Good article. As the author pointed out, the 17th Amendment wrecked everything. I’m in an analogy mood, so I’ll say it’s like removing a load-bearing wall in a house to have a bigger living room. You’re gonna pay for that decision eventually.
And there’s no going back. The 17th Amendment is here to stay. The people have the right to pick their own senators, dontchaknow?
>>If the law is whatever the fifty percent plus one of the people or their reps determine,
I doesn’t take fifty percent plus one in our current two-party system.
First, because the two parties are similar, about 40% don’t bother to vote.
Second, suppose that the two parties split the rest with 35% for the dominant party in the jurisdiction and 25% for the subordinate party. Then in the primary, 20% of the voters can nominate the candidate who will win in the general if there are two running for nomination, and less than 20% can control the nomination if only a plurality is needed.
The two party system is designed to allow a small fraction of the population (originally the WASPs) to control the government.
To avoid majoritarian tyranny, promote stability and preserve liberty, the structure of the Framers’ “more perfect union” retained the dominant feature of the Articles of Confederation: the states. It worked.
Would you rather have a corrupt central government or 5 corrupt states and 45 “good” states.
Abortion has been moved back to the states. Gun rights is moving back to the states. Encourage this trend and be encouraged by the trend.
https://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/
Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.
Many modern constitutionalists, especially Article V opponents, base their solutions to bad government on pleas to elect better men and women.
In turn, the nation could trust these altruistic angels to reliably execute the enumerated powers in Article I § 8 and prohibitions in sections 9 & 10. Unfortunately, this straightforward belief is not the first safeguard to liberty and justice baked into the Framers’ Constitution. Instead, their keystone to free government was a senate of the states, one that wasn’t isolated from the people, but one sufficiently small in number and far enough from the people’s immediate demands to take the long view and to deliberate for the better good.