Not really. Black people might still be slaves if we left that up to popular opinion. That was NOT a popular opinion at the time. Same for women's voting rights. Black voting rights. Gay marriage.
All these were passed when public support was hovering at 25% - and shortly after they were passed, public opinion quickly shifted in an S-curve.
Your claim about gay marriage is just empirically wrong. Popular "support" for gay marriage passed 50% in 2013 according to https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga... and passed the "oppose" level in 2011 (it looks like ~10% of survey respondents consistently pick neither option, so the lines crossed at the 45% mark). Obergefell v. Hodges was decided in 2015.
Support for gay marriage was at the 25% level nationally in ... well, per https://web.archive.org/web/20050517033538/http://www.aei.or... page 21 I would put it in the mid-1990s, 20 years before full nationwide legalization. Of course legalization in various states preceded national legalization, as expected.
The other things you list predate modern polling (except maybe Black voting rights, depending on how you define that). But just looking at women's suffrage, it was a constitutional amendment. That means is got 2/3 majorities in both houses of congress and ratification by 3/4 of state legislatures. It's hard to see how something with only 25% popular support could manage that, so at this point I'm going to ask you for data to back up that extraordinary claim.
If we are entertaining what would happen regarding gay marriage ...
> if we left that up to popular opinion
... then national polls are not relevant, because marriage laws are set at the state level. In fact, until Obergefell v. Hodges, it essentially was left up to popular opinion, and many people lived in states where it was unpopular enough to pass legislative, or even constitutional bans.
Sure, the mechanics of how things become "law" is complicated by the fact that you can have actual laws, constitutional amendments, supreme court decisions, etc, depending on the exact thing being discussed and where responsibility for it rests in the various levels of government in the US.
But no matter how you slice it, I see no obvious support in the data for the original claim that "gay marriage was legalized when popular support was only at 25%".
Now maybe there were some states that had support at only 25% in 2015. For example, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/where-same-sex-marriage... is a 2014 article that mentions that Missisipi had 14% support in 2004 and support went up by "1-2% per year since then". So _maybe_ it was at only 25%, as an absolute lower bound. But chances are it was higher than that even there.
> All these were passed when public support was hovering at 25% - and shortly after they were passed, public opinion quickly shifted in an S-curve.
You're mistaking correlation for causation.
Things first pass when they have ~25% popular support because that's when they first get enough votes to pass in a two party system. You get 51% of the party that controls 51% of the legislature, your measure passes.
Then support for it increases because that's what it was doing to begin with, which was how it got to 51% of 51% from whatever smaller amount of support it had before it passed.
If you require a higher bar to change the law, it takes longer. But change inevitably still happens.
Slavery wasn't doomed by voting, it was doomed by economics. Before the industrial revolution, working on a plantation (essentially serfdom) compared favorably with your other alternatives, which typically consisted of starving to death in the wilderness. After the industrial revolution, you could run away to a city and get a job in a factory, which is what everybody started doing and the whole system started to disintegrate.
And it was the same thing for women's suffrage. It came about following economic and social changes that essentially made it inevitable in a modern society. It would have happened anyway. It did happen anyway, despite being passed by constitutional amendment in the US, which has a supermajority requirement for enactment.
By contrast, ill-conceived ideas that aren't inevitable would die when they go out of fashion without ever being implemented.
Exactly! Democracy is a process used to encourage deliberation - it's a means rather than an ends.
That's why we have a constitution, three branches of government, an electoral college for the executive, and had indirectly elected senators. It was all to force deliberation and buy enough time for saner minds to prevail through the moral panics of the day.
The system is broken because the process was corrupted decades ago with the greatest of intentions.
Do you have data on slavery? My understanding was the North was pretty anti-slavery and had 3x the population of the south. I'd be interested if there is actual polling data to suggest if a popular vote was held it would have failed.
