In other words, to summarize, for the benefit of state officials everywhere:

In fact, the results of our little analysis are so consistent across the board we have no doubt that if we were to use multivariate techniques to combine and, in effect, force-multiply what’s otherwise “merely” a collection of compelling individual findings, the claims above would become increasingly irrefutable.

Is this conviction based on something more than mathematical intuition?  It is.  Take a look at the variable where the correlation is strongest–longevity–what we call “the golden metric.” Why?  Because it’s the end product, the result and consequence of all the others.  Think on it.  If our country set one simple goal, to increase the life expectancy of Black Americans until it’s equal to that of whites or, better yet, increase the longevity of all races until it matches that of Asian Americans,⁸ we’d literally have to address virtually every other challenge our country faces.

Some will look at these results, armed with the knowledge that, other things being equal, Democrats make it easier to vote than Republicans, and claim that these findings mean nothing because they’re just a “proxy” for “blue state.”  Those who are increasingly willing to “go there” will even note the high negative correlation between ease of voting and the proportion of the population that’s Black (-0.54), meaning the greater the magnitude of the Black portion of the population, the harder the state makes it for its citizens to vote (a pretty damning thing to admit in service to the cause, even for authoritarians, especially if they pride themselves on their populism⁹) and claim all the positive metrics associated with ease of voting have nothing to do with the merits of democracy and everything to do with the superiority of the white race (since the states that make it easier to vote are presumably also more white).

Allow us to retort. First of all, we can tell you from experience that issuing flip dismissals based on a correlation of a correlation is often ill-advised.  For example, when some of us coined the term “online influencer” in 2002 and did the first analysis of the characteristics of this group, we found that in many of the cases where there were significant differences between the responses of influencers and others, there were similar differences between the answers of high income individuals and their middle and lower income peers.  Naturally we were concerned that “influencer” might just be a proxy for “wealthy.”  But when we asked the survey house we were working with to do an advanced statistical analysis, they found that only a small fraction of the difference in responses between influencers and others could be accounted for by differences in wealth–it was clearly an independent variable.¹⁰

How is this possible? Because in each case, the significantly higher proportions of the wealthy who gave the same answers as the influencers were not always (or even especially often) the same individuals within that population–in fact, the wealthy individuals who responded like influencers varied widely from question to question.   Similarly, while it’s definitely the case that blue states as a group make it easier to vote than red states, there are plenty of exceptions in both directions.  For example, the ten states that have made it easiest to vote between 1996-2022 include three controlled by Republicans (North Dakota, Utah, and Idaho) and one (Iowa) considered swing over the same period, while the states that have made it hardest in the same time frame include one blue state (Virginia), and four considered swing (Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas).

And the ten states that have the proportionally largest Black populations include four that haven’t been among the hardest to vote over the the course of the observation window–North Carolina (14th), Maryland (15th), Delaware (30th), and Alabama (38th), while the ten states with the lowest proportion of Blacks include six that haven’t been among the easiest to vote between 1996-2022 overall–Wyoming (18th), Hawai’i (23rd), New Hampshire (27th), Montana (29th), South Dakota (34th) and New Mexico (35th).

The fact that Hawai’i and New Mexico are included among the “least Black” states highlights another problem with the racist explanation for our results–they may have very few Blacks, but they aren’t particularly white, either–in fact, both are majority-minority.  If you want to credit “whiteness,” not democracy, for our findings, the better comparison to make is between ease of voting and the proportion of the state’s population that is minority, not just Black.  And when you make this the apples to apples basis of comparison, the correlation (-0.21) is lower than all but one we’ve highlighted in favor of democracy, and this lone exception–income inequality–not only directly gives the lie to racist excuse-making, but at -0.16 (i.e. +0.16 in favor of egalitarianism) nearly fully eclipses the “whiteness” correlation.¹¹

The bottom line: if you’re looking for a really good “proxy,” try comparing democracies and authoritarianism in the realm of Olympic sports.  In any case, so far we’ve only provided the most generous, gentle, indulgent way of addressing anyone who critiques the validity of the results we’ve presented on the basis that they’re a “just a proxy” for “blue states,” “ethnic purity,” state wealth, or pretty much anything else.  The more accurate, less fool-suffering response is this:

And your point is?  AND YOUR POINT IS?

After all, it’s not like we’re trying to persuade said critics that drinking diet sodas causes obesity.¹² Is it really so puzzling, counterintuitive, and in need of “extraordinary proofs” that the more the citizenry participates in deciding who governs and what decisions the government makes to address the issues facing society, the better those decisions are likely to be, the more likely they are to actually result in better outcomes, and the more progress will be made towards goals like higher household incomes, less crime, better education, and longer life, to which the citizenry of red and blue states alike all aspire?

We’d say we ought to be sending that sentence to Guinness as a candidate for Longest Rhetorical Question, and further posit that full, true democracy is especially and even more vital when society is wrestling with generational, existential challenges like fascism in the 1940s and climate change today. When you’re really fighting a World War II level war, not just a waron, you can’t expect to win unless everyone is “all in,” and you can’t expect this to be the case unless everyone feels they have a real voice, a real opportunity to participate in the decisions being made. In short, if ever there were a case where correlation does equal causality, this would seem to be it.

Consider those territories to be populated by the souls and spirits of the millions and millions who were never allowed to vote, never given a voice in democracy when decisions were made that have led us to where we are today. Those who were enslaved, then denied the most fundamental American right for nearly a century after it was specifically extended to them. The women and Native Americans who had to wait another constitutional lifetime after the so-called emancipation amendments. The young and Hispanic who were intimidated, bamboozled, confused, and lied to, the poor and homeless who have been poll taxed in one way or another since our founding. And then there are those, particularly in the Black and Native communities, who were denied even more, far more than the right to vote, denied the right to breath and live in the land of their birth. Frankly, the authoritarians are lucky we aren’t demanding that each territory we’re proposing to enfranchise be given more electoral votes than California and Texas combined, because that would be only the beginning of democratic justice restored.

Sometimes the reason two wrongs don’t make a right is because the second “wrong” can never make up for the first.   But that doesn’t mean we don’t have an obligation to “die trying,” as the late Barbara Ehrenreich said in one of her final interviews.

The bow-tied tribe no doubt think they’ll be able to trip us up by pointing out that one or more of these territories might not want to be states, even after Puerto Rico demonstrated how badly you get treated in the scheme of things if you’re not.  No problem.  Then maybe we divide California into six states, as David Faris has suggested, all of them reliably blue.  Come to think of it, maybe the Dems should be exploring that anyway. Fair is nine new states, not just six.

And hey, don’t we owe the Native Americans at least some modicum of the self-governance we promised them.  There are more than five million Originals in the US today; in fact, depending on how you count, that number may be closer to 10M (3.7M+ registered, another 5.9M+ with “Native blood,”²¹ for a total just shy of 9.7M).  By our calculations (shown below), at low end (3.7M+) that’s more people than our four smallest states combined (WY, VT, ND, SD); at the high end (9.7M) it’s more than our ten smallest states combined.

