Abolish the Senate

Thomas Geoghegan in The Baffler:

Before the young in this country ever stop racism, much less enact socialism, they better start by changing our form of government. Thanks to the U.S. Senate, the government still overrepresents the racist and populist parts of the country. It also now overrepresents the rural areas or underpopulated interior regions that are the biggest losers in the global economy—and by no coincidence, it has made easier the rise of Trump. Even if Republican senators from these states are by and large more genteel than the Republican members of the U.S. House, they are the real screamers, who give voice to the country’s id, or rather the parts that are most raw and red and racist.

That’s why the Senate, for all its good manners and sophistication, is a greater threat to individual liberty than the raucous and badly behaved U.S. House—even when the House had a GOP majority. The very structure of the U.S. Senate makes it difficult for us to know who “We the People” are. If North Dakota has the same power as New York to determine the will of the country as a whole, it is impossible for the chamber to act on behalf of the population as a whole—the people that we really are. And it makes it impossible for the country to be free.

More here.