but considering that every week we see some headline about some digital fraud or another, I think there is a great reassurance in keeping democracy as analogue as possible

The US can’t even figure out giving IDs to its citizens, what makes you think they can make a cryptographically secure voting app? Not to mention that all forms of electronic voting opens up new attack vectors, which will definitely be exploited.

Just make election day a public holiday, make mail-in voting easier and assign enough polling stations with sufficient personnel to prevent long queues.

You know, the deriders of this bring up some good points, but I’d also like to bring up the point that digitally secured voting doesn’t really need to be a super great solution. It would be great if it was, sure, but it doesn’t need to be great, it just needs to be better than the alternative, which is pretty easy, I think. Voting analog is not necessarily a very secure way to vote either, as many people who remember the “hanging chads” issue will be quick to point out. It’s also a pretty massive inconvenience for some people, which shouldn’t really be discounted as a thing that prevents people from voting. “Oh but if they can’t spare the time we don’t want their votes anyways”, but then you gotta keep in mind that in some places the wait times are gonna be multiple hours upon hours, and maybe days.

In any case, if you still wanted analog voting for any particular reason, you could still keep it open as a backup, which might not be a bad idea generally.

The 17th should be reverted and Senators should be elected by the state legislatures, not abolished altogether. It should serve it’s intended purpose as the voice of the States. The Electoral College also still serves a purpose, but all states should be proportional delegate instead of winner take all. Ranked Choice or something similar is also needed, because FPTP always results in 2 shitty parties and is a root cause of many of our issues.

The House definitely need to be unlocked and proportional to population. Term limits are needed in both House and Senate, and money definitely needs to be removed from politics. Government provided war chests and that’s all you get, hard agree on that. Hard agree on no ads, no PACs, etc. Get your message out in debates and town halls in an actual real campaign.

We should also get rid of the two party system by introducing a party chartered to only support or oppose things that multiple 3rd party polls find over one standard deviation from the norm support.

It’s insane that given a political distribution that’s normal for most topics we arbitrarily divide it into two halves rather than focusing on the center.

Even as someone who would fall to the left of the first standard deviation, I’d much rather live in a world where there was consistent stability around the norms as I fought to move the social norms in my preferred direction over time than live in a world where there’s a 50% chance of Nazis being a thing again.

A significant majority of the county agrees on a surprisingly broad number of major topics, and yet we’re divided into two camps currently being driven more and more by outspoken fringes that represent less and less of the general population, with everyone else falling in line out of a greater fear of the “other team.”

No reason elections cant be conducted via encrypted open source app, where voting can be done remotely and checks in place to ensure the vote has been tallied.

You are seriously underestimating just how many people don’t have smartphones (22.5 million eligible voters in the US). A number of your other suggestions are good, but the idea of all digital voting needs at least some form of backup option for people who either have hardware access issues or digital competency issues.

the people they left to stagnate and rot,

Part of the problem is that they continue to vote against their own interests, making it impossible for the left to help them, as they continue to vote Republican.

They have been voting against their own interests for decades.

Their grandparents filled in local swimming pools with concrete because they would rather do that then share with the colored folks.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/public-swimming-pools-still-haunted-by-segregation-legacy

I fully agree with you here that we’re not having a conversation about what produces these people. I have parents that are quite terrible people, but I can see what made them that way. They’ve watched their savings and pensions evaporate and their job opportunities dwindle. They feel strongly that the government doesn’t support their interests and share the feeling that most Americans have that the system isn’t working. They don’t feel represented.

Supporting Trump and other ridiculous conservative positions is their way of lashing out. It’s not a productive response, but I feel that this disenfranchisement is a major driver that creates these people. They are Americans too, and we should be asking what we can do to build unity and improve America for everyone.

Yes, they are still responsible for their actions. However, I think that it’s equally bad to ignore the factors that are producing these people in mass. I prefer to view these people as misinformed children who rather hurt others than fix problems.

What I can do for rural Americans is vote for Democrats that will raise my taxes and use them to fund these poor states. Then they pull shit like this. Their local GOP parties and the voters that agree with them are evil to do that to kids. Rince and repeat for expanding Medicaid, etc

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cartoon-You-made-me-become-a-Nazi

Then they have a shocked Pikachu face when the people they left to stagnate and rot, turn out to be the shitty products of their environment aka the neoliberal hellscape of modern day America.

