College Education

Electoral College votes tallied in Congress, January 2013

It’s become quite obvious that American politics is broken.  And not just because a malign and ignorant huckster has been elected president, though that is certainly the most glaring symptom of a disease that’s been worsening for decades.  And the real source of our debilitating political dysfunction is our profound ideological polarization.  We’ve split into two roughly equal and mutually hostile camps, with seemingly incompatible instincts and visions of America.  But a well-designed institutional framework might have channeled those deep disagreements into constructive compromise, or better represented them in government such that consensus or conciliation might be reached.  But our Constitution seems utterly incapable of handling or moderating our deep disagreements.  Consider how, in the Obama Era, the dubious notion of Separation of Powers actually exacerbated that deadly polarization, leading to such excesses as the government shutdowns, the debt limit crises, the Obamacare wars.  And consider that an incredibly polarizing and dangerously incompetent extremist has become president without even winning a plurality of the votes cast.  That quite undemocratic outcome occurred because our system for choosing the president is hopelessly overcomplicated and confused, and sitting at the heart of that confusion is that embarrassing constitutional relic, the Electoral College.  The Electoral College is our institutional dysfunction come to life.

The Founders created the Electoral College with two principles in mind. The first was the diffusion principle, the desire that the power to pick the president be spread among all the states, even the smaller states that might otherwise be overlooked in a national popular vote.  The second was the aristocratic principle, the belief that a collection of disinterested statesmen would prevent the election of a demagogue or a fool.  But these are practical principles, they weren’t adopted for theoretical reasons, but to satisfy the interests of the various states at the Constitutional Convention.  Many of the founders, including James Madison, the father of the Constitution, would have preferred direct popular election of the president.  Others wanted Congress to choose the president.  The original version of the Electoral College left it up to the various state legislatures to decide how the electors from their respective states were chosen; and for the first few decades some of those legislatures chose them directly, while others allowed their voting publics to decide.  But those electors were expected to make their own decisions, not necessarily rubber-stamp the choices of those that had put them there.  In the early 1800’s, however, as Jacksonian democracy swept the land, all the states switched over to having their populations choose the electors, and law and custom bound those electors to represent the plurality vote for president within their respective states.

And that’s where things stand today.  We’re stuck with this bizarre hodge-podge, an aristocratic structure that tries to channel democratic desires.  But it’s the worst of both worlds, since it can override the national popular vote while – quite obviously! – failing to prevent a demagogue and a fool from becoming president.  The Electoral College has bitterly failed the demands of both democracy and statesmanship, and in doing so it has produced something new in the political world: an unpopular demagogue!

The only remaining remotely defensible rationale for the Electoral College is the diffusion principle, the desire to ensure small states aren’t overlooked when choosing the president.  But the Electoral College does absolutely nothing to force presidential campaigns to address small states.  Instead, it forces them to address battleground states like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, states which are split down the middle and can easily go either way in a given election.  The campaigns smartly ignore all dependably red or blue states, small or big, such as New York or Kansas.  But there’s no principle satisfied by ignoring those states, while a national popular vote would genuinely spread power to the entire country.  The Electoral College fails the diffusion principle too.

And it’s hard to see why the election within each state should be based on majority rule but not majority rule across the country as a whole.  Why should the democratic principle be so inconsistently applied?   There already is a mechanism within the federal government that gives disproportionate power to smaller states: the United States Senate.  (It should be noted that James Madison and other Founders opposed the undemocratic apportionment of Senators too, but accepted it as a necessary practical condition for bringing into the Union the small states who otherwise would not have joined.)   But Senators represent states, while the president is supposed to be the leader of the country as whole, the leader of the people.  That was clearly the intent of (many of) the Founders, and it was clearly the intent of those early 19^th century statesmen who gave the choice of electors directly to the people, and it is clearly the understanding of the present-day voting public.  The president is supposed to represent all of America.

