According to Excitable Paul Krugman, you’re just part of Senate America
Real America Versus Senate America
Everyone is delivering post-mortems on Tuesday’s elections, so for what it’s worth, here’s mine: Despite some bitter disappointments and lost ground in the Senate, Democrats won a huge victory. They broke the Republican monopoly on federal power, and that’s a very big deal for an administration that has engaged in blatant corruption and abuse of power, in the belief that an impenetrable red wall would always protect it from accountability. They also made major gains at the state level, which will have a big impact on future elections.
But given this overall success, how do we explain those Senate losses? Many people have pointed out that this year’s Senate map was unusually bad for Democrats, consisting disproportionately of states Donald Trump won in 2016. But there was actually a deeper problem, one that will pose long-term problems, not just for Democrats, but for the legitimacy of our whole political system. For economic and demographic trends have interacted with political change to make the Senate deeply unrepresentative of American reality. (snip)
Obviously not everyone lives — or wants to live — in these growth centers of the new economy. But we are increasingly a nation of urbanites and suburbanites. Almost 60 percent of us live in metropolitan areas with more than a million people, more than 70 percent in areas with more than 500,000 residents. Conservative politicians may extol the virtues of a “real America†of rural areas and small towns, but the real real America in which we live, while it contains small towns, is mostly metropolitan.
You can see where this is going, right? The same old whines about those people in Flyover states daring to have representation equal to big states like New York. Say, why do Vermont, Delaware Rhode Island, and New Hampshire (#’s 50, 45, 44, and 41 on list of most populous states, which includes D.C.) have the same representation as Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia?
The hot take gets more hot
I find it helpful to contrast the real America, the place we actually live, with what I think of as “Senate America,†the hypothetical nation implied by a simple average across states, which is what the Senate in effect represents.
As I said, real America is mainly metropolitan; Senate America is still largely rural.
Real America is racially and culturally diverse; Senate America is still very white.
Real America includes large numbers of highly educated adults; Senate America, which underweights the dynamic metropolitan areas that attract highly educated workers, has a higher proportion of non-college people, and especially non-college whites.
None of this is meant to denigrate rural, non-college, white voters. We’re all Americans, and we all deserve an equal voice in shaping our national destiny. But as it is, some of us are more equal than others. And that poses a big problem in an era of deep partisan division.
Right, right, he doesn’t mean to denigrate those damned rubes, guys. Who you can bet understand the Constitution and the entire point of giving each state two Senators. I know you know, so, I won’t hold forth on this.
We may, then, be looking at a growing crisis of legitimacy for the U.S. political system — even if we get through the constitutional crisis that seems to be looming over the next few months.
It’s only in Liberal World that a “crisis of legitimacy” could occur, because they whine when they lose that things just are fair. Stomps foot.
You know, some of these hot takes are so scorching that you have to wonder if they are done on purpose just to get clicks. Because this is weapons grade stupidity.
