Republicans are in a pretty difficult spot.

A sizable chunk of Republican voters are adamantly against abortion, viewing it as murder and thus are unwilling to compromise on it. These people often support other Republican policies, but for many abortion is the ultimate issue. Some of them even oppose many Republican policies (I know a bunch of Catholics. Plenty of anticapitalist Catholics or one’s who support stronger social programs, vote Republican because of abortion. This demographic is why Louisiana gets some anti-abortion Democrats in office.)

To gain moderate voters, they have to alienate the very motivated anti-abortion voters. Alienating a sizable chunk of your voter base many of whom are reliable voters who vote in all elections, to gain new moderate voters, is a risky move.

Like most weird things with the American federal government, you have to remember that at the founding, the individual states were much more autonomous, more similar to individual countries than they are now.

Primarily, the electoral college was one of many compromises made between the states so that all of them would sign on and join the union. It was deliberately designed to give smaller states a disproportionate say in the presidential election, to sooth their fears that they would end up being controlled by the larger more populous states (again, at the time, people would have identified much more strongly with their state than with the federal union.) So, the benefit was that it gave the smaller states enough of a say that they were willing to join the union.

If you conceive of the United States as a single nation state, which many today do, but was not historically a universal norm, then there’s no real benefit and only serves to help Republicans maintain power, since less populous states tend to vote Republican. This is what most people tend to believe, especially people on the left, and why you largely see most people online oppose the electoral college.

If you conceive of these United States as a group of states and not just a giant nation state, then the electoral college allows the separate states some hedge against being dominated by their larger neighbors. Almost no one actually believes this. You’ll mostly see Republicans bring up this argument, but by and large they’re hypocritical about it(they’ll use states rights when it serves them, and federal power when convenient). There are some people who do truly think that the states should be left to govern themselves, as a matter of principle and not just as part of a political game to get their way when convenient, but they are very rare.

But we don’t, and we are seeing what this means for the health of democracy and the rule of law.

If you’re going to blame multiple news sources/commentators (that all Americans do not swim in the same information ecosystem), wouldn’t it then become a matter of whether or not democracy itself is a viable system?

As in, if the only way a democracy can remain healthy is if all citizen “lived and swam in the same information ecosystem.”, Then how would it be possible to have a democracy? Like, how do we have a free healthy democracy, and enforce the existence of a singular “information ecosystem” at the same time? That sounds impossible.

Is it?

I think “you can’t show porn to kids” seems like something well within the authority of a state to make a law about, even if the implementation is hamfisted and ineffective.

My understanding is that porn would be considered obscenity, and obscenity is generally not protected by the first amendment, and can generally be regulated much more strictly.

Do you think the same way about physical media? Like, do you think we should be letting kids buy porn magazines? Or that it should be legal for someone to wait outside a school and hand kids porn as they walk home?