Electors aren’t even apportioned according to population, because each state gets as many electors as it has Representatives in the House of Representatives (which is proportional to state populations) plus two more for its two Senators.  Thus, for instance, Wyoming gets 3 electoral votes (it has one Representative in the House plus its two Senators), while California gets 55 electoral votes (53 Representatives plus 2 Senators).  But California had about 37 million people as of the 2010 census, while Wyoming had only about 564,000.  So California has about 672,000 people for each electoral vote while Wyoming has only about 188,000 for each of its electoral votes.  That means the vote of one person in Wyoming has 3.5 times as much power as the vote of one person in California.  But why should a citizen in Wyoming have so much more power than a citizen in California when picking the one person who is the leader of the country as a whole?  The Electoral College doesn’t protect small states, it disenfranchises big ones!  It’s a failure in every conceivable way.  And it’s clearly failed us this year.

Brilliant, decent, imperfect, practical men, 1787

That’s not to say that Hillary should be president by virtue of winning the popular vote by over 2 million votes (that’s almost 2 percentage points, though with 48.2% it’s still shy of an outright majority).  If we’d had a national popular vote system in place for the 2016 election both Clinton and Trump would certainly have campaigned quite differently, and the popular vote might have gone for Trump.  Still, a lot of people did take the time and effort to vote, even in states that were definitively red or blue.  That is, they must have known their votes couldn’t make a difference in the Electoral College yet they voted anyway; and that deserves respect in a generally democratic society.  It can’t be said that the popular vote means nothing.  And given that the Electoral College system is inherently undemocratic, it’s not consistent to argue that electors are morally bound to obey their state pluralities but obligated to disregard the national one.  Either we respect the wishes of the American people or we don’t.  So it’s not entirely unfair to suggest, as some have done, that the electors reject the state pluralities and deny the presidency to someone who not only failed to win a plurality of the national popular vote but who is also an irresponsible demagogue and a dribbling fool.  In that case both the democratic and aristocratic principles would be satisfied, and that would probably have made James Madison very happy.

All the logic, all the theory, all our reason and sanity and common sense suggest the Electoral College should ignore the wishes of the people in the states and obey the wishes of the people of the United States.  Except for one thing.  We all agreed before the election that we would choose our presidents in this bizarre, old-fashioned, ridiculous way.  Or rather, history and convention and expectation have stuck us with this absurd system, and it would just be terribly unfair and destabilizing to change the rules after the fact.  People would be enraged, and rightly so.  As tempting as the thought is of the electors saving us deus ex machina from the Great Orange Disaster, our respect for fair play and democratic norms renders it unthinkable.  No principle is safe if we can’t all rely on the procedures.

But then let Trump supporters stop this dishonest and baseless talk that he has a “mandate”, or he won because “the American people have spoken.”  No, he won because the Elector College has spoken (or will soon).  Or because enough unrepresentative people in enough unrepresentative states have spoken.  Or because we have our heads stuck up our Constitution and can’t create a better system.  Those sentiments don’t make great slogans, but they have the virtue of being true.  At strongest, the American people chose Hillary Clinton.  At weakest, their choice is unclear and muddled, the exact thing an election is supposed to avoid.

And that is the real problem.  This election, like 2000, was a virtual tie, but the technical winners will enact policies the technical losers find frightening and abhorrent. And to add mendacious insult to juridical injury they’ll likely speak and rule as if they had actually won an overwhelming victory.  They’ll claim a mandate to shred the social safety net and distribute huge tax cuts to the rich.  And if you don’t look closely the Electoral College appears to give them some plausible cover for that undemocratic chicanery.  But that will just add to the bitter disappointment of the vaguely leftish half of the country, who now feel, and effectively are, disenfranchised.  For at least the next two years the comprehensively Republican federal government will trample upon their deeply held convictions and damage the institutions and programs they love, even though their candidate essentially tied.  They don’t deserve that.  We don’t deserve that.

But we’ll get it, and that’s because of other imperfections of our system, specifically Separation of Powers and fixed terms in office.  In parliamentary systems, as obtain in most of the English-speaking world and in Europe, the head of government is whoever can lead a ruling coalition in the democratically elected parliament (and many of those parliamentary elections have mechanisms for making sure minority parties are proportionally represented).  If the party in power governs ineffectively or against sustained popular opinion then elections are held and the people get to choose their rulers again, even if the terms of office aren’t close to being over.  And such a unified government makes the ruling party accountable; it doesn’t have independent executive and legislative branches that can blame each other for government failure or inaction.  And it doesn’t permit the constant war between those separate powers that results when they’re controlled by bitterly opposed and sharply polarized factions.

