The Middle-Aged Genius’s Guide to Almost Everything 41 – A Robust Democratic Nation-State On the Brink
January 31, 2020
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is American democracy robust enough? Before, you thought, “It should be okay.” What about now?
Rick Rosner: We have talked about the threats to democracy. One of the threats is people holding national office who are evil. Oh! Roger Ailes, all the real motherfuckers are on the Republican side. Gerrymandering, which I have talked about before, has put Republicans in a position of electing a bunch of craven shitheads into national offices. I don’t need to go into all of the reasons.
Many, probably most, of the Republican senators, congresspeople, and president, vice president, and his cabinet, are just horrible people. Grifters and, maybe not, white supremacists but those who are willing to exploit white nationalism, which is a nicer name for white supremacy.
Wilbur Ross, the Secretary of Commerce, I used to have a mutual fund through Invesco, which was Wilbur Ross’s company. It never delivered the returns that it was supposed to; it turns out Wilbur Ross, who worked for this company, was stealing from investors.
This is a guy who probably stole tens of millions of dollars. This is the guy running the commerce department. In Germany, after WWII, they had to do years of de-Nazi-fication. I have to read more on it.
They had to take a population. Many of whose citizens who still supported Hitler and the Nazis years after they were defeated; I don’t know how they exactly did it. But right now, in America, we have a bunch of people who vehemently, enthusiastically, support assholery, and worse.
Via the compromise between small states and large states made at the beginning of America, they hold a lot of political leverage well beyond the percentage of the population that they represent.
The deal is, there was a lot of negotiation when they were building the Constitution. The rest of the systems under which America works too. The deal is, each state regardless of size gets two senators. So, a state the size of the population of Wyoming has 600,000 people or something, which has the same number of senators as California – which has more than 40,000,000 people.
So, each senator is Wyoming represents 1/67th the number of people represented by a senator in California. These little states, which tend to be conservative, and a lot of the Civil War Confederate states have a lot of political clout.
Even though, they are representing a small proportion, under 45% of the population – well under 45% of the population. It is tough. One reason we didn’t have evil people close to running major political parties was that America – what we told ourselves about ourselves – was a bunch of idealistic stuff.
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Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
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