Do We Really Need Fifty States?

As the Trump apocalypse continues to unfold, it is clear that a great number of Americans are too brainwashed by right wing propaganda to be responsible members of our political system. There is no apparent solution to this problem. I have spent countless hours at this keyboard clacking away in hopes of thinking something up to at least mitigate the fact that a sizable number of Americans simply want to be ruled. They also want to force the rest of us to submit to the same cruel leaders that they like. Something clicked when looking at the electoral map:


Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

That is a hell of a lot of red. And the county by county map makes the country look even more red. Now some analysts have attempted to mitigate the geographic and demographic disparities by weighting the map by population density but that is not the world we live in. There doesn't seem to be any fair way to keep this system. It is a mess, the constitutional equivalent of rotten boroughs. And the rotten parts only swing one way, and will probably never change. This has huge consequences for our federal government, for the presidency as well as congress. For a moment, let's step out of time and political realities to explore a different idea.

Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton may be viewed as an historical outlier in a hundred years, similar to the way we view (if at all) the corrupt bargain that put Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House in 1876. But the pattern held more or less intact, the coasts voted for the Democrat, the middle voted for the Republican. That vast swath of statistically empty plains and mountains from the Mississippi River through the Rockies holds disproportionate power over the rest of the country. Most of the USA is urban, or at least clustered around large Metropolitan centers, But a know-nothing jerk in rural Wyoming has a lot more power in his vote than a highly educated cosmopolitan professional in New Jersey. Why is this tolerable?

It isn't. It is not just, it is not fair, it is not equitable. Nor is it sustainable. In my hometown, fully half of my high school graduating class does not live in the city anymore. First they went away to college, then got a job somewhere else. It is this way in small towns across the country but the direction is almost always one way, from the so-called "heartland" to the big cities and the coasts. The dregs that are left, or "stuck" there, develop the bitter pride of misplaced loyalty and only one side speaks to them. These towns slowly die by demographic withering, or quickly when a factory closes but the result is the same,

It is almost cliche at this point to note that the large blue states subsidize the red states through federal taxation and spending priorities. But it is also true that the roughly 750,000 residents of North Dakota are paying disproportionately to support a state government; the same holds for Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, and many other states that have small populations and large land areas. Now, in the age of air travel and other fast transportation, cyberspace and instant telecommunications is there a real need for each of these lightly populated states to each have a governor, legislature, supreme court and possibly under-worked civil servants? If the mayor of New York City can govern nearly 8.5 million people, many with far greater needs than the denizens of the Great Plains, why can't we combine some of these states?

According to the census bureau, congressional seats are not simply apportioned by dividing the total population by 435, there is a formula they use starting with the 51st seat. Each state automatically gets one member of Congress even if, as mentioned for the small states, they fail to meet a numerical threshold for one. Likewise, each state automatically gets two US Senate seats no matter how big they are. This had some merit when the Constitution was written and the total population, area, and number of states was still very small compared to today. It also had merit in that formal ideologies were not as calcified, regional identities were stronger, and the party system was kept in flux by expansion. Today, those are basically settled. You have rural vs city, country vs. urban, and yes the almost entirely white countryside vs the diverse metropolitan centers. We call the battle lines "liberal vs. conservative", or "Democrat vs. Republican" but these are practically two separate nations that will never mix on their own nor coalesce into an arrangement that both can live with.

In the national interest therefore, I propose to combine these Western States into larger ones that will remain contiguous but spread the cost of government over a larger population and reduce their national voting strength. No more North and South Dakota, and throw in Nebraska. Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming can get along just fine with one governor and one main University football team. Utah and Arizona? Kansas and Oklahoma? Why not? We could even combine Colorado and New Mexico just to be less partisan. Small cities are annexed by big ones on occasion, this wouldn't really be different. One governor and legislature in a big area to create uniform laws and enforcement, economies of scale for departments of justice and elections, a larger tax base to more equitably fund schools and on a more uniform basis. There are great possibilities here, beyond just diluting the irresponsible voting habits of country folk.

