I've been thinking a lot about anti-majoritarian institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College and I confess that I think these represent a kind of impossible conundrum.
We're rightly skeptical of anti-majoritarian systems; they are apt to be hijacked by powerful minorities, and there is no minority more powerful than the wealthy.
If you're trying to figure out how to do things that benefit the few at the cost of the many, start by taking over small places with outsized representation in the political sphere (looking at you, Wyoming).
But there is a good reason that federated systems need antimajoritarian institutions: why would small groups federate with big ones if the system is purely majoritarian?
Why would Newfoundland or PEI confederate with Canada if their political representation was limited by their populations? It's not hard to look ahead and see how in short order, these low-population places will have their priorities overridden by high-population places.
So if you want to lure low-population groups into a confederation, they need some guarantee that they won't just be absorbed and nullified by the majority (think of how China would like to see Tibet or Taiwan)
But there is an overall trend for young people (and ambitious people) to move from low-population places to high-population places, so confederation tends to depopulate low-population places and increase the population of high-population places (winner take all)
Which means that somewhat antimajoritarian power-distributions become more antimajoritarian over time, with smaller and smaller groups of people wielding ever-more-disproportionate power, making them irresistible to corrupters wishing to suborn their power.
But we need federations: our problems (like climate, but also finance, etc) are transnational and transregional. Solutions require cooperation across territorial boundaries. Smart low-pop places won't enter into federations without a guarantees.
So what do we do? it's true that slavers agitated for the electoral college to ensure that agrarian slave-states would get to resist urbanized free states, but even without slavery, US federation would have had some kind of antimajoritarian mechanisms
Just to guarantee every low-pop place that they wouldn't be clobbered. And today, the low-pop places hold cities and their millions hostage: Ontario elects a corrupt thug to boss around Toronto, low-pop US states send lunatic senators to DC to roast the world in oil emissions.
I have no idea what to do about this. Safeguarding minorities without creating minority rule in federations is a hard problem, and one we're going to have to solve to create the transnational alliances we need to solve urgent problems.