So we figure Native Americans are entitled to an additional 10 states. If we don’t want to create more states, I suppose we could have a brand new Trail of Tears, where all the non-Native people in those states move out and they’re entirely taken over by Originals. After all, four of the ten already have Native names–Wyoming (Lenape), Alaska (Inuit or Yupik), North and South Dakota (the Dakota tribe, whose name means “ally”).

Does this seem extreme? Well, let us make it more reasonable.  If not for the genocide of Native peoples, it’s estimated by the National Academy of Sciences that there would be 13 million more Originals than live among us today.  There’s no statute of limitations on murder, so that puts the total population entitled to self-governance at nearly 23 million, which would add another six and a half states–the half being part of Kansas, which could be cut into two states just like the GOP did with the Dakotas, which were supposed to become a single state until the Republicans decided they needed another two votes in the Senate. Which would mean handing over a total 17 states to the Originals, or creating 17 more for them.  So if we only give them ten, we’re actually getting a bargain; we’re getting off easy.

Of course, this entire discussion may sound like nothing more than satire to you–we don’t have to give the Natives anything, do we?  Well, actually, if you’re an originalist, a real originalist, then yes we do.  Yes we do.  You see, we signed more than 500 treaties with Native American tribes, and broke every single one of them.  Does real originalism not include the treaties we signed? After all, originalist judges have certainly felt free to incorporate contemporaneous realities outside the Constitution when making originalist decisions, like whether guns were regulated in colonial days (a lot more than they are now, actually).  If all those treaties were to be enforced on originalist grounds, the result would likely be a Trumpist nightmare–they’d all probably have to move to the Sodoms and Gomorrahs running up and down the curs-ed East Coast.

Which should leave the authoritarian court jesters grasping at logistics. Those 10M Native Americans who should be 23M don’t just live in ten states, they’ll cry–they live all over the country! That’s right–they live without state boundaries, or really marked boundaries of any kind (fences were considered a ridiculous waste of time and effort), just like they did before any of us showed up, when America was Turtle Island, or just called “ours”–you can’t get more originalist than that.  And if, as the post-modern GOP continues to claim, ballots can be diverted to Venezuela, Germany, or Italy, how hard would it be to make sure ballots cast anywhere in the US end up being counted in the right Native state election?  Answer: not at all–we’ve been doing this for decades in order to allow American diasporas all over the world to continue to vote in all our elections.  So two words of advice on this subject for our Republican friends: stop digging.

Still, if the authoritarians really can’t or won’t stomach as many as twenty-three new states, all populated and run largely by the very people they’ve spared no effort to prevent from voting, there are at least two potentially even more originalist, and radical, alternatives.

Viva New Hampshire

There was no such thing as a career politician in 1776; neither this occupation nor the concentration of wealth that has accompanied it was part of the “wisdom of the founders.” Government may have been limited to propertied white men, but those men included clergy, ordinary merchants, sea captains, farmers, physicians, frontiersmen, even a licensed philosopher, and more.  Everyone kept their day job; no one lost touch with we, the people.

To see what our founders intended in the America of today, you have to journey to where it all started, to New England, and the state legislatures there, to the often raucous New Hampshire General Court, in particular, with its 400+ citizen legislators (400 in the House, 24 in the Senate), no party aisles to cross, and no more than $100/year/member salary, as mandated by the state Constitution, which, to be fair, represents a 3300% raise over what the gig paid for most of the state’s history.

What’s most striking and relevant to us about this configuration is that those New Hampshire House members represent represent a mere 1.4 million constituents.  That’s one House member for every 3,500 rock-ribbed New Hampshirites.  If that model were applied at the national level, instead of a national capitol building, we’d need to have national capitol neighborhoods–Logan Square, Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle, Georgetown, Foggy Bottom, Cleveland Park, Glover Park, Woodley Park, and Downtown DC together would do the trick– and Democrats and Republicans could get back to barbecuing together, watching their kids’ AYSO, Pop Warner, and Little League games together, having holiday parties at each others’ houses, and more.  Actual legislative sessions would have to take place at FedEx Field when the Commanders aren’t using it, because we’d have more than 98,000 House members instead of 435.

So maybe in this case, “as New Hampshire goes, so goes the nation” isn’t quite the right model, and in fact, the Founders specified in the Constitution that the minimum number of constituents in a Congressional district should be no less than 30,000.  Moreover, in actuality, the average number of constituents per representative (including free women and children) in the first Congress was significantly higher than that–51,176-54,715, depending on whether you count slaves (on a 3/5 basis) or not at all.  But the fact that the founders put down a marker at 30,000, and that, with three easily understandable exceptions, ²² the number of constituents per representative in each state in the first post-Constitution Congress only varied within a fairly narrow range (47,000-68,000, with an even narrower variance–47,000-59,000–in the case of nine of ten), strongly suggests they had a fairly strong belief, two centuries in advance, that democracy has a Dunbar’s number, an optimum beyond which representatives become increasingly unrepresentative and undemocratic, at least in the eyes of an ever-growing number of those they’re expected to represent. And they were pretty sure that, within relatively narrow margins of Census-quantified error, they knew what that number was.

It’s safe to say they’d be horrified at the number of citizens each representative speaks for today–747,000, which is substantially higher than the population represented at the time the Constitution was signed by each Senator in every state (nearly 3x on average) except Virginia, which had 747,000 as well (but only if slaves were considered whole persons, which they infamously weren’t), not to mention significantly higher than the number of citizens spoken for per legislator in every other major industrial country today.

So… what would happen, what would it look like to be truly originalist where apportionment is concerned? To find out, we assumed that the law of the land comported with the Founders’ vision as it appeared to manifest in the first apportionment.  In other words, each state continues to have two senators, but each member of Congress represents approximately 55,000 residents, not 747,000.  Based on this assumption and the 2020 Census results for each state, dividing each state population by 54,715, to be fully originalist,²³ and rounding reps up or down in the standard way, gives us a map like the one below.  And, not just to annoy any Trumpists who might be reading (as we’ll explain), in addition, we calculated how the Electoral College results of our most recent presidential contest would change if apportionment were as “originalist” as they claim to want our country to be.

Not surprisingly, Biden does even better against Trump in an originalist Electoral College, winning 58% of the electoral votes, versus 56.9% in 2020, while Trump’s grip slips from 43.1% to 42%.  Why? Because the major effect of the change on the College is to increase the relative weight of the population-based (i.e. democratic) component of its distribution of electors–vs. the anti-democratic allocation of two senators to each state regardless of population.  Or, to put it even more starkly–as the Constitution itself did–the more originalist approach increases our commitment to be a nation, the United States of America, at the federal/highest level, as opposed to the weak confederation of states we were before the Constitution took effect (apparently Republicans, by contrast, have learned to love the EU).

