The kind of corruption that "rotten boroughs" generate became manifest in 2016 when southern black voters supported a Jim Crow racist, who black leaders warn will only sell out their interests while posturing as a civil-rights hero. The overwhelming preference for Clinton among southern black voters exposed the triumph of a propaganda system that could ignore the progressive civil-rights organizer whose every policy, unknown to red-state voters, is aimed at reversing the decline of working-class and middle-class fortunes and who at the same time has a specific racial-justice program to address the structural discrimination that, alongside the class issues, drive the white-privilege system.
The red-state electoral results defied all evidence presented by black intellectuals and spokespersons. These southern voters never heard the warnings about Clinton from such leaders not coopted by the Clinton plutocrat-funded machine. Rotten boroughs exist to produce such anomalies.
I have argued elsewhere that this is still early days of the campaign. Notwithstanding the consistent and expected money-stream media propaganda advising his supporters that it has been all over for him after the Super Tuesday 7-4 split decision, if not earlier, Sanders is actually on a trajectory to victory, unless his campaign's strategic failures lose the way.
Michigan demonstrates that blacks living in blue states are better informed about their own political interests than the Clinton victory showed southern blacks to have been of theirs, due to factors they do not control. This difference can be symbolized by contrasting the views of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cornel West and Michelle Alexander with the calculations of a John Lewis. This difference manifested in Michigan as a reduction of Clinton's margin of victory over Sanders with black voters to 2 to 1 from as high as 5 to 1 in the South. Without absolving the Sanders campaign of strategic failure in effectively communicating Sanders' far superior commitment to racial justice that is falsified by the mass media, Michigan shows that this factor will nevertheless give Clinton less of an advantage going forward in the blue and purple states that will decide the nomination.
Racial Neutrality
Propagandists for the identity politics behind which plutocrats disguise themselves as "liberal" to undermine progressive anti-plutocracy unity will be quick to point out that the voters in the southern rotten boroughs are largely African-Americans. They will play the "racist" card. But this losing play ignores that red states outside the South tend to have very small African-American populations and that the blue and purple states is where the other half of African-Americans live, not to mention most of their white political allies ever since the abolition movement of the 19th century.
If Virginia and North Carolina are treated as purple or purplish states, a majority of black Americans do not live in southern red states. Since a roughly equal number live in blue and purple states that will have their equal representation restored, then there is no net loss in black voting power. That power now distributed to disenfranchised individual voters without respect to their residence in "rotten boroughs" would be shifted to the roughly equal number of enfranchised black voters who do live in blue and purple states and whose influence on the electoral college is currently under-represented due to the dilution caused by red-state voting delegates.
Plains and western red states lacking much black population, such as Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, which Sanders won, would also lose voting strength from abolition of the rotten-borough system. Since their current unrepresentative voting strength would also be reallocated to the under-represented blue and purple states where blacks do live in large numbers, there could well be a net gain of black influence on the selection of the blue-state candidate by introducing democracy to the DNC voting-delegate selection process.
If racial equality is not a neutral factor in such reforms, then it would more likely be a significantly positive result from stripping all red-state rotten boroughs of their current discriminatory over-representation.
By changing the rules into a democratic run-off system, what Mississippi loses in delegate strength Michigan would gain.
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Rob Hager, a Harvard Law graduate, is a public-interest litigator who is currently writing a three-part book assessing proposals for ending the political influence of special interest money. The current eLibrary draft of the first part, Hillary Clinton's Dark Money Disclosure "Pillar," is available online .
(The original version of this article was published by HuffPost)
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