Imagine that you have a nation that is one thousand square miles in size. Ninety percent of the nation is taken up by a city of ten million people. The other ten percent is empty desert and wilderness, populated only by a grizzled hermit named Jim. Tasked with inventing a representative political system for this country, you say, “Well, looks like there are two areas here, so I’ll draw a line between the city and Jim’s land, and I’ll give each an equal number of representatives. When the ten million city people want something they will have to negotiate with Jim, who has a power equal to all of them combined.”
Stupid, right? Yes. This is the United States Senate. This is quite literally the design of the U.S. Senate. The state of Wyoming, with 590,000 residents, has two Senators, and the state of California, with 39 million residents, also has two Senators. Every citizen of Wyoming has, proportionally, 66 times more representation in the Senate than each citizen of California. If you believe in “one person, one vote”—this is the opposite of that. The design of the Senate is inherently (and purposely) not just undemocratic but anti-democratic. Anyone who favors small-d democracy and believes that all people are created equal and deserve equal political representation must wish for the abolition of the Senate, which serves to act in opposition to those principles.
Sometimes, people will say “Well each state deserves equal representation,” as a way of defending the Senate’s existence. This is the sort of propaganda that they teach you in elementary school so that you are never required to think deeply about the flaws of your nation if you don’t want to. Really? Each little state drawn on the map, no matter how small or large, no matter how absurd the reasons for its existence, deserves equal representation? Is that what our political system is for—to represent dirt and rocks, rather than people? We have “balance out” the “urban” priorities of large states with the “rural” priorities of small states? This is just nonsense. Look closely: Do the rocks vote? Does the dirt vote? Do the squirrels and deer vote? No, they do not. Not even in Wyoming. The people vote. It’s just that each person in a less populated state is awarded far more power than each person in a more populous state. In other words, the Senate is not some sort of wise balancing system for representing culture and environment; it is, like all political systems, a system for representing people. It just does its job in a biased, irrational, and harmful way.
Each state deserves equal power? Rhode Island, at 1,545 square miles, gets the same number of Senators as Alaska, at 665,384 square miles. This idiot argument fails even on its own idiot terms. Also, see what happens when you tell a defender of the Senate as a hallowed institution that you are going to make DC and Puerto Rico states and give Democrats four new Senate seats. Outrage! Oh? The places where we murdered all the natives and made up imaginary lines and called them “states” are absolutely sacred up until the year 2026 but must never be altered after that because of… history?
The discussion you will hear on this topic tends to be quite shallow.
Want to know a representative political system that makes more sense? We have one! The House of Representatives. There are 435 reps there and they each represent an equal number of people. It is fair. As the population of the country grows, the number of people that each member represents grows equally. In order to improve the quality of representation, some people advocate expanding the number of representatives in the House. That would be fine. Each member would still be representing an equal number of citizens. See how that works? Equality. Democracy. Basic stuff here.
The fact that the unequal, unrepresentative, and undemocratic Senate sits in a position above the equal and democratic House of Representatives is clearly detrimental to the ability of our political system to give each citizen equal representation and political rights and power. It is anti-democratic. No big surprise, of course—the Senate was created to be anti-democratic, to give the ruling class of the late 1700s a way to disempower the masses in our fledgling democracy. The founders were very open about this. They did not believe in true democracy. Other evidence of their hostility to democracy is the Electoral College, the fact that they did not let women vote, and the fact that they did not let black people vote but did allow black people to be owned as slaves. Some of those atrocious elements of America’s design at its founding have been corrected since then, and some have not.
If you go back far enough in US history it was considered crazy to say that slavery should be abolished, and it was considered wacky to say that women deserved the vote, and it was considered ridiculous to say that voting power should not discriminate by race. Eventually the movements to change those things succeeded and now we look back on the establishment that opposed those changes as the real fools. The design of the Senate is just as obviously anti-democratic as those things, and if we ever get around to abolishing the Senate in the name of improving our democracy, future generations will look at its existence as just another flawed and prejudicial black mark on American history that it took us a long, long time to rise above.
You do not need to be some brilliant political theorist to understand all of this. You just have to genuinely believe in democracy and the equality of all citizens, and then to look at the design and function of the Senate, and then try a teeny tiny bit to free your mind from the the contents of public school social studies textbooks and 4th of July speeches that may have lodged inside there. Every honest person who has thought about it for more than two seconds either A) understands the flawed nature of the Senate and that our democracy would be strengthened if the Senate did not exist, B) understands the flawed nature of the Senate but does not actually want to have a fair democracy in America and therefore supports the anti-democratic function of the Senate, or C) is dumb and/ or lying.