Interestingly, the change does not elevate Hillary Clinton to victory in 2016, though she does fare somewhat better in the electoral count.  And this highlights the real problem with the EC (beyond the obvious one, of course), which is not that the small states have more impact than they democratically deserve; it’s that, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska, every state has decided (correctly, at least from a self-interested perspective) that the best way to maximize their impact on a national election and, especially, maximize the attention of the candidates vying for their support, is to make their electoral votes winner-take-all.²⁴

Cities And States

Any claim that the Senate (and by extension, the Electoral College) as it is today represents the “wisdom of the Founders” rests on a very shaky assumption–we’d call it outright wrong–about something that is nowhere defined in the Constitution: states. Because of this, we can only objectively deduce their vision on that score based on the facts on the ground, not cherry-picked remarks from one Founder’s diary or the marketing materials of America’s first great agency, Madison, Hamilton & Jay. When we do so, the results will give no comfort to those who believe the same revolutionaries who fought for “one man, one vote” would countenance a world in which a Wyoming vote is worth more than sixty-eight times one in California.

At the time the Constitution was signed, there was no city bigger than the smallest state. Ten years later, there was still no city bigger than the smallest state. It was not until the census of 1810, 20+ years after the signing, that a city, New York, had grown bigger than the smallest state, (the smallest two, actually) and both of those states (DE, RI) were part of the original thirteen, not new ones created despite being smaller than our largest cities. Clearly the decision-makers, while increasingly a generation beyond founder status, did not take the creation of states lightly, and had standards–in particular, imposing an informal minimum statehood population of 60,000, and even this was only gating, not a guarantee.

It would not be until twenty-nine years after signing (1818) that a territory, Illinois, was granted statehood despite being smaller than at least three cities and the smallest state of the original 13, with only 34,000+ residents at the time, and even then, another territory, Missouri, had not been so anointed by 1820, despite having a population 20% larger than Illinois. In fairness, Missouri was by then a political football between free and slave states, but it’s also apparent that Illinois was granted statehood as early as it was because it was clear it was growing so fast that it would rocket through the minimum and beyond and might even become unmanageable before statehood could be put in place. And in fact, in just the two years between 1818 and 1820, its population grew by more than 60%, and by 1830 it had nearly tripled again, and was double the size of the smallest of the Original Thirteen, 50% larger than the next smallest of the Thirteen, had passed Missouri and Mississippi, and was at least twice as large as any city except New York.

In the 1830 and 1840 censuses, there were no new states smaller than any of the original thirteen. In the 1850 census, the first to include Florida as a state, it was 4,000 short of Delaware, but by 1860, like Illinois, Missouri, and Mississippi before it, it had leapfrogged ahead.

Which brings us to 1864, long after the last Founder was in the ground, in the depths of the Civil War, when Lincoln was believed to be on the verge of being unseated, that the Republicans committed the original sin corrupting the statehood process, albeit for a good cause (as many corruptions initially are), and with a convenient, more traditional rationalization to back them, admitting Nevada as a free state, even though it had only 40,000 people, smaller than at least 22 cities based on the 1860 census, on the grounds that a ginormous vein of silver had been found there which, in fairness, had caused the population to balloon much faster than Illinois’, by nearly 500% since the 1860 count.

The thinness of this rationale began to be revealed in the 1880 census, when Nevada, became the second state, after Oregon in 1870, to remain stuck below the original 13 two censuses after statehood–and by 1880, Oregon had surpassed Delaware in population by nearly 20%.  As for Nevada, it remained dead last in population in the 1890, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, and 1950 censuses. It was not until 1960, when, with, appropriately, the aid of organized crime, it finally vaulted past Vermont, and was replaced in the basement by another ruby-red creation, Alaska (admitted as the price for the admission of non-white Hawaii, which had been bigger than at least one of the OG Thirteen for at least forty years, bigger than two for at least thirty, and entered the Union as 43rd–not 49th or 50th–in population ²⁵), a state, Alaska, which itself failed to reach the statehood standards of the Founders until 2000, forty years and twenty national elections later, when it finally crept past Vermont, a state nearly 70 times smaller in land mass, leaving, equally appropriately, Wyoming, which, in more than a century (it was founded in 1890) has still never managed to achieve what the Founders would consider statehood.

Nonetheless, Nevada set the necessary precedent for the Republicans, one they would goatsuck, as we’ve described, for all it was worth after they were bought by the oligarchy. By the end of their debauched anti-democratic politicization of the statehood process–gerrymandering on the grandest scale–specifically to combat the growth of urban centers, already largely Democratic, in the face of an industrial-driven demographic sea change running in exactly the opposite direction, the 1890 census revealed there were:

• 46 cities bigger than the smallest state (ie more than the total number of states at the time)
• 29 cities bigger than the second smallest
• 20 cities bigger than the third smallest
• 17 cities bigger than the fourth smallest (albeit one of the OG 13)
• 16 cities bigger than the fifth
• Seven cities bigger than the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th smallest states
• Four cities bigger than the 13th, 14th, 15th smallest
• Three cities bigger than the 16th smallest
• Two cities larger than the 17th smallest state, and
• One city larger than the 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, 25th, and even the 26th smallest.

Is it any wonder, in light of this history, that the Republicans were the first to think of using states to create a shadow confederacy under the auspices of ALEC?

Not much has changed since, as you can see from the chart below:²⁶

To add a little color, here’s a chart showing our biggest cities vs. smallest states today:

The industrial wave that had concentrated Americans in the cities receded some after WWII, as white flight and other factors led to an exodus to the suburbs, which were, not surprisingly, initially reliably Republican, but have become increasingly blue in recent years. Hence, the go-to reference in the last few years to illustrate the anti-democratic nature of both the Senate and the Electoral College has been to focus on metropolitan areas, rather than cities, to observe, for example, that Los Angeles County is more populous than Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Maine, and New Hampshire combined–or, if you’re looking for a red state-only comparison, Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, West Virginia, Idaho, and Nebraska. Yet the first group has 20 senators between them (one-fifth of the entire body) and the second has 16, while LA shares two senators with the rest of California.

Is there any reason to believe the founders would have found such an arrangement acceptable?  We think not.  And to drive a stake into the heart of that undead horse, we conducted the following analysis to determine how many of what we call “states” today would have been considered so by the founders in their time, and how far removed from statehood those that wouldn’t have would be.

(1) We compared the population of each state today, starting with the smallest, Wyoming, with the population of the largest, California, to develop a current population ratio for each. For example, California has nearly 70 times the population of Wyoming (68.17 times, to be precise).

(2) We then took the free population of the largest state in the first census²⁷ (in 1790, less than a decade after the Constitution was ratified), Virginia, and divided it by that ratio for each state to find the most comparable city or state in the founders’ time.  So, for example, if you divide the population of Virginia in the 1790 census–747,610–by the ratio of California’s population to Wyoming’s–68.17–you find that Wyoming would have been viewed by the founders as a town about the size of Newport, Rhode Island (population 6,716 in 1790) back in the day, i.e. far, far from statehood material.

(3) Because this was an exercise in looking at the world as the founders would have seen it, we exempted the 13 originals from our analysis (not to be confused with grandfathering them²⁸), plus Vermont²⁹, because even though a few of them might flunk the statehood test today, clearly in the founders’ eyes they qualified then and, it should be re-noted, not every candidate territory did; the inaugural census, for example, included four entities–Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, and “Southwest Territory”–that were not yet states.

