Tag Archives: Democracy

Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy by Jean Bethke Elshtain

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One hundred years ago, Jane Addams was one of the most famous and most admired women in the world. 

Wikipedia lists her occupation as “social and political activist, author and lecturer, community organizer, public intellectual”. Her tombstone in Cedarville, Illinois, describes her as a “humanitarian, feminist, social worker, reformer, educator, author, publicist, founder of Hull House, President [of the] Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom”. It also notes that she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Addams fought for women’s suffrage and is considered the founder of the social work profession in the United States. Sociologists view her as a social theorist. Philosophers place her in the school of philosophy known as Pragmatism.  At her death, some compared her to her hero, Abraham Lincoln, although she never sought political office.

This well-written book is an intellectual biography of Addams. It tells her life story but concentrates on her ideas and the policies she advocated. I especially enjoyed learning about her work at Hull House (a Chicago organization dedicated to making life better for immigrants and the poor); her ideas about government as an extension of housekeeping; and her emphasis on treating those who are different from us with respect (for their benefit and ours).  

America Isn’t a Democracy? Not Really, But It’s Suffering

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Having finally finished the previous post, I was deleting bookmarks when I came upon an article I’d forgotten to read: “America’s Not a Democracy, and That’s Bad News for Democrats”. It’s by Ed Kilgore of New York Magazine. He’s a professional writer who makes some of the points I made, but in a more professional manner.

The least significant part of his article is captured by that eye-catching phrase “America’s Not a Democracy”. The distinction he’s drawing is that between a democracy and a republic. But what’s a republic? Here’s a standard definition from The American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (3rd edition). A “republic” is: 

A form of government in which power is explicitly vested in the people, who in turn exercise their power through elected representatives.

But the dictionary goes on to explain that:

Today, the terms “republic” and “democracy” are virtually interchangeable, but historically the two differed. Democracy implied direct rule by the people, all of whom were equal, whereas republic implied a system of government in which the will of the people was mediated by representatives, who might be wiser and better educated than the average person. In the early American republic, for example, the requirement that voters own property and the establishment of institutions such as the Electoral College were intended to cushion the government from the direct expression of the popular will.

Well, we can certainly agree that the Electoral College is on its way to cushioning the government from the popular will this year, since it appears that Hillary Clinton (now leading the monster by almost 2.5 million votes) will be spending January 20th at home in Chappaqua – or maybe somewhere nice and warm where English is a foreign language.

Anyway, we now use the phrase “representative democracy” to say what America is. It means that we average citizens have a big role in choosing other citizens to run big parts of the government. 

The more significant part of the article is a recitation of the various ways in which “the … imbalance between the party that keeps winning the presidential popular vote and the party that keeps winning everything else is entirely the product of a system that systematically violates the supposedly sacrosanct principle of voter equality”. In other words, One Person, One Vote is a nice sentiment but that’s about it. Mr. Kilgore concludes, therefore:

For all of these interlocking reasons, the half-or-so of the American citizenry that is prone to support the Democratic Party and its more-or-less progressive agenda and ideology is and may continue to be underrepresented at the federal level to the point of powerlessness, and confined at the state and even local levels to enclaves that contain an awful lot of people but exert limited clout. And all this is totally aside from the extrinsic factors that place a thumb on the scale for Republicans, such as their support from business and financial interests and our currently uncontrolled system of campaign financing.

He then lists some ways Democrats might improve the situation. My favorite is “to win majorities in more states”. Unfortunately for our representative democracy, he doesn’t explain how that can be done. 

It’s Supposed To Be One Person, One Vote

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I can’t remember a less thankful Thanksgiving than last week’s. It’s hard to be grateful for ordinary well-being when the government’s executive branch is undergoing a hostile takeover. And it’s a hostile takeover by a gang of crooks, incompetents, bigots and cranks, otherwise known as the President-elect, his cabinet and his senior staff.

So it’s as good a time as any to review the rotten state of American democracy. We can even consider how we might fix it. (I say “we” because “they” live off the rot.)

British journalist Mehdi Hasan summarizes several ways in which our political system sucks:

#1:  We don’t have a national election. We have 51 separate elections. That’s how a woman who gets 65.0 million votes (and counting) can lose to a monster who gets 62.6 million. Those 51 contests result in 538 people being elected to the Electoral College. Those 538 people will select the new President on December 19.

#2: Our political campaigns take months and months and cost more per capita than in any other country. Most of the money goes to round-the-clock TV advertisements in key states (see #1). Those of who live in the rest of the country are taken for granted. 

