Clearing some things up.

I started using shorthand below. It wasn't clear, so let me try again. In part, what I was writing was a thought process. That's why it wasn't clear--I was still thinking through it myself.

Let's start at what may be the end and work backwards.

We have a representative democracy. One could call it a republic, I suppose, but the term democracy is important. In a direct democracy, the people themselves legislate. In ancient Athens, that meant that 6000 citizens got together in one place, anyone could propose legislation, and policy was decided by vote.

Our country is still a democracy, but in place of the 6000 citizens, we have elected representatives. Our representatives stand in for us in the legislative project. Instead of us making the laws, they do it for us.

The democratic aspects of our federal government are not in the elections we hold every two years, but in the actual legislative process. Any democracy, however, can be tyrranical, i.e. if an unchecked majority exercises its legislative power to the detriment of a minority.

Democracy itself does not mean majority rule. To be simple, it is government by and for the people. The second part of that statement implies that whatever government is formed must be as inclusive as possible. This is what I was saying about the parties representing specific positions on a political spectrum. Government for the people can't rationally mean "government for the 51% of the people who voted." That is unrepresentative and undemocratic precisely because it excludes a large portion of the people.

Most people fall into the middle of the political spectrum, and they have to split in an election between two groups that don't really reflect their actual beliefs.

We can drop all the issues with the electoral structures from my analysis, except as historical artifacts. Let me explain: The writers of the basic constitution--not the Bill of Rights or other amendments--were worried about the House of Representatives running amok with democratic fever. They were afraid that the House, as a purely representative body, could become tyrranical--that a majority could control it and harm minorities. In order to counter the tyrrany of the majority, they had to institute specifically anti-majoritarian provisions. They chose to do this by creating the Senate which is not proportionally representative.

It is important to think of the Senate as existing for a reason. When we ask what that reason is, we find that it exists to check the majoritarian design of the House. The crucial point, however, is that we don't need the Senate to do that. We can build anti-majoritarian government (and thus achieve democratic inclusivity) in other ways.

Let me try to clear up what I mean by majoritarian and anti-majoritarian. A governmental structure is majoritarian insofar as it favors the interests of a majority, regardless of the size of the majority, through any means, including through assigning governmental power based on the whim of a shifting polity. A structure is anti-majoritarian if it seeks to limit the will of such a majority and provides protection for minorities who may be out of power for just a moment.

It is clear that the Senate is intended to be anti-majoritarian. Membership of the Senate is not connected to the desires of the majority. Imagine what would happen if each state had three people living in it, except Kansas, and Kansas had 300 million people. In our federal structure, the interests of Kansas would represent the majority, but Kansas would only have 2 votes in the Senate, and the other 49 states could counter Kansas's control of the House.

The House tends to be majoritarian, as should be clear from the example.

So, that's our federal scheme as we have it. What's odd, however, is that our actual legislative processes are purely majoritarian If you consider the House and Senate as direct democracies for a moment, you see that there aren't any anti-majoritarian protections. Both the House and Senate are subject to the tyrranical whims of the majority of their members.

If you take a look at direct democracies, the problem of the tyrrany of the majority arises in the legislative process. That's what we're really concerned about--how the laws are made, not how individuals are selected for office. It seems to me that our founding fathers thought that the method of selecting officers would cure the tyrrany of the majority that arises during actual legislation. This is fallacious.

And furthermore, the structure as it is designed is problematic because the majority of the anti-representative Senate has the same power as the majority of the representative House. A majority of the Senate can represent a tiny majority of the population. Consider the Kansas hypothetical above. In that situation, 147 citizens (3 per 49 states) would have more legislative clout than 300 million. If the 98 senators from the 3 person states didn't want to go along with the House, there wouldn't be anything the House could do about it.

Hm, this could almost be called 'overinclusive,' but that term already means something.

In any case, my point below was to suggest that we need to create inclusive anti-majoritarian protections in the legislature for the simple reason that that is where the action is.

Hope that helps.