Biden’s “Democracy Summit” is on Shaky Ground
Minority rule is the opposite of democracy, but let’s not talk about how America is failing to be a democracy.
It’s weird that the Biden Administration is holding a virtual “Democracy Summit” this Wednesday and Thursday, with the leaders of about 100 countries expected to attend. For if democracy means majority rule, then the United States isn’t much of a democracy.
The U.S. Senate is split 50–50, but the fifty Democratic senators represent 184.5 million people while the fifty Republican senators represent just 143 million. Wyoming has just 583,000 residents but it gets two senators, just like California, which has almost 40 million residents. So each Wyoming resident is 67 times as powerful as a Californian in the U.S. Senate. Nearly 700,000 people live in Washington, DC but they get no power in Congress. Same with the 2.7 million inhabitants of Puerto Rico.
As Todd Tucker wrote in 2019 report for the Roosevelt Institute, “A majority of the US population lives in just 10 states (California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina). Yet combined, these 164 million people control only 10 percent of the Senate’s votes.”