#3: Relatively few of us vote. The last time 60% of the voting age population voted was in 1968. Most developed countries do much better.

#4: Rather than making it easier to vote, states run by Republicans are making it more difficult. The goal of this “voter suppression” is to stop as many Democrats as possible, especially African Americans, from voting. 

#5: Local politicians, not independent commissions, fix the boundaries of Congressional districts once every ten years. They put as many voters of the other party as possible in bizarrely-shaped districts while creating dependable majorities for their own party in the other districts. This process of “gerrymandering” – which the Republicans did so well in 2010 – helps explain why members of the House of Representatives hardly ever lose their jobs (97% were reelected this year). 

Mr. Hasan concludes:

Is this really what we define as democracy? Or is this, to quote the president-elect, a “rigged” system? Rigged not against Trump and the Republicans but against the poor, against ethnic minorities, against Democrats but, above all else, against basic democratic norms and principles and pretty simple notions of equality and fairness?

This isn’t a time for denial or deflection. The American political system is broken. Far from being the “world’s greatest democracy”, … representative democracy in the United States seems further hollowed out with every election cycle.

In fact, Mr. Hasan left out one of the worst failures of American politics. Some votes count more than others. We give lip service to the principle of One Person, One Vote, but the Constitution gives precedence to states with smaller populations. Small states are over-represented in the U.S. Senate, which determines who will be on the Supreme Court, and in the Electoral College, which determines who will be President.

Throw in the effects of geography and gerrymandering, and even the House of Representatives fails to meet the One Person, One Vote standard. This year, the Republicans beat the Democrats in House races by 61.5 million to 58.3 million. Ideally, that should translate into a slim 223-212 majority for the Republicans, not the 241-194 majority the Republicans will actually have. 

Not only do the residents of small states have excessive representation in the Federal government, but so do white voters. That’s because the smallest states have fewer minorities. From The Progressive:

The states with the fewest minorities (Idaho, New Hampshire, Nebraska, [etc.]) represent a total electoral college block of thirty-seven electoral votes. Based on their actual population, however, they should only be getting twenty electoral college votes…. 

Meanwhile, if we add up the ten states with the largest minority populations (California, Texas, Florida, [etc.]), we find that, based on population, they should be getting 276 electoral votes. In reality, though, they only get 240…

The problem is that not only do states vary greatly on who has access to the ballot box but, assuming you have successfully cleared the bureaucratic hurdles to get a voter ID card, waited in line for several hours, and cleared all the other voter suppression tactics and actually voted in your state, the [Federal] system itself is tilted in favor of certain states and certain voters.

So, borrowing a phrase from one or two Russian revolutionaries, what is to be done? How can we make America more democratic and, as a result, more Democratic? It sure won’t be easy. All right wing ideologies, from the 18th century on, have had a common theme. They fear that their power is at risk, so they fight like hell to maintain their position in the hierarchy. But let’s think about how we might reform the system anyway.  

A few years ago, the political scientist Norman Ornstein proposed a Voting Rights Act for the 21st century (that was soon after the Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act for the 20th century). He recommended, among other things:

  • The Federal government would create a standardized, personalized ballot that everyone would use to vote for President and members of Congress.
  • The Social Security Administration would issue a modern photo ID to everyone with a Social Security number (which these days means every U.S. citizen). If you had one of these ID’s and were 18 or older, you would be eligible to vote.
  • The government would allow weekend voting at any local polling place, with early voting the week before [why not have polling stations in every U.S. post office, for example?].

Mr. Ornstein didn’t mention the problem of making sure votes are properly counted, but that would be an obvious improvement too. For example, David Dill, a professor of computer science, founded the Verified Voting Foundation. He explains here how easy it would be to interfere with one of our elections. Professor Dill proposes, therefore, that: 

We need to audit computers by manually examining randomly selected paper ballots and comparing the results to machine results. Audits require a voter-verified paper ballot, which the voter inspects to confirm that his or her selections have been correctly and indelibly recorded… Auditing methods have recently been devised that are much more efficient than those used in any state. It is important that audits be performed on every contest in every election, so that citizens do not have to request manual recounts to feel confident about election results. With high-quality audits, it is very unlikely that election fraud will go undetected whether perpetrated by another country or a political party.

There is no reason we can’t implement these measures before the 2020 elections. As a nation, we need to recognize the urgency of the task, to overcome the political and organizational obstacles that have impeded progress.

Finally, there are three other reforms that hardly need mentioning.

