Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

One thing about places like Maine and Vermont (Sanders' state) is that they're tiny.

The total population of Maine is 1.3 million. The population of Vermont is 0.62 million. These states are smaller than many cities now a days. And you'll see a similar pragmatic politics in many of the other very small states. I think that's because you minimize the degrees of separation between representative and voter. When people know and meet other people it humanizes them and makes it easy to see that a letter beside somebody's name doesn't define them.

Our system was built for a different time, and we can see it's still a pretty reasonable system in the areas where that time is kind of emulated. But for many other parts of the country the system's age is showing. Even if we tried to keep up with how the founding fathers saw it we'd have literally thousands of individuals in the house of representatives which is probably similarly unworkable - and rather comical compared to the unchanging 100 of the senate.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: