In the early contests, Mr. Trump attracted less than 50 percent of the vote (in Arkansas he got only 33 percent); a majority of voters rejected him. But he faced more than one opponent every time, so that the non-Trump vote was split. That implies he could well have been defeated in most (given his extreme views on many subjects) had the opposition coalesced around one of his leading rivals.
.. Using the current system, however, the plurality winner would be Mr. Trump — with 40 percent support. Yet he would surely be an odd choice, since he would be defeated not only by Mr. Kasich but also by Mr. Cruz (in both cases by 60 percent to 40 percent) in pairwise comparisons. Note also that Mr. Kasich, the majority winner, would come in a poor third under the current system, with only 25 percent support.\
.. Kenneth Arrow’s famous “impossibility theorem” demonstrates that there is no perfect voting system, and majority rule is no exception.
Whom Does Philosophy Speak For?
I did not know, for example, that the Confederate flag was revived in Southern states during and after the civil rights movement in clear defiance of racial equality and integration. This was not just a flag that Confederate soldiers fought and died under. It became, as some South Carolinian representatives told us, a symbol of defiance and hatred, and a reminder that the Civil War may have been won but that the battle for overcoming racial prejudice has not ended.
.. These new technologies of the public sphere also challenge democratic societies in that the speed of the circulation of images often overwhelms the communicative and deliberative processes that need to take place among all those affected to unpack and understand what is being implied by these images
.. John Locke was also tutor and secretary to the earl of Shaftesbury, and he wrote the Constitution of the Carolinas for him. Locke is a colonizer, who believes that the white man’s labor in appropriating and working the land will create a condition that will be beneficial to all.
.. In view of the presence of these “others,” who haunt the text, what do we make of Locke’s theory of consent, equality and rationality? How much of these ideals are “polluted” by the presence of the other whose equal rationality is never presumed? This is the kind of question that the critical investigation of race in these texts leads us to ask.
.. I would argue that from Aristotle to Hume to Smith and even the early Hegel, we find another model of rationality as “embodied intelligence,” as the shaping of emotion by reason rather than its domination. John Dewey is the most articulate philosopher of this alternative understanding of rationality.
.. G.Y.: As a political theorist, do you think democracy is really able to deliver equality to black people, to fully translate universalistic human rights into real change for them, especially as they have, for hundreds of years, been deemed sub-persons?
S.B.: I don’t think that it is democracy that is failing black people in the United States, but the assault on democracy itself through the forces of a global corporate capitalism run amok and the rise of a vindictive and racist conservative movement that is unraveling the civic compact. Democracy is impossible without some form of socio-economic equality among citizens. Instead, in the United States in the last two decades, the gap between the top 1 percent and the rest has increased, voting rights and union rights have been embattled. There is rampant criminal neglect of public goods such as highways, railroads and bridges – not to mention the brazen onslaught of big money to buy off elections since the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision. We have become a mass democracy that is producing gridlock in representative institutions precisely because it is in the interest of global corporate capitalism to render representative institutions ineffective.
Democracy and the Demagogue
Trump’s and Carson’s comments are explicitly antidemocratic. The fact that they seem to have been rewarded — at least in immediate improvements in poll standings — confronts defenders of the American political system with two questions. There once was a facade of equal respect that required political strategists to use code words to avoid accusations of violating it. What has caused it to crack? And what are the risks for our democracy?
.. When large inequalities exist, the problem is aggravated: People tend to take out their resentment on groups they believe don’t share their way of life.
.. For these reasons, our politics right now appear insincere to many voters. And they are sick of it – they crave principled, honest politicians. They want politicians to tell it like it is. And they will seek such candidates even in the absence of a clear set of values they share. But how can politicians signal that they are not hypocritical, especially when voters have grown accustomed to what seems, for both real and contrived reasons, to be a deep stratum of hypocrisy?
.. But there is a way a politician could appear to be honest and nonhypocritical without having to vie against other candidates pursing the same strategy: by standing for division and conflict without apology. Such a candidate might openly side with Christians over Muslims or atheists, or native-born Americans over immigrants, or whites over blacks, or the rich over the poor. In short, one could signal honesty by openly and explicitly rejecting what are presumed to be sacrosanct political values.
.. They would be especially compelling if they demonstrated their supposed honesty and sincerity by explicitly targeting groups that are disliked by the voters they seek to attract. Such open rejection of democratic values would be taken as political bravery, as a signal of sincerity.
.. When voters are so concerned about authenticity, it obscures the fact that commitment to the common interest is a strength, not a weakness. Such a commitment requires more strength, not less, than commitment to almost any other value one can imagine (including for example the values of one’s particular religion). It is much easier to declare that one’s own interests are all that matters.
.. What we are seeing in both Congress and the presidential campaign is a yearning for politicians who reject commitment to the democratic value of equal respect.
.. Since candidates who reject equal respect win office by explicitly flouting democratic values, there is no reason to think that, once in office, they will suddenly embrace them.
The Biggest Questions Awaiting the Supreme Court
The legal principle of “one person, one vote” got its fullest expression in the 1964 case Reynolds v. Sims, which ruled that state legislative districts must contain roughly equal numbers of people. Before then, district populations varied widely, an intentional practice that gave more power to rural white voters than those in the more diverse cities.