The Electoral College was meant to protect small states and slave-owning states back in the 18th century. It still has one valid purpose: the members of the Electoral College can stop a truly unqualified or dangerous person from becoming President. (Small states get more than enough protection from the U.S. Senate and the Supreme Court.) If, however, the Electoral College allows T—p to become President, there is no reason to think it will ever fulfill its remaining purpose. That means we need to either amend the Constitution to get rid of the Electoral College or make the damn thing superfluous (the latter option is the goal of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which I wrote about earlier this month).

A second obvious reform is to institute a less partisan way of designing Congressional districts, that is, to limit the effect of gerrymandering. Yesterday, three Federal judges ordered North Carolina to redraw its legislative districts and hold a special, more representative election next year. Non-partisan commissions can do a better job at drawing district lines than politicians and their cronies. So can software, as described here, for example.

Of course, the last obvious change we need to make is campaign finance reform. Rich people and corporations should not exert exorbitant influence in a democracy. As the saying goes, it’s supposed to be One Person, One Vote, not One Dollar, One Vote.  Now all we have to do is convince, replace, out-vote or out-maneuver the right-wing reactionaries who stand in our way. 

This Week of All Weeks, Jane Addams Is Worth Thinking About

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Jane Addams (1860-1931) isn’t famous these days. At one time, however, she was the most-admired woman in America and well-known throughout the world.

Wikipedia lists her occupation as “social and political activist, author and lecturer, community organizer, public intellectual”. Her tombstone in Cedarville, Illinois, describes her as a “humanitarian, feminist, social worker, reformer, educator, author, publicist, founder of Hull House, President [of the] Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom”. It also notes that she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Addams fought for women’s suffrage and is considered the founder of the social work profession in the United States. Sociologists view her as a social theorist. Philosophers place her in the school of philosophy known as Pragmatism.  At her death, some compared Jane Addams, who never sought political office, to her hero, Abraham Lincoln.

As this horrible week comes to a close, it may help us to consider Jane Addams as an example of, in Lincoln’s words, “the better angels of our nature”.

Today, Addams is best known as the principal founder of Hull House, the first “settlement house” in the United States. It opened its doors in Chicago in 1889 and continued to operate until 2012. Its initial goal was to help recent immigrants find their place in American society, because Addams’s purpose in life was to convert her progressive ideas into action.

Here is a passage from Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy by Jane Bethke Elshtain:

The statement of purpose in Hull-House’s charter read: “To provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago”; but this fails to capture the spirit and the manifold activities of Hull-House. Addams refined this statement over the years. It was a “place for enthusiasms”; it helped “give form to social life”; it offered “the warm welcome of an inn”; it was a place for mutual interpretation of the the social classes one to another; it responded to ethical demands and shared fellowship; it was a place for the life of the mind….

At the conclusion of her second autobiographical volume, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams takes another stab at it: “It was the function of settlements to bring into the circle of knowledge and fuller life, men and women who might otherwise be left outside” [ p. 92].

The work of Hull House “gained expression in day nurseries, kindergarten classes, playgrounds, boys’ and girls’ clubs, a cooperative boardinghouse, theater workshops, music schools, language classes, reading groups, handicraft centers and eventually a Labor Museum” [p. 93].

In the early days, after Addams and a Hull House resident named Julia Lathrop came to the aid of a young woman, all alone, giving birth in a nearby tenement, Addams exclaimed:

“This doing things that we don’t know how to do is going too far. Why did we let ourselves be rushed into midwifery?” To which [Lathrop] replied: “If we have to begin to hew down to the line of our ignorance, for goodness’ sake don’t let us begin at the humanitarian end. To refuse to respond to a poor girl in the throes of childbirth would be a disgrace to us forevermore. If Hull-House does not have its roots in human kindness, it is no good at all” [p. 93].

We might say the same thing about the United States of America during the months and years ahead.

Taking Advantage of the Electoral College: Two Possibilities

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I don’t know about you, but I’m still avoiding the news. 

I do know, however, as votes are still being counted, Hillary Clinton is leading her opponent. She has 60.5 million; he has 60.1 million. (And roughly 6.2 million fools voted for candidates who had no chance to win.) In fact, her margin will continue to grow, since California is still counting votes and California voters strongly support Clinton. 

In a better world, these results would mean Clinton won the election. But in this world, we didn’t hold just one election. We held 51 separate elections, one for each state and one for the District of Columbia. The winner of each of those 51 elections thereby received a certain number of “electoral votes”. 

