[mikem170]

On the other hand, it might be better to have many smaller states, perhaps the size of counties, which could better represent urban and rural areas separately.

Switzerland does this, having "cantons" about the size of U.S. counties, and these cantons hold more power in their system than states do in the U.S. These cantons, averaging a few hundred thousand people, handle citizenship and cultural issues, collect taxes, administer health care, run secondary schools, etc. If you have a problem in a construct this size the politicians are not so far away and inaccessible. Your fellow voters are nearby, and more like you.

I don't know that it is a good thing to put more people into larger groups, noticeably diluting their political representation. That causes a lot of friction, when large groups of people don't agree.

I imagine that most localities would rather have more representation, not less.

[midoridensha]

>On the other hand, it might be better to have many smaller states, perhaps the size of counties, which could better represent urban and rural areas separately.

Have you seen Star Wars: The Phantom Menace? What you're proposing is something that resembles the Galactic Senate from that movie. Are you going to have Congress hold sessions in a football stadium or something?

>Switzerland does this, having "cantons" about the size of U.S. counties

Switzerland is a tiny country with a small fraction of the US's population or geographic size. It's comparable to a single US State, so sure, having cantons the size of US counties makes sense. (And what kind of counties are you talking about anyway? This really doesn't mean much: on the east coast in a state like Virginia, the counties might only have 5000 people. In the western states, you can have a county like Maricopa County, Arizona with over 4 million.)

>I imagine that most localities would rather have more representation, not less.

At the national level? There is no example of this working anywhere, worldwide, for a sizeable country. (No, Switzerland is not a sizeable country.) The whole idea is completely unworkable. There's real-world limits to how large political divisions can be before they need to be grouped together into larger groups, which themselves have representatives in a larger body.

[mikem170]

> Have you seen Star Wars: The Phantom Menace?

I have not seen that movie. Heard it wasn't that good. I'm happy to hear about the relevant parts, if you want to describe them.

> Are you going to have Congress hold sessions in a football stadium or something?

I'd be ok with that. Not afraid to try something different. It used to be 1 federal representative per 30,000 people, communicating via horse-back. We've regressed to 1 representative per 500,000+ people, even though we now have instant communication. I don't see what the big deal is about counting more congressional votes.

I realize this would be a drastic change for those currently in power, those with money might not be able to afford to bribe so many more congress people, or so many more state representatives if we had more states.

Ideally a national congress so large, ruling over so many people, would not be running the entire country in minute detail, just coordinating on issues that need to be collectively dealt with, and where there is collective agreement.

> And what kind of counties are you talking about anyway?

Swiss cantons vary in size, like U.S. counties. The smallest canton in Switzerland has something like 20,000 people. The largest is home to Geneva. 26 cantons, about 8.5 million people total. I brought Swiss cantons up as a demonstration that smaller groups of people can run things for themselves just fine, doing more than U.S. states. They subdivide cantons into municipalities that function much like U.S. city/town governments.

> At the national level? There is no example of this working anywhere, worldwide, for a sizeable country.

Why do countries need to be sizeable? What would be wrong with smaller groups of people governing themselves and organizing into federations when they want or need to? What is sacred and desirable about the idea of large countries?

There's seems to a be a trend of wanting to consolidate into larger political units. I don't know that this serves the interest of the people. Sometimes it seems this is just a way to impose one-size-fits-all solutions across ever larger and more disparate groups of people.

> There's real-world limits to how large political divisions can be before they need to be grouped together into larger groups, which themselves have representatives in a larger body.

I agree that it is harder to get larger groups of people to agree. I don't know that the best answer is to force people into larger political units. That doesn't make disagreements go away.

There's a line of thinking that larger and larger political units are actually harmful, that they ultimately lead to authoritarianism and bullying behaviour, towards their own populations and others, and that the solution is to split into much smaller political units [0].

Countries that become too big become evil. History is full of such examples. The U.S., Russia, China, Japan, Germany, and the U.K have all taken advantage of their size and power to do things that are harmful to others, and those are just the largest examples over the last 100 years. Adolf Hitler as the ruler of Bavaria would not have been able to command forces that could kill millions of people, but Adolf Hitler the leader of Germany did. What benefit are larger states and countries, besides concentrating more power in one place, power that is so often misused?