(4) Starting with Wyoming, we rinsed and repeated our way up until we hit a modern state with the heft to be considered as such by our forefathers (i.e. a state representing the same proportion of Delaware, the smallest state of the back-in-the-day).

As you can see from the chart below, quite a number of what we call “states” would not have made the constitutional grade; they’d likely only have been considered territories or, in astronomical terms, “dwarf states,” a la Pluto.  In each such case, we’ve included the 1790 city whose population they most correspond to (including one that’s now just a neighborhood in Philly), and you can check our work in its entirety here.³⁰  By contrast, LA County would have been our 10th largest original state, larger than Delaware, Rhode Island, and Georgia, as well as out-peopling the three territories–Maine, Vermont, and Kentucky–that also exceeded DE in size:

It’s hard not to notice something nearly all the dwarf states have in common–with the exception of New Mexico, Hawai’i, and part of Maine, ³¹ they’re all staunchly Republican. Remove them from the map, as the founders would (or, at a minimum, combine them), and both blue and swing states dwarf the red electorally. Moreover, even if several of the swings were to go to Trump, as they did in 2020, Biden would beat him by an even greater margin–in the only vote the GOP considers legitimate–than if we just rationalized and recalibrated the number of representatives to the founders’ proportions as we earlier proposed.

Of course, this would be highly uncharitable to those Americans living in the states that would be demoted to territories. Perhaps given their dwarf status and predominant political attitudes, which apparently haven’t changed as much as the rest of us from 1776 to today, we could give them each 3/5 of a vote to cast.  Too on the nose?  Too soon?

In any case, all the above suggests an even more radical solution than those previously described, one that more directly addresses our current democratic challenges as a nation, is much more more aligned with the founders, and extends in history all the way back to democracy’s original foundations: the city-state.

Because they were relatively small, contained, and homogeneous, Ancient Greece’s city-states were the natural birthplace of the original “laboratories of democracy.”  We all know about the purported granddaddy of them all, Athens, but researchers have found direct evidence that more than fifty other Grecian city-states enjoyed a democratic form of government for at least some portion of their history.

Moreover it’s believed that between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC, democracy spread like a climate-driven wildfire among the cities, until as many as half of all Greek cities and towns had democratic forms of government.  At that point, the first golden age of democracy ran into threats similar to those we face today–the rise of oligarchs and therefore authoritarians, the formation of leagues like ALEC, which increasingly distanced government from direct local democratic control, etc.  And clearly this was not an improvement–by 31 BC, all of Greece had fallen to the Roman Empire.

Some, with either witting or unwitting authoritarian proclivities, would point out that Greece’s city-state era was marked by nearly continuous civil war(s).  Our response: …And your point is?  Is that not where we are now–albeit the raw, cold version of same–with right-wingers cheerleading and fanning the sparks into flames all the way?  The challenge for the more perfect union is preventing simmering rage fueled by ignorance from heating up, boiling over, and searing the body politic.

In fact, so much talk of civil war seems to elide over the reality that we are no longer in the pre-industrial era: per above, today’s divide is urban vs rural, and a civil conflict would involve every state at war with itself–that’s how meaningless the concept of states has become in the post-industrial era. Milwaukee and Madison would join forces with Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, not the rest of Wisconsin, because the story of recent political history is one of rural America gerrymandering and suppressing its way to supermajorities in state government, then using state power to crush local self-rule in the cities. For the majority of Americans who live in metropolitan areas, gun-toting rural religious fanatics riding herd over the urban populace on behalf of radical right-wing governments is a model we don’t even find acceptable thousands of miles beyond our sight, i.e. in the likes of Iran, Afghanistan and, increasingly, Russia.

The bottom line: there is literally no evidence the Founders thought it was acceptable for states to be created with populations smaller than even one of our cities, let alone so many. There were none such when the Constitution was signed, and when new states created over the next thirty years, only one, in the 28th year post-signing, was granted statehood despite being smaller than any of the original 13–and it quickly surpassed them. And no evidence, despite the more rural nature of the country at the time of its founding, that even the Jeffersonians wanted our cities to be ruled over by a rural Taliban of armed zealots.

Which brings back to democracy’s origins and the city-states of ancient Greece. The right-wingers say they can’t stand our cities, but to literally separate into two countries would be suicidal in our global competition with Russia and China. And given the distribution of wealth and productivity in our country (70%+ of GDP is produced by counties that voted Democratic in 2020), any newly self-liberated rurocracies would likely soon find themselves with a lot more in common with the Taliban than they bargained for.

What would the Founders do? Based on how well-versed they were in the history of the original democracies, their strong preference, as previously discussed, for local over national government, and the standards they apparently applied to determine the creation of new states, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that they’d look at the mess we’ve made and make one of their typical simple gordian rules that only those who disagree find ambiguous: every city–or, more accurately and stably–every metropolitan area with a larger population than the smallest state in the most recent census becomes a self-governing city-state with two Senators, impossible-to-gerrymander representation in Congress, and appropriate representation in the Electoral College. What if the metro area declines in absolute or relative population after achieving statehood? I dunno, have any of the red states lost a senator when this happened?

What if the Republicans don’t like it? What if they don’t like any of what we’ve proposed (as they surely won’t)? I could say that the difference between our country and Iran or Afghanistan is that in America, anyone can buy an unlimited amount of firearms, that Democrats and democrats have more resources to do so, that as the Ukrainians have demonstrated acutely, it’s awfully difficult for even a vastly superior force to take a city whose defenders are armed, not only with weapons but a morally righteous cause–democracy–even if they’ve never picked up a weapon before in their lives,³²  especially a city with ready access to open water, as most of ours have, and it’s not hard to figure out whose side our allies would be on–the calculations won’t be much different than they made during the Civil War, especially given the way they were treated by Trump.  Of course, the Trumpists would have the support of the Russian army–rotflmao…

But why go there? We all know, including most of those on the “other side,” that the only winners in such a conflict will be the Russians and Chinese, and while there’s clearly a Fifth Column in our country now who would be good with this, the vast majority of Americans are not among its members.  “Prepare for war” isn’t the answer to the obvious question that catches in the throat, once you realize there’s literally no reason or evidence to believe anything on the authoritarian spectrum, rather than pure representative democracy, was what the creators of our nation emphatically desired–because it’s not the right question.

The question we all should be asking is: what’s stopping us?  What’s stopping us from making our government right, the American way it was meant to be? The problem isn’t the “other side.” We’ve constructed our prison–a prison of cynicism and inertia–ourselves, with a little help from our frenemies.³³ How this happened and how we break out will be the subject of Part 7 of this series.  In the meantime, know that while we may seem to be dreamers, we’re not the only ones, and maybe not even the most radical³⁴ or creative…

 

Creative Politics is the world’s first community-based political incubator, perpetually under construction, as we synthesize the best of liberal and conservative ideals with technology and history to generate policies, strategies, applications, and actions for the post-modern era that are well outside the beltway, and well beyond just talk.  All Creative Politics blog posts are collaborative, living documents, the way Madison and Hamilton would create them if they were writing The Federalist today.  Let us prove it (with credit) by leaving us a comment below

 

 

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Other than the Founders, everyone in this image has played a role in corrupting the Founders’ vision for our country or benefited from the corrupt role of others.  It will probably not escape your notice that, in addition, other than the Founders, and (perhaps) the foreign dictators, virtually everyone pictured is a Republican.   To be clear, there are a LOT of Republicans and Republican leaders who have no place in this image. Many, in fact, have been among the most ardent and effective defenders of our nation’s values, and even a couple of those listed below have been profiles in courage when democracy was at the brink.  

