Anti-Climacus

LINK: Kevin Yaroch has a good post taking Howard Zinn to task for some particular inanities. Me likey:

"There are a couple of reasons that [proportional representation] would be a bad idea in the United States. The U.S. is much less geographically homogeneous than Israel, and individual regions often have distinct interests, which means that a PR-elected wouldn't represent the interests of many areas sufficiently — especially if we also do away with the electoral college, as Zinn also suggests. (Getting rid of the electoral college by itself isn't such a bad idea, though.) There is also another more important problem, which is the lack of party discipline in the U.S. In a country like the UK, where party discipline is very strict, one Labour MP is about the same as another Labour MP because they all tend to vote the same way, and run the risk of expulsion from the party if they don't. (This is very common in Westminster-style systems.) In the U.S., this is obviously not the case at all. The difference between, say, David Bonior and Ted Kennedy is really quite large, and our system of elections needs to be able to differentiate between the two in some way."