From: mss2@ellis.uchicago.edu (Michael S. Schiffer)
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Re: More elections, a victory...
Date: 5 Nov 92 22:52:03 GMT
Reply-To: mss2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations

In article <9211051939.AA08728@yrloc.ipsa.reuter.COM> dgil@IPSAINT.IPSA.REUTER.COM (Gillett, David) writes:
>     Mentor finds Michael's comments reasonably well thought out, but a bit
>troublesome nonetheless.

>     Perhaps, in some ideal world, the competence of a politician to represent
>their constituents depends only on ability and not on identification with the
>concerns and problems of those constituents.  I don't think we yet live in that
>ideal world.

	"Clearly not.  We don't live in any sort of ideal world, and I
daresay that we never will.  But is it necessary to identify with a
problem in order to adequately represent people with it?  If so, how
can representative government function at all?  My representative
didn't live my life, or anything particularly similar to my life.  Do
I really have more in common with Ted Kennedy than with Jeanne
Kirkpatrick, simply because Kennedy and I are both men?  Or do he and
Jeanne have more in common with one another because they're both of
Irish descent?  And if either of those are true, why would I prefer to
see her in charge of foreign policy than him?  Should I care whether a
candidate `has been there' if I'm confident that the candidate will
vote the right way?  I don't claim that background can't be used as a
proxy for opinions-- it's reasonable to suppose, as a rebuttable
presumption, that a Catholic candidate will be pro-life, or that a
Jewish candidate will be pro-Israel.  But I sense a difference between
that and considering opinions to be secondary to experiences (and
using ethnic background as a proxy for experiences)."

>     In a world where an awful lot of blacks were slaves and women could not
>vote, a white man represented a bunch of white men.  Race and gender were
>essentially irrelevant, and geography made sense as a way of distinguishing
>the interests of one set of constituents from the interests of another.

	"Did it?  Were the interests of the farmer and the storekeeper
the same?  The factory owner and the factory worker?  If anything,
many cities and states were once more heterogeneous than they are
today in terms of income and education-- cities especially.  The whole
idea was for people to come together and choose their
representatives-- _not_ to have an agent for the farmers and an agent
for the storekeepers, but to have an agent for those American citizens
who lived there.

	"The idea of a land of many self-interested nations scares me.
Because it's the small nations who get the short end of the stick,
always.  I'm not afraid of special privileges for minorities-- I'm
afraid that when minorities have each been carefully classed and given
their representation, then it will be possible to bring in the
question as to whether those `dangerous elements' should be
`controlled'.  And no representative will have to consider whether the
black vote, or the Jewish vote, or the Hispanic vote, or the Asian
vote in his district might swing the next election, because there will
be no such element in his constituency.   Not to mention the fun
apartheidesque games we can have in determining whether a given voter
or candidate is "really" black/American Indian/Asian/whatever when he
or she is of mixed descent."

>     The abolition of slavery did not end racism.  The franchise for women did
>not end sexism.  Diversity of representation is not fostering division of the
>population:  it is acknowledging and representing divisions which exist in the
>represented population.  The franchise has been extended to groups whose
>problems and interests do not follow neat local geographic boundaries, problems
>which have been exacerbated by the (perceived) exclusion of these groups from
>representation.

	"And I still think that thinking of people as `groups' plays
into the hands of those who want to discriminate against them as
groups.  Giving a group a Congressional district is identical to
excluding it from the dozen other Congressional districts that those
people might have been part of.  If that's acceptable, then what was
so wrong with seperate but equal education?  (Well, for one thing, it
wasn't equal-- but most people would not support a return to
segregation with guaranteed equal funding, I would think.)  For that
matter, I suspect that the old segregationists would have found giving
blacks a special, seperate repesentation in Congress rather than full
voting rights to be an acceptable compromise (assuming they couldn't
keep them completely disenfranchised).  At least they wouldn't have to
vote together, nor would their candidates have to court the black
vote.  Of course, if that had happened I doubt that Virginia would
have ever seen a black governor, nor Illinois a black senator.

	"In the long run, political leadership requires the ability to
gain a broad base of support.  The alternative is ghettoization-- to
let the black politicians cater to the black community and, by
extension, to allow only white politicians to serve the white
community.  In the long run, women shouldn't have a problem-- they
_are_ a majority, and hence don't face the same danger of
marginalization now that most _legal_ (as opposed to actual)
discrimination is gone.

	"But if minorities allow themselves and others to think of
them as a people apart, then they'll pay a price for it.  Ask the Jews
and the Gypsies-- not just the Holocaust, but the entire history of
persecution, at least in the modern period stems in large part from
the fact that these peoples were considered (and considered
themselves, in large part) a seperate nation with seperate interests.
This belief persisted right up until the Second World War even in
relatively civilized places like Britain, and contributed to the
complacency which the world showed in the face of the early stages of
the persecution.

	"In the end, if a minority group insists that its interests
are different and opposed to the majority's, and gets this fact
institutionalized, the real danger is that the majority will believe
them.  And if that happens, then if the majority is large it will win,
and if the factions are of more equal size, you simply get permanent
ethnic enmity and rivalry."

>     I think that it is reasonable to hope that someday differences in race and
>gender will not translate, in American society, into privilege and
>disadvantage, and in that day I would hope that, if we still resort to
>representation to effect democracy, elected representatives will reflect all
>points of the most important spectra of divergence in the population at that
>time.  I think it's fair to say that, at present, race and gender exert much
>greater influence on the lives of an awful lot of Americans than geography.
>Perhaps in fifty years some other criterion will have become more important.

	"And I say that if geography really did divide Americans into
communities of interest, then geographical apportionment would have a
divisive effect-- if diversity is desirable in the representative
body, I think it's more desirable in the electorate.  Because a
diverse electorate can't be swayed very far, as a whole, by divisive
politics-- the politician loses some for every gain.  Look at the
Louisiana governor's race: David Duke lost that race despite getting a
majority of whites to vote for him, because he alienated the black
community (and many whites, to be fair) by his racist stances.  Now,
imagine if Louisiana were gerrymandered into a black state and a white
state, and tell me who'd be governor of the latter today.  Of course,
black Louisiana would have a black governor-- but would that really be
better, or would politics just be more extreme and more racially
polarized in reaction to their white neighbors election of Duke?"

Michael

-- 
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS	"Indeed I tremble for my country
mss2@midway.uchicago.edu	 when I reflect that God is just."
mike.schiffer@um.cc.umich.edu	 -- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on
mss2@usite-next.uchicago.edu     Virginia (1784)
Newsgroups: alt.callahans