That’s all of the possibilities. A lot of regular people have never spent much time thinking about this, which is fine. A lot of other people are politically and ideologically hostile to the principles of democracy, and therefore favor the existence of the Senate as a way to hobble the power of the masses. This is not fine—it’s dictatorial, elitist, and is the sort of thing that we allegedly had a revolution here to overcome—but it is, I guess, honest. What is neither fine nor honest is to stand up and argue that the Senate is good for our democracy and that anyone calling for the abolition of the Senate is wacky and ridiculous and dumb. Whenever you hear this, I advise you to just imagine fat guys with mustaches and cigars in the late 1800s arguing against the enfranchisement of women, for many of the same reasons.
This is a topic on which there is not really much new to say, on a theoretical level. The Senate is plainly an institution that makes our government worse and the sooner we can get rid of it, the better. Victor Berger, a socialist member of the House of Representatives, introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate in 1911. There has been no reason for anyone to find this position shocking for more than 100 years. Hell, this is all so rudimentary that even a Gawker blogger was calling to abolish the Senate a decade ago.
So why am I wasting all of our time rehashing this? Because, recently, it came to the attention of professional political operatives and then to the attention of some of the shallowest political thinkers of America, all of whom are employed by major media outlets, that the Democratic Socialists of America want to abolish the Senate. Since DSA is having electoral political success right now, that means that many news outlets now preface their discussions of DSA with the factoid that they want to abolish the Senate, presented in a context that implies that it is a wacky and extremist far left position. Worse, the true professional propagandists who work at places like the Washington Post editorial board take this as an opportunity to metaphorically place their hands on their face in the manner of Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone” and shriek that Angie Nixon has won a Senate primary and yet she is a member of DSA and DSA wants to abolish the Senate and isn’t that crazy??????
As someone who has been professionally obligated to read things like this for decades now, I have developed a robust immune reaction that protects me from this sort of penny ante sophistry written by guys who like to masturbate to the idea of shaking Jeff Bezos’s hand. (The quality of right wing opinion writing on offer at house organs like the WSJ and Washington Post editorial pages today in fact gives me great optimism for socialism, because our intellectual opponents seem capable of building little more than straw houses in the face of our mighty wind.) Yet I know that, as with many structural issues, the fact that much of the general public has not given this much thought until now may allow them to be easily swayed by shallow bullshit.
So let us all be clear about this: The Senate is anti-democratic by design, it gives much greater power to citizens of small and rural states than to citizens of large and populous states for no rational reason, and our political system would be fairer and more democratic if the Senate were abolished. Does that mean it is going to happen soon? No. Does that mean that it is hypocritical for a socialist to win a Senate seat? No. The long path to reforming our system will ultimately require gaining the support of many people in the Senate. As long as the Senate exists, we need to fight for power there. All of this is pretty straightforward.
What is grating is that the group of people—politicians, political theorists, pundits, the political media—who are responsible for creating a healthy public conversation about the quality of our political system instead become either party hacks or get their jobs just by being good at having beautiful hair on television and therefore act all shocked and discombobulated at the common sense suggestion that we should reform our political system where it is flawed. Jesus, it’s so tedious. If you are paid to discuss this stuff for the public please stop being a lying asshole or smug prick about it. Thank you.
More
Related reading: Abolish the Electoral College (And the US Senate) [2012]; Fight Inequality: Abolish the Senate [2015]; Well We Still Haven’t Done Anything About the Electoral College; People Don’t Know Anything About the Government.
In December of 2024, I published an interview with Heather Hardy, a professional boxer from Brooklyn who is suffering from traumatic brain injury as a result of her fighting career. It is a challenge for Heather to support herself as a boxing trainer now, given her ongoing health issues. She recently put up a GoFundMe to help with her living costs, and I know that any and all donations would be greatly appreciated. Many How Things Work readers asked how to donate to Heather after reading our interview. Here is your chance.
The idiot Washington Post editorial page is supported by a billionaire and the Wall Street Journal editorial page is supported by Wall Street, but the How Things Work editorial page is only supported by the people. We are able to publish and I am able to pay my bills only because people just like you become paid subscribers. I hope you’ll consider clicking the button below and doing that now. Together we will prevail, my friends.
I have been saying this for years, repeal the apportionment act and expand the house to 1000 members.
In addition, expand the SCOTUS to 13 to match the number of federal courts
Start with the easy stuff. Repeal the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act!
It caps, the size of the House of Representatives creating even more inequality.