But wait, this is about as academic as an argument can get.  There is as much chance of America renovating its basic constitution as there is of Donald Trump suddenly becoming an expert on 20^th century African-American literature.  Though there are ways around the Electoral College that might actually be implemented – and more power to them!  But the Electoral College, ridiculous as it is, is only a small part of what’s wrong.  One doesn’t have to be a Democrat or bitter about Trump’s technical win to see the lesson the College teaches us: Our deeply polarized populace is possessed by rage and vindictiveness, the design of our political institutions prevents a constructive handling of that polarization, and that combination is radically undermining our democracy.  And it will probably only get worse.

It’s not sustainable, and there are really only two ways this can end: the polarization can give way, or the institutions can give way.  It could still conceivably happen that, as seemed inevitable until November 8, the demographics keep moving in the liberal direction, with the older, whiter, more conservative percentage of the populace shrinking.  Or populist conservatism could become widely dominant among the broad middle.  Or populist liberalism.  If any of those things happens then the federal government will be safely held by one party with a clear majority among the people, and that’s a situation the Constitution can safely handle.  (Though, if it’s Trumpian populism it’s not necessarily a situation that liberal democracy can handle.)  

Doing his best to elevate the discourse

But if none of those scenarios comes to pass, then the institutions themselves will erode.  If Congress and the Presidency are held by opposing parties the conflict between them will become even more acrimonious and destructive.  If our present situation continues – with one party that only represents half the people holding complete control of the federal government – then the struggle between feds and locals will become more acrimonious and destruction.  There could be widespread unrest, with irresponsible individuals on both sides even embracing violence.  And all these scenarios end just one way, with a president accruing more and more police power until he becomes essentially an elected tyrant.  And soon after, not even an elected one. 

That’s the direction we’re heading if we can’t create a better politics, an understanding of ourselves that satisfies the interests and aspirations of most of us.  America is hurting right now, all of it, the half that lost and the half that won.  And the only way forward is toward some new, moderate consensus that respects us all.  If any good can come from Trump’s win, it will be to force us to question the old rigid ideologies and blind archaic animosities that possess us and make us enemies.  There are fair-minded people on both sides urging tolerance and conciliation and offering constructive and pragmatic solutions.  But conciliation and pragmatism have little hope of being well received in an atmosphere of bitter mistrust, a mistrust happily fomented by special interests, propagandists, ideologues, fanatics, and fools.  But when our institutions fail us, all we have left is ourselves, and our commitments to each other.  There isn’t necessarily a happy ending here, only a chance, a hope that the great reserves of good will, common sense and generosity still possessed by the American people can be marshaled to fight the polarization that is killing us all.

The Cold Lost Cause

South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, father of minority obstruction.

How have we come to such an impasse?  Conservative Republicans in Congress will fund the federal government only if Democrats agree to delay or prevent the implementation of Obamacare.  And they will not raise the debt ceiling unless the government enacts their entire economic agenda, including a one-year delay of Obamacare, tax reform based upon GOP Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s regressive tax plan, their entire energy policy (including the Keystone Pipeline and offshore drilling), regulatory repeal, further reductions in government spending, means testing of Medicare, restrictions on medical malpractice lawsuits, plus a host of other conservative policy wishes.  What the hell is going on here?  How did we get to the point where one faction of one branch of government feels justified in threatening to trash the government’s credit, and with it, the world economy?  As Jonathan Chait put it:

The fact that a major party could even propose anything like this is a display of astonishing contempt for democratic norms. Republicans ran on this plan and lost by 5 million votes. They also lost the Senate and received a million fewer votes in the House but held control owing to favorable district lines. Is there an example in American history of a losing party issuing threats to force the majority party to implement its rejected agenda?

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers suggests an answer: 

There is an obvious example: the election and subsequent secession crisis of 1860. The southern Democrats were quite clear with their threats to secede from the Union should Lincoln be elected. 

