Consider two questions:
1) Do all people deserve an equal vote, and hence equal representation and equal political power?
2) Should racists have political power over racial and ethnic minorities?
Ooopsies! If you answered, "yes," to Question 1, and, "no," to Question 2, then congratulations. You have successfully been indoctrinated into western small-d democratic values. You have also contradicted yourself.
The concept of the one-person-one-vote standard took a long time getting here. First, we had to get rid of slavery, but even then, it took a century before we got the Voting Rights Act, and we still have enforcement problems. Women didn't get the right to vote until a century ago. There's a line about "the arc of history," but it is far too optimistic for me. I'm more of a Sinclair Lewis kind of guy at this point. Yes, we can... backslide. Sí, se puede.
Anyway, one-person-one-vote. We aren't supposed to deny people a vote, nor representation on the basis of political beliefs, right? Right?
But, a vote is power. If everyone has a vote, then everyone, racists included, have power, and that means the potential for racists to impose their will on racial and ethnic minorities. To accept the one-person-one-vote principle as sacrosanct above all else is to accept racial oppression unless you accept a higher principle above the OPOV principle, in which case, you know, fuck democracy, but that's kind of what emboldens the "populists." Read: pissed off white people.
Legally, this gets into the issue of constitutional design, and my good buddy, Commander William Riker, of the Starship Rochester. Good book: Liberalism Against Populism. By, "liberalism," he really meant libertarianism, in the tradition of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, and the critical work here is actually The Calculus of Consent. Buchanan and Tullock essentially argued that the only truly legitimate standard for voting is unanimity because everything else requires the imposition of will on someone who doesn't consent, and that is a situation with the capacity for exploitation. They were concerned primarily with economic exploitation because they were economists, but it works for racial exploitation too. Put civil rights up for a vote, and it tends to fail. Had Brown v. Board been up for popular referendum rather than Supreme Court adjudication, things would have turned out differently. Why? Because segregation was popular. Here's the thing. Civil rights and civil liberties-- those are the things that we have cordoned off and said, "you don't put those up for a vote. Popular opinion doesn't fucking matter on these things. Racists-- go fuck yourselves (but please stop fucking your siblings) because you just don't get a say on this stuff." This is the real source of "populist" anger. They are structurally, legally prohibited from policy victory by a system that says that they are not allowed to win because we, as a society have deemed their positions too odious.
We're still stuck in that Question 1 versus Question 2 knot, though. Why on these things and not on others? Who says that these are the issues about which public opinion doesn't matter?
And it gets really messy the deeper we dig into my realm of scholarship. Kenneth Arrow's Nobel was for Social Choice and Individual Values, which may be my favorite piece of scholarship ever written. Arrow showed that a set of five conditions for "democracy" cannot simultaneously be met by any electoral rule. Taking a set of outcomes and asserting that they cannot be allowed to win, no matter what the group's preferences are, directly violate's one of Arrow's conditions.
And I'm just fine with that because I am fine saying racists don't get to win, but that means you have to look back at Question 1 with some serious side-eye because fuck those people! Yes, we are violating one of Arrow's conditions, but we already know from the impossibility theorem that we have to violate at least one, so who cares? Let's just pick the least important, and violate that one.
The alternative is the Buchanan & Tullock problem. Democracy is not truly about consensus. Democracy is about imposition. One of the points I addressed in my first book was the problem with the analogy between markets and elections. In a market, you get what you buy. I buy some hipster-approved coffee beans to grind myself every morning (guess what's on my mind!), and those are the beans I get. You buy Starbucks, you get Starbucks. We're each happy because we get what we buy. In an election, I don't get what I vote for. If I did, I'd be living in Clinton's America right now. (2016 was the first time I ever publicly admitted how I voted because... you figure it out.) What any one of us gets is dependent on how the rest of us behave. In my first book, I put a stupid, pretentious term on that concept, because I'm an academic, and that's how we do things: "the principle of voter interdependence."
[Excuse me for a moment while I remove the large stick from my ass...]
[AAHHHHH!!!!! That's better.]
Anyway, this is the core problem with elections. They necessarily generate "externalities." Always. Mechanically, they have to. That's really why I don't like competitive elections. They maximize the magnitude of the negative externalities. What do things like civil rights protections do? They limit those negative externalities.
They also reduce the stakes of elections, to the degree that they put policy beyond the reach of whoever wins. That's automatic victory for the good guys.
And automatic loss for the racists.
As it should be.
Fuck democracy. Racists can't be allowed to win, no matter how many of them there are. That's the point. That's why civil rights protections exist. But, once you accept the premise of civil rights protections, you reject the value of the one-person-one-vote standard as sacrosanct.
As you should. Racists shouldn't be allowed to win, no matter how many of them there are. And you know that. (The ones who don't aren't going to read this blog). Now, wrap your brain around what that means for representation, voting and power. It doesn't go to where most people think.
