It’s interesting to me that modern progressives make so much hay about the tendency for election systems to deliberately overrepresent rural and low-population areas, since that’s one of relatively few cases where protections for a traditionally marginalized group actually are enshrined in law. Obviously this comes in part from a tendency not to think of “marginalized groups” along those lines in the first place, but I wonder how much of that comes from the fact that people are used to them having disproportionate power and influence because it was given to them intentionally as a counterbalance. “Urbanites fuck the provincials” is one of the most timeless axes of exploitation, and rural and other low-population areas are kinda fucked even with this system, so they’d be ridiculously fucked without it.

Of course this is a flashpoint because the regions in question are arch-conservative reactionary hotbeds and cosmopolitan urban liberals resent being held hostage to their demands, and objectively many of those demands are very damaging for huge swaths of society that voted against them. But, like, that’s not that unusual an outcome when you give otherwise-disenfranchised groups an outsized influence to compensate. The liberal coalition of the disenfranchised is only a liberal coalition because the ones who would prefer something else have nowhere to get it.