Response to Richard N. Rosenfeld’s essay “What Democracy? The case for abolishing the United States Senate”

Rosenfeld’s essay, apart from suggesting a plan that would never be passed, is written to take advantage of an ill-informed readership and is too idealistic.

One technique Rosenfeld uses to take advantage of (what he must assume to be) an uniformed public is to combine his opinion with a retelling of history. Because he does not qualify his opinions with statements like “I think” or “in my opinion” and does not provide any clear distinction between his retelling of historic events and his opinion, he attempts to dupe people into taking his opinions as fact. For example, he states matter-of-factly that the “Great Compromise” was erroneously named because the compromise forced “larger states to an undemocratic demand by smaller states” (36). One could argue that “one vote per state” is democratic in a convention of states.

Moreover, his choice of language in many passages showed extreme biases. For example, he satirizes and undermines James Madison’s statements by saying Madison “performed a lawyerlike pirouette in The Federalist Papers, as he propagandized” (37). This could be stated differently to give Madison his due. In another example, on the first page of his essay, he says “our leaders must necessarily pursue their unpopular aims by means of increasingly desperate stratagems of deceit and persuasion” (35). In this statement he deliberately casts politicians in a negative light but fails to qualify his opinion with more facts. He then uses this negative view of politicians to further his argument later in the essay.

In his conclusion, Rosenfeld accepts the idea that not all states would agree to take away their equal vote in the senate. How then would his plan be put into action? He states that the citizens in small states would accept a plan to decrease the power of the senate because “all American’s believe in ‘one person, one vote’” (44). If the states would not agree to decrease their power, the average American would not be willing to either. Perhaps Rosenfeld is arguing that the people are more sacrificing or more “American” than state legislatures.

Rosenfeld’s plan to eliminate or diminish the power of the senate is just as idealistic and unattainable as his hazy concept of democracy. In his essay, he does not explain his definition of democracy, which makes his essay that much harder to follow. Does his believe in complete democracy in which each person can do as he likes? Does he want a representative (republican) form of government? What kind of voting system does he deem fair? Majority rule? Rosenfeld does not address these basic questions and, instead, jumps to making broad, general statements about how the minority is victimized by the Senate and our current political process. As we discussed in class, different voting systems yield very different results. Instead of attacking the Senate, perhaps he would have done better to discuss voting methods. Even his proposal of having the majority of power invested in the House of Representatives would lead to certain biases in the system.

Another concept Rosenfeld failed to discuss is the idea that the Senate holds institutional memory due to the length of the term of office, as well as other factors. The framers of the constitution knew that the Senate would be departing from idealized democracy, but the body would be an important check on the whims of the people. The Senate would be way to control the temporary surges of popular thought in favor of more well reasoned, long-term thinking.

In this critique, I have attempted to address a few complaints I have regarding Rosenfeld’s defects in both writing styles and logic.