Name me a sizeable country that has not suppressed large segments of its own population and other less powerful countries. Large political structures come with a lot of their own problems.

I realize this is a big topic, I tried above to present more detail behind what I was thinking. I'm not sure why you think it is wrong or a problem to have smaller political units that better represent people.

[0] Leopold Khor wrote about this, "The Breakdown of Nations", here's a good youtube summary, about 10 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaszpQaNwAU

[midoridensha]

Basically, you live in a fantasy world. You mention Hitler, but someone like Hitler doesn't stop with Bavaria, he takes over everything around him, as we saw in the 1930s. Did you totally forget how both Austria and Germany were under control of the Nazis, and then they invaded and took over Poland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, France, etc.? Then, the reason they lost the war was because the "evil" US was large enough to beat them militarily. If the US had been a bunch of small un-unified countries, that never would have happened. They would have been like pre-EU Europe: not sharing any common governance or military power and not having that much economic power because of a lack of a single market and currency.

So, in your world, all the free nations will be too small economically or militarily to really do much and won't be able to effectively unite, and then they'll be beaten into submission by China and Russia.

[mikem170]

> Basically, you live in a fantasy world.

Hoping to make the world a better place, via more democracy...

I objected to your original assertion that we should consolidate states in the U.S., because that would be less democratic, and I think we should go in the other direction. I assume more local government is better, because it is more responsive to the people. People revolt if when a government becomes too unresponsive. Also it's easier to corrupt a more centralized and far away government, a one-stop shop for the oligarchs. We've got enough of that as it is. I don't think theirs anything sacred about the status quo. We could do a lot better.

If the people in Vermont and Rhode Island want to merge, I'd be ok with that. I don't think they want to, though! If the people in eastern Oregon want their own state, or to join with Idaho, I'd be ok with that also.

I am still curious why you think less states in the U.S. would be better? Is there a reason you said that?

> but someone like Hitler doesn't stop with Bavaria, he takes over everything around him

Remember that Hitler didn't start as the ruler of Bavaria, he was able to become the leader of the entirety of Germany because Germany was already a large country. Also other large countries caused WW2 by leaving Germany trashed after WW1, a war which happened because a united (large) Germany was a threat to the other large nations of France, Russia, and the UK. Large countries caused those wars.

Prior to Germany uniting there were smaller wars in the area. Nobody said that small countries would never go to war, but they tend to so less often, and with less impact. Most people don't want to go to war, they end up forced into it.

Maybe this all goes back to kings who created these large countries to command more money and power? Hard to say stuff like that is in the interest of the people, especially considering how well many small countries have done for themselves.

> So, in your world, all the free nations will be too small economically or militarily to really do much and won't be able to effectively unite, and then they'll be beaten into submission by China and Russia.

Small countries confederate when they need to. They are aware of threats, they make alliances. They get caught off guard sometimes, just like big countries do. The U.S. entered the NATO alliance with other countries, we didn't have to merge them into ours.

There's no reason we can't make changes to be more democratic and still defend ourselves. China and Russia are not a threat to the United States if we have more states and give them more power. China and Russia are both large centralized countries that are disintegrating - the Soviet Union is gone, Russia is still declining, and China is headed in the same direction.

What do you suggest, we become a large dictatorship because that is the most efficient way to weaponize a nation, in order to best defend ourselves from hypothetical threats? Or do you think that everything is perfect in the U.S. at the moment, except for some pesky small state senators, and we should just plod along wondering if the next Jan 6 will be successful or not?

[midoridensha]

Confederating doesn't work. The US tried that back in the 1700s and it was a disaster; they gave up after 12 years. Did you forget that part of your history? It works OK for Switzerland because they're surrounded by mountains and during wartime have taken advantage of situations for their monetary benefit.