I mean, the Democrats didn’t really leave these people to rot, they’ve largely been prevented from doing anything to help them since rural areas vote so overwhelmingly Republican. What do you really expect the Democrats to have done when it’s the other party these folks keep electing to represent them? They effectively say they want the policies that have left them so exposed and disadvantage, then they have a shocked Pikachu face that “those darn liberals haven’t done anything to help us.” Heck, even in broad terms, their voting habits have screwed all of us by preventing broadly popular things like universal health care or drug reform from going forward because of the disproportionate power the self-destructive votes they cast wield at the national level. My sympathy for them is extremely limited, and my patience at their insistence in making everyone else suffer for their god-awful politics has long since run out.

Private military contractor?

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You misread the passage. It doesn’t say

each representative representing no more than 30,000 people

It says

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand

That means the opposite of what you said: each representative should represent no less than 30,000 people.

The house, as well, has out-sized representation for rural areas. For example, California has approximately one Representative for every 749,000 people, while Montana has one Representative for every 560,000 people.

This is a direct consequence of the House being a fixed size. The method used minimizes the average difference in people/representative for any two states. You literally can’t make it any better so long as the House is a set number of people, and increasing the size of the House to be one Rep per X people creates practical and logistical issues as regards meetings and floor debate and the like.

The reality is you have a couple of tiny states that get outsized representation by having the minimum one representative, and you have California that is just so much higher population than any other state that it blows the scale on the other end. For the rest of the states, it actually works pretty well. I’ve joked before that we don’t really **need ** two Dakotas and Montoming would be a perfectly good name for another merged state. Or chop California into several pieces.

They are just more empathetic than you realize. They just put themselves in the shoes of the black/brown people and were like:

If I were them, I would have definitely shot me by now.

I know someone whose grandmother died some years ago and when they were cleaning out her house and doing some reno to it, they kept finding hatchets stored in places that would be accessible in case something went down, including several concealed inside walls. Apparently if things turned bad, granny was going to go down axe in hand. This feels like the same energy, just with more money to hide more expensive weapons.

65% of rural America voted for Trump in 2020 nearly half 47% believe the election was stolen that’s half of all rurals not half of rural Republicans. Support for political violence is high with 1 in 3 Republicans nationwide and higher yet in rural America. It is easier for violence to take root where their is monocultural acceptance of the false premises used to justify it.

I think I’ll withhold judgement until reading the book. Partly due to my own confirmation bias, but also partly:

And Schaller and Waldman bring receipts.

In a book filled with reams of data to back up their arguments, Schaller and Waldman show that rural whites “are the demographic group least likely to accept notions of pluralism and inclusion” and are far less likely to believe that diversity makes America stronger.

The most generous interpretation of Christianity is that it’s monotheish. The Doctrine of the Trinity is like crypto: you can’t understand it unless you believe in it.

I think it’s funny that they call themselves monotheistic and then do these verbal gymnasics to keep that true (like calling other deities ‘saints’ or claiming that Jesus is god’s son but also 100% the same entity as god - oh yeah and that holy spirit thing too).

Maybe they mean the sometimes not so subtle differences in worship by various sects of Christianity?

That’s definitely probably part of it, but I think the biggest issue is homogeneity. Racism is hard when you can chat with black and brown people regularly. You aren’t hating some perceived immigrants but an actual human being that you know. Especially in places like the rural north and Midwest there was no mass movement of black people there. Similarly people will hate on Muslims in rural Kentucky but not in Dearborn Michigan.

And it’s not just racism. Queer people have always existed everywhere. But rural queer people are often much less open about it and often move away including before coming out. So people in bumfuck nowhere either dont have any queer people anymore, or their queer people are closeted or invisible.

Educated people also tend to prefer urban or suburban areas. Yeah maybe you’ve got a few lawyers or people who went to a local Christian college, and if you have a factory it has some engineers for sure. And you definitely have people who went to agricultural college. But you don’t have professors or scientists or people with humanities degrees. And notice those degrees I mentioned are overwhelmingly white and male programs. You can get them and not make black or brown or queer or even female acquaintances in school.

By and large more rural areas got affordable or accessible internet access much later so they are more succeptable to scams as well.

I visited the bourbon trail area. Everyone was lovely to talk with but that was as long as things stayed superficial…

Is that maybe just because there’s more people in cities? Rather than a higher concentration of parker users compared to the general population