It would be a little less embarrassing to have a powerful Senate committee chair who is returned to Washington each time by fewer votes than that of a city with an NFL team. And fewer electors for president who represent demographically tiny areas. And there's no reason to stop with the Great Plains/Rocky Mountains, Mississippi and Alabama could combine to make an unassailable bottom of the barrel state in every social indicator. How about Rhode Island and Connecticut? Those religious differences are long past in jolly New England right?

State lines were often drawn arbitrarily through time, treaty, and geography but what do those things have in common with the Twenty First Century? And just think how much money lobbyists would save only having to enrich and corrupt two Senators instead of six? This is win-win all around baby!

"You Do Not Exist"

 Excerpt: pp. 256-60

His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston; he is not a hypocrite; he believes every word he says. What most oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range of his vision. O'Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, or could have, that O'Brien had not long ago known, examined, and rejected. His mind contained Winston's mind. But in that case how could it be true that O'Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad. O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had grown stern again.

"Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiousity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves..."

[Electro-shock]

"It will not last," said O'Brien. "Look me in the eyes. What country is Oceania at war with?"

Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania, and that he himself was a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered Eurasia and Eastasia: but who was at war with whom he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any war.

"I don't remember."

"Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember now?"

"Yes."

"Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you remember that?"

"Yes."

"Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who had been condemned to death for treachery. You pretended that you had seen a piece of paper which proved them innocent. No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that?"

"Yes."

"Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?"

"Yes."

O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.

"There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?"

"Yes."

And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back in again. But there had been a moment-he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps-of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O'Brien's had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had faded out before O'Brien had dropped his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers a vivid experience at some remote period of one's life when one was in effect a different person.

"You see now," said O'Brien, "that it is at any rate possible."

"Yes," said Winston.

O'Brien stood up with a satisfied air. Over to his left Winston saw the man in the white coat break an ampoule and draw back the plunger of a syringe. O'Brien turned to Winston with a smile. In almost the old manner he resettled his spectacles on his nose.

"Do you remember writing in your diary," he said, "that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to? You were right, I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane. Before we bring the session to an end you can ask me a few questions, if you choose."

"Any question I like?"

"Anything." He saw that Winston's eyes were upon the dial. "It's switched off. What is your first question?"

"What have you done with Julia?" said Winston.

O'Brien smiled again. "She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately--unreservedly . I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness--everything has been burned out of her. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case."

"You tortured her."

O'Brien left this unanswered. "Next question," he said.

"Does Big Brother exist?"

"Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party."

"Does he exist in the same way as I exist?"

"You do not exist," said O'Brien.

Once again the sense of helplessness assailed him. He knew, or he could imagine, the arguments which proved his own nonexistence; but they were nonsense, they were only a play on words. Did not the statement, "You do not exist," contain a logical absurdity? But what use was it to say so? His mind shriveled as he thought of the unanswerable, mad arguments with which O'Brien would demolish him.

"I think I exist," he said wearily. "I am conscious of my own identity. I was born and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously. In that sense, does Big Brother exist?"

"It is of no importance. He exists."

"Will Big Brother ever die?"

"Of course not. How could he die? Next question."

"Does the Brotherhood exist?"

"That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or NO. As long as you live, it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind."

Winston lay silent. His breast rose and fell a little faster. He still had not asked the question that had come into his mind the first. He had got to ask it, and yet it was as though his tongue would not utter it. There was a trace of amusement in O'Brien's face. Even his spectacles seemed to wear an ironical gleam. He knows, thought Winston suddenly, he knows what I am going to ask! At the thought the words burst out of him:
"What is in Room 101?"

The expression on O'Brien's face did not change. He answered drily:
"You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101."

He raised a finger to the man in the white coat. Evidently the session as at an end. A needle jerked into Winston's arm. He sank almost instantly into a deep sleep.