The reason the US is so successful economically is because of unity. It's the same reason Europe has not been that successful lately, despite their much, much longer headstart; it's why the EU was formed, to try to emulate the US's success with a single currency and single market. However they're finding that just having a confederation doesn't really work and isn't stable: Brexit, the Greek debt crisis, etc.

And no, I'm not convinced that China is disintegrating at all. That's a rather distorted view of current events. They might be shooting themselves in the foot with their Covid policy, but that's a long way from "disintegrating". The US shot itself in the foot in many ways too but it isn't breaking apart.

You might be right that the US in particular has gotten to a point where internal divisions will force some kind of large change, but this doesn't support the idea that free nations would be better off splintering into hundreds of tiny republics and hoping that confederating will protect them from enemies that don't share this view.

[mikem170]

> Confederating doesn't work. The US tried that back in the 1700s and it was a disaster

I'm not sure what you mean that confederacy doesn't work. The U.S. has always been a confederation of states, as per the current constitution. We got started in the conversation debating on how many states there should be.

> The reason the US is so successful economically is because of unity.

I've always thought that geography, natural resources, free markets, and immigration played a big role in our economic growth. The Soviet Union was unified, and they were not successful, so there are obviously other factors. Perhaps unified dictatorship vs unified democracy makes a difference, also, at least over the long term.

> it's why the EU was formed, to try to emulate the US's success with a single currency and single market

The EU was flawed. Money and labor could cross boarders, but not national debt. The poor countries were allowed to borrow more than they could afford, and lost their manufacturing to the richer countries. It was half assed. Perhaps the countries in the EU were too dissimilar to be unified the way they were. In contrast NATO still works. Confederacies come and go as the decades go by, things change.

> I'm not convinced that China is disintegrating at all.

China has fallen apart numerous times in their history. it's not just what is happening now with covid, it's going to be economic bubbles bursting, increasingly ineffective centralized power, their rapidly aging population, culturally and economically disparate regions, etc. The aging population is a time bomb for them, they're headed towards a seriously scary demographic cliff. They are not going to be the same country in 2030. They are not an existential threat to the U.S., just like the former Soviet Union and the current Russian regime are not an existential threat. Three years before the Soviet Union fell apart we were terrified of them, too. We over-judged that threat for a couple decades.

> You might be right that the US in particular has gotten to a point where internal divisions will force some kind of large change, but this doesn't support the idea that free nations would be better off splintering into hundreds of tiny republics and hoping that confederating will protect them from enemies that don't share this view.

We kind of got mixed up talking about many small states, versus many small countries, with asides about the details of the EU and China. Perhaps that's my fault, I can't help myself, I find all of this interesting. I never said that we need to turn the U.S. into Europe, or into a confederacy of many small countries. We already have a confederacy of many small states.

I meant to defend the idea of smaller and more local government, and that more small states could be a good thing. I brought up Switzerland not because they were a small country in Europe, but because they have small states (cantons) of 20k to 1.5m people handling things that our federal government ruling over 330m people struggles with, like health care. The Swiss are my favorite example of a well designed democracy that can scale. They vote on getting involved in wars. They voted on their pandemic response. The voters can referendum to veto politicians. They use double majorities to try to avoid suppressing minorities. It's not perfect, but it is definitely better.

The founding fathers of the U.S. were against democracy [0]. They were the rich landowners and thought of it as a threat, that people would vote to take their land. And in the modern era we still have money in control of politicians, the Supreme Court ruling that money is free speech [1], legalizing what most other civilized countries consider bribery and corruption. That's why the health care industry players got to write the Obamacare bill, and we're all stuck with it. Goodbye Romneycare in Massachusetts, goodbye to Vermont's pending single payer plan, goodbye to New York's and California's future plans, etc.

I think it's a real long term problem that our federal government continues to grow in power. That Leopold Khor fellow I referenced earlier said that the U.S. works well because a plurality of states are more powerful than the federal government, to keep it in check. When the federal government becomes more powerful than a majority of states it can act with impunity, and that's where things get ugly.

You wanted to get rid of small states for some reason, and you haven't explained how come. We've talked enough, I'd really like to know if you still think this is a good idea, and why.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=founding+fathers+against+democracy...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC