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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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You need more than that to have a functioning democracy. In order to avoid incentivising defection from democracy, you also need to have fair post-game reward distribution. It's not enough for the vote itself to be fair. The actual exercise of power after the vote must be fair. If one side wins elections and then gets to enact policy, while the other side wins elections but then doesn't get to change policy, then this is hardly any better than the election being rigged in the first place. But this also has to balance against not harming the losers too much. There's no reason for the one sheep to accept two wolves voting to eat it, and it would be wrong to describe their subsequent attempt at self-defence as an attack on democracy.

Both parties in the US seem to hold both these grievances with existing elections, though they both responded to it in different ways. Republicans by claiming the voting process is flawed, and Democrats by claiming foreign interference made it flawed.

What exactly makes democrats think they got an unfair deal? Russia collusion was basically a fear reaction, not an escalation to feeling screwed by the democratic process.

The standard Dem "elections are rigged" rant is that all three federal elections (President, House and Senate) produce Republican control even if Democrats are slightly ahead in the popular vote. The electoral college is a fossil that makes no more sense than the continued presence of hereditary peers in the British House of Lords, and lots of Democrats (wrongly) feel the same way about the Senate. The Republican advantage in the House is the result of deliberate gerrymandering, including recursive gerrymandering where purple states elect Republican-dominated House delegations on maps gerrymandered by Republican-dominated state legislatures that are themselves elected on self-gerrymandered maps.

The gerrymander in Wisconsin is so severe that if it happened in a third world country then the State Department would call it a flawed democracy.

I think the supreme court getting in the way of policies that democrats want to implement would serve as an example. Either way, I didn't say these had to be justified grievances.