Less wrong isn't necessarily right.

This is unusually good. From How the Rural-Urban Divide Became America’s Political Fault Line by Emily Badger. Not that there aren't many statements with which I disagree. However, it comes closer to a real truth than I have seen in any similar analyses from other mainstream journalists.

It is staggering that our American system of government is not better understood by our Mandarin Class spokespeople. There are a handful of surprising assumptions in this article which indicate that unawareness. Take for example:

The American form of government is uniquely structured to exacerbate the urban-rural divide — and to translate it into enduring bias against the Democratic voters, clustered at the left of the accompanying chart.

So close. So, so close. And yet, so wrong.

The American form of government is uniquely structured to protect the rights of minorities.

There. Fixed it. And with all those checks and balances, decision-making is markedly slower than almost anywhere else. But once decisions are made at a legislative level, we are much more confident of all groups of citizens assenting to the law/policy. We set much greater store on consent of the governed here than elsewhere. Totalitarians hate those checks-and-balances because it retards fast decision-making by the smart technocrats. But you only need to view the track record of technocratic decision-makers to appreciate the wisdom of the Founding Fathers in shielding us from them.

Other countries with parliamentary systems and with proportional voting systems tend to end up with more facile decision-making but also greater swings in policies (look at the UK in the 60s and 70s swinging from near marxist labor to gentry conservative to labor again to near market libertarians.) While we talk about polarization in the US, it is nothing compared to the strains in most European countries where there are always some pretty extreme parties on the far left and right.

More than that, the gulf between the people and those who elect them is even greater than here. The level of distrust and what is widely referred to as a democracy deficit is far greater elsewhere than here.

Most our pointy headed commentators fail at system thinking. They presume that if we can toggle a little here or nudge a little there, we can get a better system. That we can swap out pieces of the system for something we see and like elsewhere. We can't. Each of these systems is a total product of a range of trade-offs which are a totality each of themselves. You can change the trade-offs but you cannot just average the systems.

And when we refer to minorities whose interests are to be protected, our Founding Fathers were far deeper thinkers than the cognitive rug rats of today, nipping at their heels. Minorities can be racial, our contemporary obsession in some quarters, but usually they are a mix of things - Religion, class, education, economic system, rural/urban, etc. We are all of us minorities of one across the rich spectrum of what we are interested in, concerned about or identify as.

That was the genius of the Founding Fathers. They recognized that we are all minorities in some way at some point in our lives and that majorities would always have the capacity to exploit minorities of whatever stripe. Whites of Blacks (or vice-versa, Rich of Poor (or vice-versa), Protestants of Catholics (or vice-versa), Men of Women (or vice-versa), Country of Town (or vice-versa), Capitalists of Workers (or vice-versa), Manufacturers of Agriculturalists (or vice-versa), Youth of Aged (or vice-versa), Healthy of Ill (or vice-versa). And so on. The human instinct to exploit the other is always resident in everyone though we are each always the other in some way. So the Fathers set out to establish a system on that knife edge where a government of the people has sufficient power to be effective but not enough power to exploit.

Our Constitutional system, set up to slow decision-making, protect minority rights, and obtain the consent of the governed is a masterpiece of compromise. That the USA, one of the youngest of nations and the most disparate of nations, is also the oldest of constitutional governments and also the wealthiest of nations is a testament to how effective the design has been.

All these attempts to get rid of the Electoral College, revert to direct democracy, etc. are simply testaments to ignorance or insatiable hunger for despotic power. Because that is what happens without consent of the governed and without all those checks and balances.

The idea of the urban-rural divide and the idea of deterministic geography are simply masks for a deeper issue.

The fact is that 80% of Americans are urban, a fact which belies the hazy assumption that democrats dominate urban environs. If urbanites were Democrats and 80% of America is urban, then Democrats would be winning election after election, even with all our checks and balances.

The fact that they are not says that there is something wrong with the definitions. When Democrats speak of urban, they are usually talking about the core 30-40 old cities. The New York's, San Francisco's, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, etc. But there are hundreds of small cities (>50,000 people) for every singular Atlanta or Philadelphia. And Democrats don't dominate small urban like they do big urban. This misconception of urban underpins the faultiness of Badger's analysis.

Badger does not tackle this issue. I would argue that by failing to make the distinctions and apply consistent definitions, we hide what is going on. I think what is happening is that the 30-40 big old cities, dominated by Democrats are drifting away from an awareness of electoral reality. The core of these big old cities do have massive income inequality, their governance tends to be dominated by harder left ideologists, their crime tends to be more dramatic, there is a greater concentration of extreme advocacy, there is greater poverty, there is greater social dysfunction, etc. And this is not unusual. Big cities everywhere in the world are not reflective of the country as a whole.

America tends to be a centrist country. I think what is happening is that we have a rich postmodernist elite in urban cores which are drifting to hard left/radical socialism. Our suburbs tend to be moderate to conservative. Our smaller towns tend to be conservative as do our rural counties.

But there are a lot of people in those small towns and in those suburbs and that is what is reflected in Badger's charts.

