Something in the Air

As the US government falls deeper and deeper into a crisis, it seems clear why national forms of government don't last more than a few hundred years (many don't make it twenty). This seems far more in the procelerating world of global technologically, and the United States (which may have the oldest government in existence) is quickly feeling the effects of this exponential change.

Robert Reich has noted an article [1] by the Washington Post: "In About 20 years, half the population will live in eight states." He comments:

The framers of the Constitution – who decided that each state would get 2 senators regardless of population -- never imagined that Americans would bunch up in just a few states. Yet demographers now predict that in two decades, 70 percent of Americans will reside in just 16 states, half in just 8 states. As a result, 30 percent of Americans – who will also happen to be far whiter, older, and more rural -- will control 68 percent of the seats in the U.S. Senate. The House, of course, will still be based on population. So the Senate and House will reflect two different Americas – the America of the distant past, and the America of the present.

Now that two twenty-first century elections have revealed that the original American system is beginning to have internal failures, consideration of the operational limits of the American approach seems appropriate. The over zealous motivation to keep a few states from over-dominating election processes has resulted in a minority of the population now over-dominating.  Once again, we are seeing imbalances of power, as it slides to one group- concentrating in a minority.  This will only get worse, and avoiding crisis requires redistributing this power back across the population as a whole.

Many aspects of our system of government now seem inadequate and over-whelmed by a world in which global contact is in real-time.  At the time of our founding, America was a very large expanse with a widely dispersed population which would be difficult to govern centrally. On the other side, contact with foreign adversaries would be largely limited to border neighbors and a few of our elder European relatives as rivals.  But since we have been able to nuke the entire planet on a few minutes notice, the procedures for regulating our ability to wage war seem immensely outdated.  Not to mention the economic links of global trade, where factors of the economy depend on what other governments do.

Domestically, now that we are all instantly connected, it is a counter-productive hindrance to have protocols which were meant to compensate for the difficulties of direct democracy.  Even if we want to protect the ability for 50 states to having varying legal systems, it seems foolish to choose federal systems based on the outlines of these states, dependent on who lives on what side of which line.  The laws of the nation should be chosen by representative proportions of the population, without consideration of which state each citizen belongs to.  Considerations of minority views (to avoid a majority-decides-all outcome) should be ideological, not geographical.

It would seem wise to presently look into Constitutional modifications in light of historic changes in order to keep the resulting goals achievable rather than waiting for it to break and bring down the country in an unavoidable crisis.

[1] behind paywall