Civics before politics, the prerequisite of working liberal society
Still active candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 2024 presidential race, Dean Phillips, drew the ire of many in said party—and the approval of many self-professed Trump supporters—with a tweet featuring a red versus blue electoral map of the United States and a remark about how he talks to Trump supporters outside that candidate’s rallies. Phillips’s argument was that if Democrats want to reach Americans outside of big cities, they must go speak with those people.
This seems obvious, but the common reply by Democratic activists has been, “land doesn’t vote,” a dismissal of all the red regions on the map on the observation that few voters live there—along with a great many insults at Phillips’s intelligence and recommendations that he drop out of the race, even though one of his complaints is that the Democrats are once again coronating a leader, rather than conducting a fair contest.
Let us start with a point of agreement: Land does not vote. Additionally, in many matters of public policy, the majority of voters should determine the direction that we collectively take. And it is antithetical to a free society to allow pocket or rotten boroughs to steer the whole for the benefit of the very few.
That being said, our federal constitution gives fundamental roles to both states and to the people. This was a necessary choice to get small states to join a union that was going to have the popular domination of Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts—yes, the latter was once one of our most populated states, and that reminds us that political influence shifts over time.
The House of Representatives was set up to reflect the will of majorities of the people, and the redistricting fights that we go through after every census are an illustration of how we acknowledge the mobilis in mobili nature of majorities. By contrast, the Senate and the presidency were established to provide an element of stability. With regard to the claims made by Democrats, in some sense, land does vote for senators and presidents.
This all stems back to the lingering resentments among Democrats over the 2000 and 2016 elections. Losing the presidency to candidates such as George W. Bush and Donald Trump was both a shock and an existential wound. But what good does this resentment achieve? Democrats may say all election long that land does not vote or that the will of the people ought to decide, but the Constitution in some sense says otherwise, and ignoring its rules will get them nowhere—nowhere other than to face future loses and continued resentments.
There have been proposals as to how to ignore the electoral college, generally through some agreement among the states that they will give their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular majority, but how that might be enforced, given the actual Constitution and the current Supreme Court is anyone’s guess. Another suggestion is to abolish the Senate, a notion that makes up in audacity what it lacks in practical application.
The reality is that achieving either of those would require at a minimum the agreement of the states and ultimately a constitutional amendment. It is also worth noting that the states that have declared their intention to follow a scheme requiring their electoral votes to go to the winner of the popular vote are already states that Democratic presidential candidates generally win, so this is no great accomplishment. But short of a constitutional mandate, any attempts at changing how our political system operates structurally would only be so much aspiration with no means of compelling opponents. And with the many states in the union that are small in population, finding thirteen—the minimum needed to stop constitutional change—that say no would be easy.
The problem here is that Democrats have adopted the characteristic of being the party of resentment since Al Gore’s loss in 2000. This is in addition to the neo-liberal takeover of the party under Bill Clinton’s presidency after the 1994 loss of Congress to the Republicans. The attitude among Democrats is that their candidates deserve to win. This was especially true in 2016 with the smugness expressed by Hillary Clinton and her supporters. The leadership of the party also would rather see Republicans win than to allow any progressive even as moderate as Bernie Sanders to get the nomination.
My recommendation, not that the party will listen, is that Democrats first adopt an acknowledgment of the way things are in their platform. The electoral college exists. The Senate exists. Democrats may dream all they wish about changing these facts, but doing so would require the sort of large, lasting, and coherent majorities that they have proved incapable of achieving in this century.
Then the party needs to understand that Dean Phillips is right in his desire to win over Trump voters—and more broadly, to appeal to the American people as a whole. If Democrats would make universal healthcare, higher education, and living wages in a sustainable environment the core of their platform, if they would communicate with the traditionalist parts of our country about how transgender and abortion rights are American values, and if they would drop gun control—their advocacy for that policy is a primary cause for their loathing of the voices of low-population states—they would win enough races to make questions about the votes of land and people fade into silence.
What they will likely to is to continue resenting and ignoring anyone who disagrees with them, while feeling righteous in the justice of their neo-liberal cause.