1. George W Bush — Beneficiary of a combination of voter fraud (as it should be defined–fraud against the voters) and the fraud known as the Electoral College, thereby winning an election that in a democracy, representative democracy, republic, democratic republic, or constitutional republic (all of which are interchangeable terms to a real originalist) he would have lost 2. Donald Trump — Beneficiary of massive voter fraud, including “sweeping and systematic” interference on his behalf by a hostile foreign power, on top of the Electoral College, which should be the only federal structure ever named after him (since size matters so much to the man, we’d also propose upgrading it to a university), thereby winning, by a much greater negative margin than Bush, an election he would have lost if the vision of any andevery single one of the founders was in place.  3. Mitch McConnell — While he stood tall against the would-be dictator Trump at critical moments, the Republican Majority/Minority Leader in the Senate has also been king of the filibuster (which the Founders universally opposed): of the obscene 2,000+ filibusters that have occurred since 1917,  half have occurred in the last twelve years, and this doesn’t include all the legislation that’s never even been considered because Democrats know it would just be filibustered. Adding insult to injury, half of all bills filibustered have been concerned with civil rights, in direct contradiction to the Founders’ vision. McConnell is also infamous for denying a duly elected Democratic president the right to nominate a Supreme Court justice nearly nine months before the next presidential election, on the ostensibly democratic grounds that the nomination was close enough to the election that the voters should decide who gets to make it, then, just four years later, three weeks before a Republican president was widely projected to lose his bid for re-election, bigly (and did), confirmed said Republican president’s conservative nominee to replace a liberal justice who had just passed away 4. Kevin McCarthy, the current Republican Speaker of the House who briefly spoke the truth of a real man of conscience, but had the opportunity to finish off wannabe strongman Trump after the insurrection, and didn’t, out of cowardly self-interest, the same cowardly self-interest that caused him declare his willingness to cut off support for democratic Ukraine and agree to severely anti-democratic terms that now allow a tiny minority of House members to hold the entire institution hostage 5. Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, who deliberately destroyed bipartisanship during his term in office, thus becoming the prime mover who made polarization, and therefore authoritarianism, possible in the modern era 6. Clarence Thomas, the most radically right wing of Supreme Court justices, and increasingly influential on the Court; principal supporter of the independent state legislature doctrine and holder of a veritable hornet’s nest of anti-democratic and unconstitutional views 7. Saint Sandra Day O’Connor, the deciding vote in Bush v Gore, (ed note: since we published this, it’s been learned she was much more than just the fifth vote) the deepest and most grievous wound to the Founders’ vision since the back-to-back murders of MLK and RFK in 1968 (and, as the only justice to have served in elective office–the last of her kind, sorely needed on the hermetically sealed court of today–was the one who most should have known better), and who, after which, on retirement, had the audacity to appoint herself as the next generation’s guide to civics (as penance? probably not). Predictably and appropriately, all the outcomes of the “games” in her “game-based” service were pre-ordained every step of the way (hence the scare quotes).  Yes, we know she has Alzheimer’s, and having lost a brilliant grandfather I was very tight with to that disease, I know how awful this is, and wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, which Justice O’Connor definitely is not–until That Decision I was an unstinting admirer, and in fact, I fervently wish she wasn’t suffering from it, so that she’d be fully aware of all she wrought, everything Bush v Gore has led to. As it stands, she has at least expressed regret for the decision, saying it’s a case the Court never should have taken.   8. Neil Gorsuch — Radical right-wing Supreme Court justice who warms the seat McConnell stole from the duly elected president who had the Constitutional right to fill it, active participant in the destruction of democratic rights and democracy  9.  Radical right-wing Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, who perjured himself repeatedly before the democratically-elected Senate, not only to get his seat, but to get the seat that made his Supreme Court nomination possible; an active participant in efforts to destroy democracy via the Court, also heavily involved in efforts to bring down a democratically-elected president over a consensual sexual affair and in the frauds the Republican Party perpetrated to steal Florida and with it, the 2000 election, from its rightful winner  10. Amy Coney Barrett — Radical right-wing Supreme Court justice and beneficiary of McConnell’s coprageous hypocrisy in 2020; active participant in the destruction of democracy who perjured herself before the democratically elected Senate to win her seat 11. Greg Abbott — Governor of Texas, the world’s largest electoral plantation, who has relentlessly supported and signed into law some of the most sweeping voter suppression measures in the country (the result of which Texas has been rated the most difficult in the country to cast a ballot) 12.  Tom DeLay — Former Republican Majority Leader, and architect of the unprecedented power grab in which Republicans used their success in the 2002 Texas state elections to unconstitutionally redistrict the state for a second time in the same decade, creating a severely gerrymandered Republican advantage in Congressional elections that persists to this day (it’s a mark of how weak Democrats are that they’ve never returned this favor) 13. Ron De Santis — Current governor of Florida and would-be President of These United States, whose actions since assuming the governorship have been breathtakingly authoritarian, and have included a gerrymander far more severe than even FL’s legislature contemplated, so as to lock in his would-be dictatorship against democracy  14. William Barr — Attorney General under Donald Trump who used his position to politicize the neutral Justice Department, cover up Trump’s electoral crimes, and punish his electoral enemies. He showed surprising fortitude for a true believer (he would still support Trump in 2024) and a deep reserve of faith in democracy when he declared, first to Trump, and then to the world, that election denial to be “complete bullshit,” but unfortunately that alone doesn’t undo the damage he did.  15. Stephen Miller — Senior political advisor to Trump, often considered his “designated Nazi,” architect of many of Trump’s most authoritarian, anti-American policies, about which, he infamously declared, “the president’s authority will not be questioned.” 16. Karl Rove & Jim Baker — Rove was one of Richard Nixon’s dirty tricksters, a font of dishonest campaigning, and architect of the use of 9/11 for political gain rather than unite the country, which would have been considered his cardinal sin by the Founders, though his use of ALEC to create a state-level shadow government and confederacy would be, at worst, a close second.  Baker was generally a stand-up guy until he became the leader of George W Bush’s successful efforts to steal Florida and the 2000 election from Al Gore. 17. Vladimir Putin — Russian totalitarian ruler who has serially wreaked havoc with our elections (possibly dating back as far as 2004, and in any case, continuing well beyond the 2016 election to the present day), with the tacit, and sometimes explicit, support of Donald Trump and other leading Republicans (as we’ve discussed here and here).  18. Xi Jinping — Totalitarian dictator of China, whom Republicans have risibly attempted to claim is in league with Democrats, which is either projection, distraction, or wishful thinking based on the overwhelming evidence of their own leader’s extensive, compromised complicity in China’s rise 19. Ron Johnson — Republican Senator from Wisconsin, beneficiary of a level of voter suppression that has been likened by Harvard’s Election Integrity Project to Congo’s, Jordan’s, and Bahrain’s (the latter two ruled by kings), regular purveyor of Putin’s propaganda, especially against democratic Ukraine–even after being told by our intelligence agencies that what he was spouting was Russian disinformation, active participant in Trump’s scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election via the generation of slates of fake electors for key states like Wisconsin 20. Tucker Carlson — aka Taiga Tucker, leader and primary mouthpiece (a la Tokyo Rose in WWII) of Russian dictator Putin’s Fifth Column in the US as he seeks to get our country to abandon democratic Ukraine. His main argument against any facts that don’t support his own position? A hyena-like giggle, as shown here.  21. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Radical right-wing Congressperson and Q-Anon supporter, one of six members of Congress known to have sought preemptive pardons from Trump for their roles in support of his anti-democratic coup attempt of 1/6/21 22. Lauren Boebert — Congresswoman and Q-Anon supporter, known for, among other things, repeatedly trying to smuggle weapons on to the House floor. 23. Matt Gaetz — Radical right-wing Congressman, suspected statutory rapist and sex trafficker, another member of Congress who sought a Trump pardon for his active role in the latter’s attempt to overthrow our democratically-elected government. 24. Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary, considered a role model by authoritarians seeking ways to turn our democracy into a GOP-run dictatorship without having to fire a shot 25. Boris Johnson, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, one of a coterie of leaders around the world who modeled themselves after Trump and took cues from him, the worst of which in Johnson’s case was Trump’s xenophobia, which led him to full-throated support of Brexit, which will likely go down as the single worst decision made in British history  26. Jair Bolsonaro — Former president of Brazil, the archetypical mini-Trump known as the “Trump of the Tropics” for his far more fervent aping of our strongman, including disastrous response to COVID, and attempted insurrection after he lost his bid for re-election 27. Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud — Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and another of Trump’s merry band of dictators, and like many of the others, guilty of trying to sabotage our elections, in MBS’s case by dramatically raising oil prices three weeks before the most recent mid-term elections in an effort to tip the results to the GOP 28. Benjamin Netanyahu — Prime Minister of Israel, yet another Trump wannabe in what was formerly democracy’s strongest outpost in the Middle East (which would now probably have to be decimated Lebanon or the people most deserving of a country who don’t have one, the Kurds 29. Roger Stone — Like Rove, one of Nixon’s original dirty tricksters, and the Zelig–no, the John J McCloy–of virtually every effort to corrupt our democracy ever since, including the Brooks Brothers riot in Miami that halted the 2000 recount in Florida, the collaboration with Russia to steal the 2016 election (about which his omerta was rewarded with a Trump pardon), and coordination of January 6th coup attempt 30. Rudy Giuliani — Former mayor of New York (where the vanity and incompetence of  “America’s Mayor” led to the deaths of dozens, if not hundreds of first responders), regular purveyor of Russian and Trumpian disinformation, leader of many of Trump’s fraudulent efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, proponent of many of the most extreme tactics proposed to Trump, and serially corrupt  31.  Steve Bannon — Trump political advisor and former chief strategist, former chairman and founding board member of extreme right-wing Breitbart Media, board member of Cambridge Analytica (which was key to the spread of Russian disinformation via Facebook during the 2016 election), advocate and supporter of authoritarianism around the world, banned from Twitter after he advocated the execution of FBI Director Christopher Wray and infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci, currently serving a contempt sentence for refusing to answer bipartisan Congressional questions about his role in the January 6th coup attempt  32. John J McCloy — Unelected dean of the American establishment and the anti-Zelig of American politics whose biography should never be read without Sympathy for the Devil playing in the background, among other things (a small sampling of his activities surveyed in his biography), McCloy was at Goldman-Sachs when the company was instrumental in causing the 1929 stock market crash that led to the Great Depression, instrumental in persuading Roosevelt to intern the Japanese and to not bomb the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz, persuading the Warren Commission not to look into the evidence that there was a conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK, and persuading Carter to allow the Shah of Iran into the US for medical treatment, which caused the Iran hostage crisis that led to Carter’s replacement by Reagan–and the rest is history.  Back

