CT Blue

I know I should still be celebrating Biden’s victory, but, along with John Fogarty, I see a bad moon rising.

Kurt Gödel, he of the incompleteness theorem, came to this country from Germany in the thirties, to Princeton, where he was pals with Albert Einstein. When he became a citizen he was anxious to explain to the magistrate taking his oath that he had found a contradiction in the Constitution that left the country vulnerable to a dictatorship. Einstein and others counseled him to keep his mouth shut and just take his citizenship oath, and we still don’t know precisely what Gödel meant, but there’s no doubt that his basic point is valid: the constitution contains the seeds of its own destruction, which seeds have now taken root.

Krugman deals with the immediate prospects here, in a column well worth reading, as opposed to the David Brooks column of the same date, which I am still waiting for Driftglass to deconstruct. And here’s yet another, where Krugman very delicately points out that our problem is with stupid uneducated people who believe everything they see on Fox News or hear from Rush Limbaugh.

One of the many ironies about the Constitution’s flaws is that we were taught, and to the extent anyone teaches social studies anymore, kids are probably still taught, that those very flaws were master strokes of compromise by those fonts of wisdom, the sainted Founding Fathers.

The worst still relevantcompromise is often, at least around here, known as the Connecticut Compromise, for it was allegedly Roger Sherman’s bright idea to give each state equal representation in the Senate. I was taught to believe this was an incredible act of statecraft whose wisdom could not be overstated. Yet…We now have a situation in which California, the most populous state, has 2 blue Senators representing a population likely equal to the combined population of 8 or 9 red states, which would therefore have a total of 16 or 18 senators. A person from Wyoming has something like 20 times the representation of a Californian. The situation is the same if you take a look at the generally blue states vs. the red states. Our population is greatly underrepresented in the Senate, and will continue to be even if lightning strikes in Georgia.

The wise men of Philadelphia then went on to compound the problem by creating the electoral college which is deeply infected by the lopsided representation in the Senate. Presidents were supposed to be chosen by the wisest among us, who would be members of the electoral college. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, and it is an historical fact that when the popular vote has disagreed with the electoral college, it has been the choice of the majority that was the superior candidate. Imagine an America that had not had to live through eight years of W and four of the orange one, and imagine further that the Senate was a truly representative body during those periods instead of the plaything of Moscow Mitch.

To cap it off, the wise Founding Fathers made it virtually impossible to meaningfully change the constitution without having a civil war first, since a) any changes that would meaningfully rectify the issues I’ve identified above would reduce the power of the sparsely populated states, and 2) the sparsely populated states have more power to block a constitutional amendment than they do to block meaningful Senate action. This was part and parcel of their concessions to the slave states, whose slave owners, in essence, got extra representation due to their human property.

If we succumb to fascism, which we may have only temporarily done, it is because our sainted Founders did this to us. A truly representative system would be vastly different than what we have. Besides ducking fascism, we’d likely have national healthcare, systemic racism would not be quite so systemic, and we’d be doing something about climate change, to mention just a few things that come to mind.

Of course, the above only scratches the surface. Alexander Hamilton (about whom more in my next post) and his ilk were determined to make sure that the people had as little say in their government as possible. The point was to preserve the position of the elites and the excuse was that if the majority ruled, that majority would get captured by dangerous demagogues. It has worked to a certain extent; the people don’t have that much say, but oddly enough, the elites have learned to retain their power by harnessing the power of demagoguery to get the overpowered minority to vote against their own self interest. They hadn’t predicted that, but then they couldn’t anticipate our forms of mass communication.

Gödel’s conclusion was right, though we will never know his reasoning. The constitution’s flaws will bring us down, sooner or later, and some of those flaws will make it impossible to do anything about it.

We can only hope that when that time comes, we can peacefully agree to break up the union, and the sane states can band together to form a more rational system.

End of rant.