Badger never mentions it, but there is a further, and peculiarly American issue with old urban centers - Race. For perfectly understandable and well intended reasons, the Voting Rights Act of the sixties essentially institutionalized racism on the part of the government. Not just any minorities, but racial minorities. The intention was that there needed to be a mechanism by which African-Americans could be more present in Congress (and government in general) than was the case. Effectively we created majority minority districts to accomplish that.

However, given the dominance of African-Americans in the Democratic party and therefore block voting, with the Voting Rights Act we were also institutionalizing the Democratic Party as the Party of the old urban cores.

As Badger points out, and I think this is the heart of the problem:

In the United States, where a party’s voters live matters immensely. That’s because most representatives are elected from single-member districts where the candidate with the most votes wins, as opposed to a system of proportional representation, as some democracies have.

Democrats tend to be concentrated in cities and Republicans to be more spread out across suburbs and rural areas. The distribution of all of the precincts in the 2016 election shows that while many tilt heavily Democratic, fewer lean as far in the other direction.

As a result, Democrats have overwhelming power to elect representatives in a relatively small number of districts — whether for state house seats, the State Senate or Congress — while Republicans have at least enough power to elect representatives in a larger number of districts.

Republicans, in short, are more efficiently distributed in a system that rewards spreading voters across space.

But the where only matters because we have institutionalized the majority minority districts which tend to be urban. And by institutionalized, I mean that we have two iterations of gerrymandering. The first is sanctioned and is to design districts which meet the VRA requirements. But by doing that, so many Democratic voters are now concentrated across the urban cores, that almost de facto, in the second iteration, Republicans are more evenly distributed across all other districts, giving them a wider tent, a broader range of issues to which they have to respond, etc. It is this well-intended VRA policy which looks to me to lock Democrats into old urban core agendas and stymies their capacity to reach across the full spectrum of all Americans.

As Badger points out, making gerrymandering more neutral sounds promising but there is plenty of both practical real world experiences as well as strong academic modeling research which suggests that more neutral gerrymandering might lead to better results for Republicans.

Badger notes:

In most European democracies, geography doesn’t matter in the same way.

Puhlease. How unaware can you be? As she points out, we are talking about continental Europe, not anglo-phone Europe. Half the countries in Europe are too small to have more than one large dominant urban center, and when they are that small and that urbanized, there is of course far less of an urban-rural divide. But "urban-rural" is an American distinction which hides how Europeans talk about and wrestle with geography which is by "region". Badger is so focused on advancing a thesis (urban-rural division) that she is losing sight of the obvious realities.

Spain, as an example, has two urban anchors - Madrid and Barcelona. But the political divide is not Madrid/Barcelona and small town rural. That is applying a false filter from America. The divide is between regions - Barcelona versus Madrid versus Basque versus Andalusia, etc. Germany's regionalism is further exacerbated by religion (Protestant north and Catholic south) as well as by the old East West divisions.

Contra Badger, geography matters enormously in Europe but it is geography as regionalism rather geography as urban/rural.

Badger offers this howler as well:

Gerrymandering, a particularly American practice, allows Republicans to amplify their advantages in the political map.

Oh, dear. Gerrymandering exists everywhere because it is all about manipulating the system for power. It might not be called gerrymandering because that is our terminology, but manipulating electoral boundaries for political advantage is nearly the oldest pastime in the world.

Badger's very next sentence is so close to the revelation.

Democrats gerrymander, too, but often the most they can achieve is to neutralize their underlying disadvantage.

And what is that underlying disadvantage? It is not clear. What follows is a long pastiche of various Democrat Party challenges which doesn't really coalesce into a comprehendible "underlying disadvantage" unless you read it to mean that their policies make them unelectable.

But what precedes this key sentence is also unclear. However, separated by inches of column and rhetorical jumps, I think Badger is identifying the underlying disadvantage as being:

Democrats tend to be concentrated in cities and Republicans to be more spread out across suburbs and rural areas.

And if that is the case, then that tracks back to the iron links between the VRA, African-Americans as block voters for Democrats and African-Americans as being demographically dominant in old urban cores.

Seen from this perspective, there are then some plain mechanisms by which to address the Democratic Party disadvantage. We can get rid of the artificially imposed majority/minority districts or we can relocate African-Americans from urban centers, or we can break the stranglehold of the Democratic Party on the African-American block vote. None of that would be easy or even necessarily desirable but it solves the problem of concentrated voting areas.

It would be great if the Republican Party had a meaningful incentive to seek African-American voters. It would be great if the Democratic Party had a meaningful incentive to advance policies which meet the needs of all Americans, not just those in urban cores. However, at least for a while, it would likely mean fewer African-American faces in Congress and perhaps in other political ranks. Whether that also entails a loss in political influence, I am not so sure. Swing voters have a lot of power.

At least that is how I see the evidence.

Badger continues with the model that it is an urban/rural divide. I think that is wrong. Very wrong. But it is still a good deal better than those who are arguing that the problem is the Electoral College or gerrymandering.