Picairn wrote:San Lumen wrote:You don’t see a problem here? A legislature not reflecting the demographics of its constituency? The previous congress which Republicans controlled their caucus was almost entirely white men. Same goes for republican majority in state legislatures it’s almost all white men. But that is no issue right?
Uh, politicians are voted in by their constituents, not their party members. If the legislature is dominated by white men then it's quite clear these white men were voted in by the people, and I don't see any fault with democracy making its voice.
I swear, most people who reply to this with the mindset of "so-what" lack the sociological imagination. Vaush is completely right when he says it changes your perceptions of everything, because you come to understand how our society is a product of complex historical forces, instead of only being able to describe things through the just-world fallacy; that the world is influenced predictably and tends toward a moral balance where well-meaning people naturally bring about well-meaning results.
You people don't conceive of the possibility that people vote for old white men, because there's a social bias towards viewing elders, men, and whites as natural leadership figures; this in addition to other factors such as wealth inequality between groups that mean white men have a disproportionate change of acquiring the resources that allows them to campaign in the first place (which is not a cost-free activity, at least in America) and thus get into power.
People's choices of who they vote for aren't made in some objective vacuum either, they're influenced by who the voters believe can win, who the voters view as accurately representing their interests, who the voters view as being better on the issues (i.e. issue ownership) along with other things such as the person-factor (what kind of person is the candidate?). To suggest things are fine because people were voted in is to miss the complex picture presented by actual research into voting patterns. It is also, as I said above, to miss the complex picture of the social forces that allow people to become candidates in the first place.