Beware the tyranny of coddled voters in the boondocks
There are two Americas. One vibrant, dynamic and heavily Democratic; the other stagnant, troubled, backward-looking and now all but exclusively Republican. The latter elected Donald Trump.
That may sound a deplorably broad generalisation until you look at the map of November’s presidential election results broken down by counties. Observe an ocean of Republican red swamping small islands of Democratic blue. Trump looks at the map and sees in it validation of his fatuous claim to have won a historic landslide in spite of coming second by nearly 3-million votes. The truth is different. Those blue islands are mostly the densely populated counties that are the engine rooms of a fullemployment American economy, encompassing the country’s largest cities and their teeming suburbs.
Hillary Clinton may have won in only 472 counties to Trump’s 2,584, but her counties are responsible for 64% of GDP.
In the previous election that put a Republican in the White House, the 2,397 counties that went for George W Bush in 2000 accounted for 46% of GDP; Trump’s haul, though nearly 200 larger, accounts for 20%.
Like Jacob Zuma, Trump owes his office to the hinterland. The US’s great cities are hugely diverse. They are fuelled by migration from within and without the nation’s borders.
They are magnets for those with the get and go to get up and go, people such as Trump’s Hebridean mother, not to mention his German grandfather, who didn’t hang around in the boondocks after making his first pile as a gold rush brothel keeper but headed back to New York to launch a dynasty.
The diversity and openness of New York, Miami, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other such metros contribute mightily to their economic dynamism. What John Stewart Mill wrote in 1848 is no less apt today: “It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar…. Such communication is peculiarly in the present age one of the primary sources of progress.”
To the growing detriment of US democracy, the political deck is stacked in favour of the sticks. To guard against a tyrannical majority, the founders decided that each state should be represented in Washington by two senators regardless of its population. Minority protection has now morphed into something dangerously akin to minority rule. With 84% of Americans now resident in metros — up from 63% in 1960 — it is technically possible to achieve a majority in the upper chamber with the votes of senators representing just 16% of voters nationally. And it is likely to get worse. By some estimates, 30% of the population will control 70 of 100 senate seats come 2040.
At the congressional level, gerrymandering of district boundaries is reckoned to have given Republicans two-thirds of their current edge over Democrats in the House of Representatives.
Republican-controlled state legislatures have proven themselves adept at passing laws to discourage voting by Democratic constituencies.
If Trump appoints another Supreme Court justice or two, such injustices could be locked in for generations. And that will leave this once great country in the grip of rubes and the plutocrats who cynically manipulate them with slogans, fake piety and phony patriotism.