For example, Clinton beat her opponent by more than 2.5 million votes in California. That means she will get all of California’s 55 electoral votes. But if she’d won the state by 1,000 votes instead, she’d still get all 55. With some very minor exceptions, it’s winner-take-all. This is the system our founding fathers came up with more than 200 years ago. 

Furthermore, the number of electoral votes each state receives isn’t based purely on population. California, for example, has about 38.5 million residents. Montana has 1 million. One might think that California would get 38 times as many electoral votes as Montana, but that’s not how it works. Each state (and D.C.) gets at least 3 electoral votes. So empty Montana gets 3, while not-empty California gets 55, or 18 times what Montana gets, not 38 times.

Another way of saying this is that because we elect a President in this strangely indirect way, individual votes cast in Montana are worth more than ones cast in California. 

Our founding fathers weren’t idiots, of course. The complicated system they devised was partly a way to give smaller states more representation than bigger states, because small states like Rhode Island were afraid they’d be bullied by big states like Virginia. That’s why the small states were given extra weight in choosing a President. (Why the big states weren’t equally concerned about being cheated is an interesting question.)

So, officially speaking, we won’t know who the next President will be until December 19th. That is when the various “electors” submit their ballots. 

But wait! The founding fathers didn’t completely trust the wisdom of the voters. They had more trust in the electors, who were presumed to be pillars of the community. The voters might prefer an orange-haired demagogue or TV personality as President. The electors would presumably know better. They might have the good sense to choose a former Senator and Secretary of State. They might even choose whichever candidate won the nationwide vote. The point is that there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that requires an elector to vote for the candidate who won that elector’s state.

Now, it’s true that some states would levy a small fine on an elector who applied his or her judgment and voted for someone who didn’t win the state’s presidential election. But other states don’t even levy a fine. Electors from those states can vote for anyone with no penalty at all (except a lot of criticism from disgruntled voters back in their home state).

The ability of the presidential electors to vote for whomever they want has given rise to a petition at Change.org. It calls for the Electoral College to choose Hillary Clinton on December 19th. If she ends up with, say, 230 electors pledged to her after all the statewide ballots are counted, she would only need 40 electors to switch to her. Whoever receives 270 electoral votes become President. That’s how the system was designed to work.

I don’t expect 40 or so Republican electors to do what’s best for their country and the world, so I’m not expecting much from the petition. But I signed it anyway, as have more than a million other people. As they say, any port in a storm, especially a  world-class (pardon my French) shit storm! 

Fortunately, there is another way to eventually use the Electoral College to make America a better place. Several states have already adopted legislation that would award their electoral votes to whoever wins the nationwide “popular” vote. The legislation will take effect in those states as soon as states with a combined total of 270 electoral votes pass the legislation. After that, whichever candidate got the most votes nationwide in the next Presidential election would automatically receive at least 270 electoral votes and become President. It wouldn’t matter how states that haven’t adopted the legislation allocated their electoral votes.

The great thing about this plan, which is called the National Interstate Popular Vote Compact, is that it wouldn’t require changing the U.S. Constitution. The anti-democratic effect of the Electoral College would be eliminated without eliminating the Electoral College itself.  It’s very difficult to amend our Constitution. It’s only been done fifteen times in the last 200 years. So a plan that uses the Electoral College instead of trying to get rid of it has much to recommend it. (Of course, as long as the Electoral College exists, some electors might still go their own way.)

As of 2016, ten states and the District of Columbia have joined the Compact. Their 165 electoral votes are 61% of the 270 votes needed for it to have legal force. In addition, the necessary  legislation is pending in Michigan and Pennsylvania. If those states adopt it, we’ll have 74% of the necessary 270 votes.

As you might expect, states controlled by Republicans are less likely to join the Compact. Republicans love the fact that they’ve won two of the last five Presidential elections while losing the popular vote (The man who became President lost to his Democratic opponent, Al Gore, by 550,000 votes in 2000).  That doesn’t mean, however, that the Compact will never come into play. It just means Democrats need to take control of more state governments.

It might even be possible to get the necessary legislation passed in Republican-controlled states using public referendums or ballot questions. Most people, if asked, would probably agree that the candidate who gets the most votes should win the election. Well-financed campaigns to get the issue on the ballot in several more states might hasten the day when the person who gets the most votes will always win the election.

Of course, many Americans already believe that’s how our system of government works. Whoever gets the most votes wins. Knowledge of the Constitution isn’t our strong point. After the election we just had, I don’t know what is.