If you're talking about the business of governing, when a bill is introduced or a candidate nominated for a position, there are only two choices, yes or no...
No, that's not true. As with the primary process, which creates the illusion there are only two choices, the yes-or-no vote idea creates the same illusion. But in the minds of the voting population there are many feelings, many positions, and there may be no majority position.
That's why we aren't able to settle complicated issues with a single up or down vote. If we could the question of abortion would have been resolved decades ago. But going almost 50 years after the Roe v Wade decison, abortion remains an unresolved social problem with no clear resolution in sight.
The way we make progress in resolving those problems is by people talking -- to their friends, their neighbors, their communities, to the people they agree with and the people they disagree with -- in conversations, in discussion groups, in letters to the editor, in something I've heard about call social media posts, and whatever other ways they're comfortable with. Campaigning for a candidate, or campaigning to get laws passed, is a way to stimulate these discussions, but it's these discussions which bring about the actual change.
It wasn't the passage of the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965 which changed US society so dramatically from what it had been 10 years prior; rather, the laws were able to be passed because society had changed remarkably. In 1954 civil rights activists were considered violent agitators and commie traitors; by 1965 there was still a considerable portion of the country which opposed civil rights and desegregation but a majority had come to agree that blacks had been badly mistreated and deserved more equal treatment. The laws didn't cause that, they were a way of recognizing that and moving us forward to the next level of conversations on the issue (which, unfortunately, did not get resolved nearly as well).
Similarly, it wasn't the passage of laws which changed attitudes on gay marriage -- but putting forward laws and court cases and referenda were ways of stimulating the social conversation and getting people to discuss and re-think their feelings on the issue. Again, we've seen remarkable social change over the last few decades, and the legislative process helped bring about that change by helping stimulate the conversations and arguments people needed to have to bring about a different social attitude toward gay relationships and gay rights.
Civil rights in the 50s was never a yes-or-no question. Abortion is not a yes-or-no question. Health care is not a yes-or-no question. Corruption in government is not a yes-or-no question.
You can bring up yes-or-no questions to try to stimulate conversations but those are generally not the best questions to ask because people's feelings on the issues are a lot more complicated and need more complex discussions. We saw that during the recent Democratic debates, when the raise-your-hands yes-or-no questions were interesting gotcha moments but really didn't help people understand well where the different candidates stood, let alone what the right answers to how to address problems such as making sure people can get the health care they need are.
Filibusters, when properly used, are a useful tool in helping the social discussion even if it's sometimes hard to see that. But they need to be properly used. The filibusterers need to be required to talk continuously, and the vote should only be delayed for as long as they are willing and able to do that and as long as enough other members of the group are willing to let them continue talking. It's not a perfect tool but it is potentially a useful one which I think should be kept in the tool set.
... and in our representative democracy the majority rules.
No. You still don't see the point I've been making, which is that
majority rule and
the outcome of majority vote are two distinctly different things.
The outcome of majority vote is not majority rule unless an actual majority will exists, and very often it doesn't.
Majority vote allows you to lump people with a wide variety of very different views into 2 groups, count the number in each group, and say one of the 2 groups is the majority. It isn't. It's a somewhat arbitrary grouping of people who aren't really in agreement, and if you were to offer up one of the other options a majority of the electorate would likely prefer it to the one which has been declared the majority will.
It doesn't matter whether the choices are
Sanders, Clinton, Trump and
Coulter (as in the example I provided) or
keep ObamaCare, expand ObamaCare, replace ObamaCare with MedicareForAll, replace ObamaCare with MedicareForAllWhoWantIt, scrap ObamaCare entirely and let everyone fend for themselves, and whatever other options people want to put out there. The point is that none of these options, at present, is actually the will of the majority. By putting things up for a vote you can pick one and
claim it's the majority will, but that doesn't make it the majority will because none of these are.
In the example I provided, it's possible to make one of the 4 candidates the "majority choice" by having primaries, getting it down to 2 candidates, having a vote between the 2 of them, and declaring the one who wins that vote the winner. But as I showed,
regardless of which one wins, a majority would have preferred one of the others if given that choice. There is no unique majority among them.
Likewise there is no unique majority choice among the options on health care reform. There is no unique majority choice among the options on abortion. There is no unique majority choice among the options on immigration. Rather, there are numerous positions held by different groups of people which can be lumped together in different ways to create the illusion of a majority.
But what we need isn't the illusion of a majority. What we need is an actual sense of agreement among society about how to deal with an issue. And that kind of agreement only comes about through good social discussion. Putting candidates up for election and putting issues up for votes can be a good way of promoting that discussion, but it's that discussion which is needed and until that discussion succeeds in unifying society around one position or another no actual majority exists except the majority which says we're not really in agreement yet.