Prompting Sullivan to employ the wonderful phrase, “Cold Civil War”:

Seeing the Obama presidency as a Cold Civil War of the South against a Northern president does help explain the splenetic rage, and the obvious belief in the illegitimacy of the elected president because of the policies he ran on and won with.

The geographical base of present-day conservatism is indeed in the South, a region which has historically threatened filibuster, nullification, massive resistance, and even secession when the federal government enacted policies it found intolerable.  But it’s quite unfair to compare forcing a government debt default to destroying the union to maintain slavery, even though an actual debt default would be devastating.  But there is the stench of something like civil war in the air: the smell of fundamental, implacable polarization.  America is splitting in two ideologically, and government shutdowns and the debt defaults (and much else of our ongoing political dysfunction) are manifestations of the ruthlessness, tenacity and desperation of the losing side.  Welcome to the Cold Lost Cause.

But where most observers see irrational, unjustified intransigence, conservatives see the GOP finally fighting back.  Ever since its inception in the 1950’s the modern conservative movement has had a strained relationship with the Republican Party.  Conservatives were quite disappointed with Eisenhower’s accommodation to the New Deal, and they began the search for a conservative savior to cast out the moderates and liberals and remake the party in their own image.  In conservative lore, Joe McCarthy was beaten down by the liberal establishment, Barry Goldwater was undermined by liberals in his own party, and Richard Nixon campaigned like a conservative but governed like a liberal.  But they were finally saved by the sainted Ronald Reagan, whose pure heart and steadfast, simple moralism righted the country for as long as presidential term-limits allowed.  But most of post-Eisenhower history of the Republican Party has been a great disappointment to conservatives; they’ve perceived it as craven acceptance of the ever-growing big government liberals have foisted upon a quiescent American public.  For sixty years they’ve wanted a showdown they’re not about to let the present fiscal crisis slip away.  Even now, as much of the Congressional party seems eager to jump off the cliff of economic and fiscal insanity, any movement back from the brink brings fervid denunciation:

Conservatives have finally realized that, as it’s currently constituted, they have no home in the Republican party, which is the Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters, the designated losers who nevertheless are rewarded handsomely for their sham opposition.

They hate their own establishment almost as much as they hate liberals:

The Republican Party, as it is and as it has been, is an utter embarrassment to those who vote for them. The guys up top – Boehner, McConnell (ESPECIALLY MCCONNELL), Cantor, Cornyn and the rest – listen to money, lobbyists and, strangely, Democrats, for guidance on what to do next. The little guy, you and I and the rest of the electorate, have no say in what they want.

But – dare we hope? – aspiring saviors walk among us.  Texas Senator Ted Cruz is auditioning for that role, with his stubborn refusal against funding for Obamacare in the form of a self-congratulatory semi-filibuster.  He angers not just liberals, but his more pragmatic Republican colleagues; and that is the point: the party must be purified before it can become the instrument of national salvation.

And that’s where the Tea Party comes in.  The whole point of the Tea Party is to make the Republican Party the perfect vessel of crusading, un-pragmatic, uncompromising conservatism:

Conservatives understand that rather than form a third party, their only hope is to seize control of the corrupt, rotting hulk of the GOP, which they now can do with the help of a reinvigorated Tea Party.

The Tea Party represents the final chapter of the modern American conservative movement: the rising of the conservative populace.  Conservative hunger for a savior arises out of the deepest conservative conviction: that all correct policy flows naturally from righteous character, which itself is an expression of hard-won conformity to the moral order of the universe.  Only the good man knows good policy.  But Tea Party fervor expresses the belief that decent, small-town Christian folk, as the only true representatives of American idealism, are themselves the saviors.  This is what all that talk about “taking back America” means: insurrection of the good men, by the good men, for the good men.  Evil men and women in both parties, duped by the false idols of sobriety, pragmatism and compromise have diluted our shining truth long enough.  As Daniel Horowitz of Red State – ground zero for apocalypse lust – puts it: “There is no such thing as lukewarm hell.”  Compromising right and wrong only pollutes right.  Wrong need only be defeated with the eager belligerence that flows from the certainty of folkish cultural truth.  This is the purest of Puritan populism; the righteous shall inherit the Earth.  The true believer both dreads and dreams of the final reckoning between good and evil, between true American freedom and foreign, socialist tyranny.  We are being subjected to the modern politicized expression of Puritan apocalypticism.  May God save us!

