Kulin, here I'm sitting, reading all the stuff you've written, and one thing comes to mind: your notions are terribly Amero-centric.
What do you think rural citizens in Canada feel about your notions? In Australia? In Sweden? In the rest of rural Europe?
They do quite well—probably better than we—without an Electoral College. You don't hear cries of feudalism in any of those regions.
My beef about the Electoral College is that it effectively disenfranchises millions of Americans. Our esteemed colleague JB3, nee Droid, is a Republican in a very heavily Democratic state, but like millions of his colleagues, he has no purpose whatsoever in showing up at the polls on Election Day. It's a complete waste of his time.
That's just flat-out wrong, Kulin, no matter how many fancy words you hurl at me about "feudalism", and I'll go to my grave thinking that.
So you want to disenfranchise entire states?
New York City would have more clout than the smallest ten states combined. There would be no point at all in people in those states voting -- no matter what they did, the people in the cities would turn them into serfs. No national politician wold campaign anywhere but the big cities, because it wouldn't be cost effective.
The U.S. is made up of states, as in sovereign entities, which are supposed to be bound together by a federal government that isn't supposed to do anything but serve as referee between the sovereign states and handle foreign policy. That it's become a tyrant is no argument for taking it the rest of the way and turning the states into provinces.
We're already headed for economic feudalism, with the wealthiest one percent running things, enabled in doing so by an archaic concept of private property, assisted in doing so by a corrupt government (to paraphrase the movie Aladdin, "They can be bought!"). Reducing the states to mere lines where laws are different, where the big states would determine the presidency and the small might as well stay home, would only further that.
And the geographic feudalism is real; I've been watching it grow in Oregon, and get worse. Even a Democrat County Commissioner here sees it; he told me a while back that half of the new laws and regulations sent to the counties by the state have really only the function of making the countryside a nice place to visit for the people in the cities; his way of putting it was to say that they're making the rural parts of the state into their park/playground, and we all get to be the living exhibits and caretakers the city people can look at and say, "How quaint!"
Of course that really means the rich city people; the poor don't get out much. So our countryside is turning into some prissy liberal's notion of what forests and farms and rivers "ought" to look like -- whether it makes economic or even environmental sense (and believe me, we have plenty of environmental regulations which are totally screwing up the environment).
So for the other federal offices, you should already know my prescription there: representation in House delegations should be proportional; as I've noted before, my guess is that we'd get at least seven different political parties seated from California, and end up with a dozen or more in the House. People's votes would actually count again, and we could actually be represented -- in reality, not in legal fiction.
And Senators should go back to being selected however a state decides -- personally, I'd go with a system something like having randomly chosen legislators choose candidates, and let the governor choose the one he likes, but whatever.
By worshiping democracy, the Republic has tilted off-balance. Getting rid of the Electoral College would kick it further out of kilter. Making the House delegations proportional would kick it back toward equilibrium.
