The only election that truly represents the American political landscape is the only truly national election, the Presidency. But the Electoral College serves there to perpetuate this tyranny of the minority. Since 1992, the Democratic nominees have won the popular vote in every single Presidential election except 2004, where the nation was understandably reluctant to switch horses in a time of war. And even the Electoral College votes in 2000 were thrown into the courts and the results were, to say the least, controversial. For the last quarter-century the average American has consistently voted for an Obama or a Clinton. The Bushes and Trumps got in on technicalities.

Conservatives like to think of themselves as a bedrock rural, Christian, Northern European majority: They listen to Country-Western and follow NASCAR, and they are surrounded by people just like them. You know, the kind of folks who have chandeliers made out of faux stagecoach wheels–if they can afford them. But they are not the real Americans. The real American is more likely to be secular, browner, watch basketball, live in a city and listen to hip-hop. On the whole, they tend to be younger and better educated and yes, more tolerant and liberal, than their rural counterpart. And they tend to live alongside people who are not at all like them.

I speak in gross over-generalizations, of course. You cannot characterize enormous populations with just a few convenient phrases in a vast and evolving society like this one. But the point I’m making is that not only is the country changing, it changed some time ago. The political turbulence we now see in the USA is solely the result of the minority suddenly realizing it IS a minority, and refusing to accept it. And they are ready to plunge the nation into chaos and conflict rather than give up the position of privilege they have imagined themselves holding for so long.