Tyranny of the Minority - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Michelle Goldberg, New York Times

Image from article, with caption: A protest in December outside the Pennsylvania Capitol while electors in the Electoral College arrived to cast their votes.

Excerpt:

Our Constitution has always had a small-state bias, but the effects have become
more pronounced as the population discrepancy between the smallest states and the
largest states has grown. “Given contemporary demography, a little bit less than 50
percent of the country lives in 40 of the 50 states,” Sanford Levinson, a
constitutional law scholar at the University of Texas, told me. “Roughly half the
country gets 80 percent of the votes in the Senate, and the other half of the country
gets 20 percent.”

The distortion carries over to the Electoral College, where each state’s number of
electors is determined by the size of its congressional delegation. This would matter
less if the United States weren’t so geographically polarized [JB emphasis]. But 
America is now two countries, eyeing each other across a chasm of distrust and 
contempt. One is urban, diverse and outward-looking. This is the America that’s
growing. The other is white, provincial and culturally revanchist. This is the 
America that’s in charge. ...

I recently had the chance to ask Gov. Jerry Brown of California what might
happen if we have more elections like 2016, where a majority of voters and a
supermajority of Californians are thwarted. Polls already show a third of
Californians favor secession. Could that fringe movement become mainstream?
Brown said it was “not beyond the realm of possibility” that the country could
eventually break apart, even if he doesn’t think it’s likely. ...


Conservatives are often unmoved by complaints that our system is
undemocratic, arguing that America was intended not as a democracy but a republic.
But if this was true at the founding, it’s probably not how most Americans
understand their country today, when “undemocratic” is considered a political
epithet.

Before Trump, there was enough overlap between popular will and electoral
outcome to make the issue largely semantic. Now it’s existential. Certainly, we need
checks on the tyranny of the majority. But what we have now is the tyranny of the
minority. ...