But what is it they’re so opposed to?  Is it Obamacare in particular?  One conservative columnist considers Obamacare to be, “primarily a symbol of a Congress unaccountable to the voters.”  But most conservative commentators don’t see Obamacare as a symbol, but as the latest and most egregious example of government meddling in our lives, as possibly the thin wedge of Stalinism!  For liberals, universal healthcare – even in Obamacare’s thoroughly market-friendly version – was the last large missing piece of the American welfare state; its passage marks the substantial completion of the New Deal.  For conservatives it represents the very same thing.  But conservatives have been working for 60 years to repeal (or at least radically reduce) the welfare state.  Reagan won twice and was succeeded by his Vice President, Gingrich took Congress, George W. Bush won twice and presided over Republican control of all three branches of government, but after all that we’re no nearer to repealing the welfare state.  Indeed, the Obamacare disaster demonstrates just how relentlessly it grows.  The Democrats railroaded Obamacare through Congress and Republicans took over the House in 2010 and still Obamacare stands.  A supposedly conservative Supreme Court, led by a supposedly conservative Chief Justice, declared it constitutional.  The 2012 GOP nominee promised to repeal it on his first day in office but he was not elected.  Impossibly, it stands!  If conservatives can’t even slay such a legislative and constitutional monster, how can they possibly subdue the bureaucratic and institutional menagerie created by 80 years of socialism?  Obamacare is indeed a symbol, but not a symbol of Congressional irresponsiveness; it’s primarily a symbol of the failure of the conservative dream, a dream that has so often seemed on the verge of fulfillment but has so often been bitterly disappointed.  That’s why it hurts them so much and that’s why they’re willing to do everything in their power to stop it.  If it becomes an accepted part of American society, then they have lost their last battle.

And to conservatives the definitive victory of the welfare state would be a terrible tragedy.  They see the liberal welfare state as not merely bad policy, but as a violation of the fundamental moral and political principles of our system.  They believe that the Constitution was designed to prevent just such things as individual health insurance mandates.  Sociologists and technocrats, with their longitudinal studies and their misleading statistics and their snooty manners, can’t understand what everyday people perceive directly in their unschooled moral simplicity: the free market rewards virtue and punishes vice and interference by the state undermines that moral enforcement.  The Founders, thankfully, understood this perfectly and they wrote the Constitution specifically to maintain our moral, economic and political purity, to specifically prevent just such liberal corruption.  But conservatives see their fellow Americans exchanging their freedom for medical care, selling their birthright for a few shiny baubles.  To them, Obama is Madison’s worst nightmare.

The irony is that these self-proclaimed “constitutional conservatives” constitute our system’s most radical subverters.  The Founders wanted the government to be consensual, not fractured, compromising and pragmatic and reasoned, not hateful and incendiary.  By holding Obamacare hostage to budget negotiations, conservatives are, as Chris Matthews said on last Sunday’s Meet the Press, demanding an extra-Constitutional hurdle for passing controversial legislation:

Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, had been passed by the House, by the Senate, signed by the president, reviewed by the Supreme Court. And then the president got reelected on that very issue.  Senator Cruz talks as if there should be a final test that you have to get through before a law goes into effect. In other words, a final vote, whether it's on debt ceiling or whatever, or on the shutdown of the government, sort of a final look at the law and say, “Well, should we really let it go into effect even before it’s set to go into effect?”

Republicans are, in the incisive and frightening words of Matt Yglesias, “essentially asking for an end to constitutional government in the United States and its replacement by a wholly novel system.”  He mentions the way the British House of Commons – over the course of a few centuries, with much political wrangling, and a few civil wars and a few revolutions – used its power of taxation to become the only political institution with any real power.  If current conservative shutdown and debt ceiling plans succeed then the House of Representatives would be well on its way to becoming the dominant institution in what would essentially be an American parliamentary system.