¹ Aka “the wisdom of crowds” in modern parlance, an analogy much less in vogue with the authoritarian crowd, due to its clear democratic overtones vs. the authoritarian possibilities that inhere to a giant invisible paw, or better yet, a fist. Back

² As the saying goes, “coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” Back

³ The dataset includes all the presidential years from 1996 to 2020, plus the mid-terms of 2018 and 2022, which we decided to include so as to give what we thought was appropriate additional weight to recent dynamics, as the most likely to impact voting today. Back

⁴ If you want to try it and see for yourself, this link will show you how to use the CORREL function in Excel, and here are links to our data sources for ease of voting, household income, household wealth, income inequality, poverty, violent crime, jobs, GDP growth, population growth, health care quality, preK-12 education quality, higher ed quality, environmental quality, educational attainment, obesity, and life expectancy/longevity. We like our choices of metrics and sources, but would love it if you’d try others and let us know in comments below what you find. Back

⁵ Mississippi regularly brings up the rear in rankings of everything good and typically leads the way only when the metrics turn negative. Ironically, it’s the state with the highest percentage of Black Americans (nearly 40% of its population), yet has not had an elected Black statewide official in decades. A bit of foreshadowing: we believe the evidence will clearly show these things–poor performance on every metric and consistent lack of statewide representation for 40% of its population–are not unrelated. Back

⁶ Just as there are special and general theories of relativity, we’ve increasingly come to believe there are, or ought to be, special and general theories of uncertainty. The special theory would be, of course, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that you can know either the position or velocity of a subatomic particle, but not both, because the very act of observation impacts the observation’s result. We believe something similar happens in the hard sciences writ large. Hard science depends for its advancement largely on experiments in which all but one variable is held constant (or at least as few variables as possible are allowed to vary, entangled with one another via statistical methods). But the reality is that in nature there are an almost infinite number of variables, and in the cavernous, engulfing landscape of things we don’t know, holding all but one variable constant is often akin to shining a bright light on one point in a cave, which, of course, has the effect of pitching everything around it further into darkness.

In consequence, once we get beyond the easy observations in any field (the better lit part of the proverbial cave near its entrance), the further resulting scientific discoveries themselves often turn out to be akin to the parable of the blind men and the elephant, and in consequence of that,  there’s a good chance that any scientific finding you read one year will sooner or later be contradicted or found unrepeatable and, on a grander scale, why what physicist and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called “paradigm shifts” continue to occur, any may continue to do so perpetually. 

