Dylan Matthews says that the U.S. Senate is “a profoundly anti-democratic body and should be abolished.” His reason is that small states get too much representation.
It’s true that the Senate’s membership has little relationship to the true will of the people if that will is expressed in majoritarian terms. In that sense, it is not democratic. But the Senate was never supposed to be a smaller version of the House of Representatives. The Senate should be considered as an institution that made it possible to glue the disparate states together into something approximating unity. Ultimately, the Civil War could not be avoided, but the Senate is the only institution in government that had at least the potential of averting it. By preventing a majority from pursuing policies that would lead quickly to secession, the Senate gave peacemakers a chance even if no acceptable compromise was ultimately possible.
That people today talk about the Senate being anti-democratic is an indication that the country no longer suffers from the kind of regional differences that could lead to war. In today’s environment, those differences are only strong enough to cause massive dysfunction and attacks on the federal government by the southern-anchored majority party. But we’re not about to take up arms against each other.
It is now the Democrats’ turn to use the anti-Democratic nature of the Senate, this time as expressed by the filibuster rule rather than the skewed membership, to forestall radical changes (such as outlawing abortion) that could quickly lead Blue America to talk about secession.
Maybe the Senate should be abolished, but it would be a luxury we couldn’t previously afford. And I don’t really see the country as becoming more homogenous and unified. I see it as becoming more and more splintered along regional lines within and between states. This country aspires to small ‘d’ democracy, but it’s never had it in its long history and I’m not sure we’re ready for it.
One thing I’m sure about it is that we don’t have any need for a truly democratic Senate. It would just be an expensive redundancy, the only merit of which would be longer terms for its members.
If you want to know if we can afford to abolish the Senate, ask yourself how long the country would hold together if it was governed by a standalone House of Representatives led by Nancy Pelosi one day and John Boehner the next?
The undemocratic nature of the Senate seems like an affront to our values, but this is only because we think we can have a united country without it that consents to be governed in radically different ways from one election cycle to the next.
But I see less evidence for this proposition with each passing year.