Now parliamentary systems, as found in Britain and all of Europe and much of the world, are quite good at responding to democratic will.  Indeed, a single and popularly elected legislative body cannot avoid accountability the way the branches of our divided system can.  Consider how Republicans blame Obama’s policies for our continued economic difficulties while Obama blames Republicans for blocking those policies; separation of powers allows both claims to seem plausible.  And parliaments can easily avoid the constitutional obstruction and dysfunction we now endure.  If the tea-drunk GOP controlled an American House of Commons it would just slash the welfare state and wait for the next election to see if the public approved.  But parliamentary systems, specifically because of their heightened democratic responsiveness and their concentration of power into one majority-controlled body are not always as good at protecting the rights of minorities.  If conservatives make over the House into our pre-eminent political body they would be enabling the very majoritarian tyranny they claim to be working so hard to avoid.

But of course, what they really wish to establish is a kind of tyranny of the minority.  In the 2012 Republicans failed to take the Senate (despite the ongoing Republican advantage of many small, rural, conservative states), received fewer votes for the House of Representatives than Democrats (they control the House because of unrepresentative districting), and failed to unseat President Obama, despite a laggard economy and an unhappy electorate.  Most Americans view presidential elections, not Congressional elections, as the national moment of ideological decision.  When the Great Depression shook people’s faith in laissez-faire they voted in Franklin Roosevelt; when they thought liberals were exacerbating racial strife they voted for Nixon; when big government seemed to be hurting the economy they voted in Reagan; and when conservatism proved incompetent at both foreign and economic policy they voted for Obama.  Republicans are, in effect, trying to change the rules after they’ve lost.

When the British House of Commons slowly seized control of the government it did so as an expression of the democratic hopes of rising middle and working classes.  They only disenfranchised an unaccountable monarchy and aristocracy; today’s extra-Constitutional GOP radicals cannot credibly make such democratic claims.  Conservatives are close to half the population and their views should be respected and they should, as part of normal budget negotiations, contribute to policy.  But they shouldn’t dominate outright, absurdly out of proportion to their numeric representation and minority status.  How do they, even in their own minds, justify such a ruthless power grab?  Demography and ideology are moving away from them, and they know it.  They may not represent a numerical majority, but in their minds they represent a genuine but embattled cultural majority.  Their deeper apprehension of the American essence grants them an authority that no mere numerical majority can endow.  They are, by virtue of their moral and political values the only real Americans and only their values should inform policy.  To conservatives, liberal government is a mockery of the real America, it is illegitimate, morally, culturally and constitutionally, and it deserves no respect.  It must be defeated, not accommodated. “There is no such thing as lukewarm hell.”

Not all conservatives feel just these impulses so unalloyed by pragmatism or generosity.  But the shutdown and debt default – and the polarization that underlie them – descend upon us to the extent that those impulses dominate; they are those impulses made manifest.  But maybe those crises, and the tragedy they promise, can be avoided by appealing to contrary conservative values: comity, stability, prudence.  Reasonable people understand that earthly versions of hell and heaven are always varying degrees of lukewarm.  And respect for popular government demands accommodation for opposing opinions, particularly electorally expressed majority opinions.  But such broader-minded, Burkean attitudes may be hard to rouse in the Puritan-populist ferment that constitutes the present-day conservative mind; too many conservatives seem to have concluded that those attitudes are what led America to its present self-evident degradation.  What can we – liberals, moderates, pragmatists – do when our countrymen have been gripped by such implacable irrationality?  No doubt we must do what’s necessary and legitimate to stop them in their destruction.  The president must not acquiesce to threats to our fiscal health and to obstruction of duly enacted legislation, particularly such undemocratic and unjustifiable threats.  But we must do more than simply stop conservatives; we must appeal to their better natures.  We must honor their conviction, even as we abhor its content.  We must listen to their arguments, even as we forthrightly dispute them.  We must hope that reason and friendship can still reach them.  And we must not forget that they are our fellow countrymen, even if they seem to have forgotten that we are theirs.