I thought part of the point of the strange election process we have was to "ensure" that southern states would have a vote even in the face of a more populous north…
They did. Which was why they were able to hold out until 1860 when the writing was on the wall. Since slavery didn't die on it's own and was the underpinning of the economy of many states violence was somewhat bound to happen.
You can't just expect to make any sizeable minority of your nation's economy non-viable and not have all the people's lives you just ruined start shooting. You might be able to get away with it if the people losing out are an evenly distributed minority but if there's a huge block where they are the overwhelming local majority it's gonna get ugly.
The alternative path out of slavery would have been to boil the frog but with the uneven geographic distribution of slavery that wouldn't have been reasonably possible to do socially (e.g. convince people to spend more any more money treating slaves better until wage labor is competitive and slavery can be legislated away without a war). You might be able to boil the frog legislatively but the weak government structures of the 19th century were not well equipped for that kind of thing and that requires a lot of support anyway. In order to get the nation bootstrapped the founders intentionally put off any action for several decades. Something calamitous was kind of bound to happen. Frankly I think we were kind of lucky we got off with a "one and done" war over it (yes I know there was a bunch of background violence after the fact) rather than a perpetual slow boil conflict that turns into a low intensity shooting war every few decades like you see in other parts of the world.
In fact, it was the slave owning southern states that wanted the Senate to be apportioned proportionally, rather than equally (this was the Virginia Plan). The Virginia Plan created a two-chamber legislature with proportional representation based on population. The New Jersey Plan would have allocated one member of Congress to each state. The Connecticut Compromise that led to the current allocation received buy-in from both slave and non-slave states, because it was about small vs large states, which were present in both sides.
The population advantage of the South was the impetus behind the infamous "three fifths compromise". The 3/5 compromise was designed to reduce the interest of slave-holding states in Congress as well as the elections.
The South had more people, but far fewer voters (partially because of slavery, partially because they had more restrictive rules even for white males).
The Senate was done for small states, but the Electoral College was definitely invented to appease the South.
> but the Electoral College was definitely invented to appease the South
No it wasn’t. Under both the Northern proposed New Jersey Plan as well as the Southern proposed Virginia Plan, the President would have actually been elected by Congress. There were concerns that having Congress elect the President would jeopardize separation of powers. So the Electoral College was created, with one elector for each member of Congress. It had nothing to do with protecting the interests of slave-holding states, but instead was designed to make the Presidency more independent of Congress. The fact that the President would be elected by States as opposed to people directly was uncontroversial. What was controversial was whether the apportionment of those votes should be proportional to the population (where both chambers of Congress had proportional votes) or whether it should be the degressive proportionality that we have today (where the upper house has equal representation). The slave-states wanted the former, not the latter, owing to their population advantage.
It’s what’s used to allocate seats in the European Parliament, who vote to elect the President of the European Commission, who is the Head of Government of the EU. In many ways, the structure of the EU is identical to that of the US, especially prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment.
The North wasn't a single, unified entity. There were 4 major polities in the Union during WW2:
- New England and the Great Lakes were virulently anti-slavery for primarily economic reasons, but some moralist reasons also.
- New York City was mercantile and not thrilled about being in the war. Lots of protests and political violence in NYC during the Civil War.
- Pennsylvania and the Lower Ohio Valley were generally more anti-slavery for moral and economic reasons, but generally more pacifist and amiable toward the South than New Englanders.
- Appalachia, which covers all the border areas along the mountains running from central PA to northern AL, who were completely ambivalent about slavery, but extremely patriotic and anti-secession.
Pre-1860 a vote on slavery certainly would have failed in the North and may have led additional states to secede. Lincoln was explicitly not pro-abolition for this reason.
I certainly agree that some things are so important they need to get done regardless of popular opinion. But to say that independent contractor classification clears that bar seems like a pretty strong anti-democratic commitment. Are there any matters of public policy you feel should be left up to popular opinion?
All these were passed when public support was hovering at 25% - and shortly after they were passed, public opinion quickly shifted in an S-curve.