All that said, the great mathematician and philosopher Jacob Bronowski would want us to be clear that the import of Heisenberg’s principle is not that “we can’t know anything.” In fact, via a revolutionary and elegant series of equations, Heisenberg and his collaborators in Copenhagen, showed that, ironically, there is a great deal of precision in uncertainty, and collectively, the locations of a particle are probabilistic, taking the form of the familiar Bell curve (which is how light can be both particle and wave).  It will be interesting and telling if, collectively, the results of experiments in areas of scientific inquiry that continually elude repeatability and resolution form similar probabilistic waves. Back

⁷ We assume that for the most part our choice of data sources–a mix of non-partisan government agencies that have been relied on decades, even centuries, and a media source, US News & World Report, that has become a go-to for all kinds of rankings, while maintaining a reputation for probity, even as it has shifted from its origins as the conservative counterpoint to TIME and Newsweek, to an ideological position “slightly left of center“–raise no flags.  In the three cases (Household Income, Household Wealth, Higher Education Quality) where we used sources with which you may be less familiar, we suspect and have assumed that like most small players in any given field, they’re relying on the same foundational data sources you’re used to–we’d be shocked, for example, if the household income and wealth numbers used for these rankings didn’t have their origins in Census or other government data, but as small players trying to establish themselves, they aren’t highly motivated to disclose this dependency (any more than a much larger player like Zillow wants you to know it gets the data feed it relies on as a baseline for its analysis from the National Association of Realtors (aka realtors.com).

In any case, we think you should know we maintained our religious/spiritual commitment to democracy in making these choices–every source was the first appropriate result when we searched on some variation of “[category] rankings by state,” foundationally, Google rankings are based on vox populi in the form of referring links, and these aren’t the kinds of searches marketers are blowing their SEO dollars on to game the results.  Back

⁸ If you should ever run into someone who suggests that the primary reason Black Americans don’t live as long as whites is not systemic racism, that instead it’s that they “lack the necessities” (to use Al Campanis’ infelicitous term) to live long lives, you might want to ask them to explain the difference in life expectancy between Asian Americans (83.5 years–the highest of all racial groups) and Native Americans (65.2 years–the lowest), given that at a fairly fundamental level, members of both groups are born with the same “necessities,” Native Americans having come to our country, by both land and sea, from Asia not that long ago, evolutionarily speaking. Is this a simplistic question? Sure, but bear in mind who you’re asking and why. Back

⁹ For elitist authoritarians, preventing people from voting may actually be a point of pride, but for the much broader community of populist authoritarians who claim their raison d’etre and mandate from “the people,” it’s not exactly a good look to be shouting from the proverbial rooftops that you owe this mandate to systematically and selectively making it more difficult for some portion of “the people” to contribute (or not) to the mandate you claim to have from them. Back

¹⁰ The resulting study that included the first systematic analysis of influencers, Children, Families, and the Internet, was published in 2003, and widely distributed in new media and corporate circles over the next 2-3 years, its 500+ pages of research (of which the influencer study was only a small part) even earning a mention in Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat. If you can find a reference to “online influencers” in the literature before 2002-03, please post it in the comments below. We’re always ready to stand corrected, but we’re pretty sure we won’t be in this case. Back

¹¹ There may some who have a problem with our using rankings to make these comparisons rather than the actual numbers involved, e.g. basing our correlations on the fact that a state ranks 37th in poverty rate, rather than the fact that it has a poverty rate of 2.2% . We might try to do  further analysis on this basis, but there are some significant problems with claims that such analysis would necessarily  produce better, more “legitimate,” and/or more “scientific” results:

• As a practical matter, many of the areas where we want to make these comparisons, especially those related to quality, don’t necessarily have associated metrics–the rankings themselves may be the only metric publicly available (or that even exists)
• In the cases where there are real metrics for both values being compared (e.g. household income, poverty rate, obesity rate, longevity), if the numbers associated with those metrics differ substantially in magnitude (e.g. comparing a list of poverty rates [expressed as percentages] and household income [expressed in dollars]), it can cause one of the two sets of values to carry a greater or lesser weight than the other in the correlation analyses conducted.
• Even norming the data in both cases by, for example, expressing each data point in each as a percentage above or below the median value in the category, if there’s greater variation in one variable than the other, it can still result in inequalities in impact on the correlation between the two sets of values being considered. 

By contrast, when you use rankings you are making comparisons using the same unit of measure with the same range of variation with respect to each variable being compared or, to put that more simply, comparing apples to apples.  Whereas the alternative, though it might look more scientific, is likely to introduce a false and misleading perception of greater precision, akin to adding decimal points.

Beyond this, if the goal is to persuade state officials to be more democratic, it seems likely, based on what they’re apparently willing to see their citizens suffer through without taking corrective action, that they’re more likely to be moved more by direct comparisons with their peers, with whom they often find themselves in competition, than by the magnitude of data points as applied to their states.  Back

¹² For me, this has long been the go-to, archetypical example of the dangers of imputing correlation to causation. For a number of years, there have been studies showing that obese people drink more diet soda than those who aren’t obese, with the often not terribly subtle suggestion that this proves diet sodas cause obesity, and those putting forward this theory apparently believing, a la Trump, that if they just keep publishing these studies, such claims will be validated by repetition alone. Until recently, no study put forward a plausible evidence-based mechanism of action (that is, how diet sodas make people obese) and even in the case of this more compelling recent research, the finding is far from universal, i.e it applies only to women and people who are already obese, not to males and people of normal weight (and involves only one type of artificial sweetener), which obviously leaves a lot of room for alternative interpretations and explanations  (the authors themselves suggest only that vulnerable populations “might want to completely avoid diet sodas for a couple of weeks to see if this helps to reduce cravings for high-calorie foods.” As far as the observational studies that preceded this work in a steady drumbeat for years, I have yet to read such a study that really accounts for the obvious alternative: that obese people drink more diet soda because they’re obese. Back

¹³ To us, and presumably others, productivity per capita represents the basic unit of what economists call delta, the rate and direction of development and change in a society, whereas longevity, as we’ve previously suggested, represents its result. Put another way, productivity per capita is the best measure we know of the quantity of a society’s activities, and longevity the quality of the life this activity is producing. Back

¹⁴ We weren’t able to include four of Worldometers top 25 in life expectancy–Macao (#3), Channel Islands (#9), Martinique (#14), and Guadeloupe (#22) because the Economist does not consider them independent nations and thus they’re not included in the Index.  We replaced them with the next two countries in line, Austria (#26) and Germany (#27).  Only two additional countries were required because the Worldometers list included ties for 14th and 19th. Back

¹⁵ And again, nothing like this kind of kabuki theater was so much as a stirring of a single neuron, let alone a twinkle in the eye of any ruler in the world in 1776. There were little to no democratic “conventions” anywhere then; in fact, as anthropologist David Graeber convincingly argues in The Dawn of Everything, his final opus,  the Native Americans–or “the Americans” as he calls them–had to, in effect, teach the Europeans what democracy was.Back

¹⁶ As we’ll show in the final part of this series, we are the authors of the tools used to suppress democracy in our country. Back

¹⁷ There’s even often a (at least) metaphorical vacuum involved (in both tornadoes and positive loops) Back

¹⁸ Even with all the rest of the conflicts we’ve been involved in included, only 6% more Americans have perished in all our wars combined than died in our one civil war alone Back

¹⁹ As long as it’s OK for the Stacey Abrams’, Beto O’Rourkes, and Ben Wiklers to focus their attention elsewhere without being told in tendentious post-election “analyses” that their ground and hybrid/digital games had nothing to do with any of the key elections won, not, that is, in comparison to the television spots the consultants get a hefty cut on. LOL. Back

²⁰ More specifically, children whose parents, the Founders, had passed on, leaving them in the clutches of guardians who, to keep more government support money for themselves, decided to sew patches on the old clothes rather than buying new ones that fit, or take hand-me-downs from others, like their neighbors down the block, the Swiss family. Back

²¹ Many Original Americans hold that culture and community, not blood or genetics, determines who belongs–and doesn’t–to their tribes. No doubt this is a foreign concept to those in the white population who believe that races actually have a biological basis or meaning–they don’t–and given the history of believing they do, e.g. the “one drop” rule that justified first slavery, then Jim Crow and apartheid, then the gas chambers and crematoria, we view the Native criteria both more valid and more civilized. Of course, projectionist whites fear that without blood or genetic testing, many imposters and frauds will claim the meager compensatory benefits they’ve made available to the Originals as reparations for centuries of genocide and the grandest of larcenies. The remedy is equally obvious, if unthinkable, to white decision-makers: let the tribes decide who qualifies, as they’ve done for tens of thousands of years, not white government bureaucrats. Back

²² The outliers were all slave states–Georgia, on the dramatically low end, had only 23,614-27,516 residents per representative, while North Carolina (70,704-78,750) and Virginia (63,506-74,761) had somewhat higher residents per rep than the rest. The simplest explanation for the discrepancy, especially given that the “whites only” numbers aren’t really out of line with the rest of the originals (in the case of NC and VA) is that the number of slaves turned out to be higher or lower than expected, especially given that until the “3/5th Compromise” in 1787, slaveholders had no particular motive to count them other than to make sure they hadn’t escaped. Back

²³ 54,715 is the number of constituents per representative if slaves are included as 3/5th of a person each. As reprehensible as this practice was, and as little representation as slaves actually got from “their” “representatives,” (a) we assumed this was the most likely calculus engaged in by the founders, since they went so far as to include it in the constitution, and we felt “originalism” therefore required it (b) in general, other things being equal we always try to make the set of assumptions least favorable to the argument we’re hoping the fact will support, so that no one can (legitimately) accuse us of cherry-picking or manipulating our way to the result we want. In this case, the lower the number of residents/representative we assume, the more representatives we generate, and the more representatives we add to the EC, the more likely its results will converge with the popular vote (b/c the undemocratic Senate contribution will continue to be increasingly down-weighted while the number of voters in the EC will, however incrementally, increasingly converge with the number of voters overall, and become increasingly representative of their will–more on this momentarily below, which is what we want Back

²⁴ It could, in fact, be argued that Nebraska and Maine are just exceptions that prove the rule. Their 5 and 4 electoral votes, respectively, aren’t much of a haul to engage national candidates, but in the increasingly tight elections we’re experiencing, the opportunity to peel even one electoral vote off the opposition’s statewide win (as Trump did in Maine and Biden did in Nebraska in 2020) can provide dunk-like cred arguably adjacent to (and typically more realistically achievable than) the more crushing blow to the opposition’s legitimacy accruing when you steal their home state or district away from them. Back

²⁵ Ironically, while the vote to admit both was quite bipartisan by today’s standards, the Democrats more favored admitting Alaska while the Republicans more favored bringing in Hawaii, but this is a bit misleading because the parties weren’t remotely as polarized ideologically as they are today, and still in transition from Civil War alignment; support for Alaska and opposition to Hawaii was mainly the province of Southern Democrats, who would either become Republicans or be replaced by them after Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; on the flip side, believe it or not, the Republican used to have a healthy liberal wing, the remnant of what was briefly, in its first few years, arguably the most radical leftist party that’s ever held power in our country, especially relative to its era. Back

²⁶ The torsion the Industrial Revolution applied to the structure of state and local governments peaked around the time of the 1930 census, when there were 97 cities larger than the smallest state (the artifice known as Nevada). Today the average/mean state is 6.6 times larger than the average size of one of our 50 largest cities; in 1790, the population of the average Original 13 state was thirty times larger than the average population of one of our 13 largest cities. Back

²⁷ We chose to base the analysis on the free population rather than the total population because that was clearly what the founders all valued–the 3/5th compromise was about electoral power, not statehood, and all historians of the period would agree that had there been a would-be state made up primarily of slaves, there’s no chance it would have been granted statehood. Only in Georgia did a state combine a relatively low population of free whites and others with a relatively high percentage of slaves, and even there, its free population exceeded Delaware’s, the smallest state. Back

²⁸ There aren’t many concepts we’d less want to apply in an article about voting rights than “grandfathering,” which has its origin in the “literacy tests” Black Americans had to pass in order to vote throughout the South during the Jim Crow era, tests whites did not have to pass because their forefathers had had the right to vote long before officials began administering these tests, therefore their right to do so was assumed to have been passed on from their predecessors and thus they were “grandfathered in” where voting was concerned. Here we’re giving these states a pass because we’re endeavoring to beat the descendents of the literacy test givers (who’ve moved on to a whole plethora of other voter suppression techniques) at their own game, by basing our analysis strictly on what the “grandfathers” believed. Back

²⁹ Vermont gets special treatment because there was no census conducted in the state until after it was granted statehood. Thus, like the Original Thirteen, and unlike Maine, Kentucky, and “Southwest Territory,” which were part of the first census but not granted statehood–even though Kentucky and Maine, in particular, were both more populous than Delaware–clearly Vermont had the “special sauce” based on more than numbers alone that the founders initially considered diagnostic of statehood (though, as we’ve seen, they grew more number-oriented over time), which is the basis upon which we exempted the other OG states that, in modern parlance, might otherwise have been diagnosed as having failed to thrive. Back

³⁰ Here’s the full analysis we referenced above:

Back

³¹ As indicated on the map and analysis above, Oregon would have been considered slightly smaller than Delaware (free population 50,209 in 1790) by the founders, but close enough in size, within the margin of error, that we believe it would have passed muster. That said, the smallest state to definitely pass muster, as also indicated, is Kentucky, which was actually already bigger than free Delaware in 1790 as well, a testament to our decision to privilege the Original Thirteen as the founders themselves did. Back

³² Thanks to the NRA, user-friendly mayhem is well within the reach of everyone.  While conservative gun owners may chortle about liberals’ ignorance about what semi-automatic and caliber mean, very few of the many mass murderers in recent history have been expert marksmen, and anyone who has fought in Iraq or Afghanistan will tell you that even the lowliest weekend warrior can take out the best Navy SEAL in the current environment. Back

³³ Especially the so-called “liberal media.” More on them in the final part of this series.

³⁴ Though truth be told, as part of the leading edge of the digital native community (with an emphasis on community) we’ve been discussing and dreaming about the fundamental principles of Landemore’s “open democracy” since the early 1990s, as reflected in our stake in the ground vision for democracy fundamentalism.