[Note from Steve: This post continues a series of posts, bipartisan in spirit, that analyze the mistakes the “Founding Fathers” made in writing the Constitution, that revered “law of the land.” Why are these errors so meaningful now? Because America’s fascists have discovered them and are using them to destroy American democracy!]
As with many of the mistakes the “Founding Fathers” made in creating the Constitution, we can’t discuss the mistake they made in creating the Electoral College without first considering their over-arching disaster they created by saddling us with excess federalism, i.e., states’ rights, a policy that has tainted that venerable document since its inception. The evil and odious economic fascism of racism and slavery has left that long-Covid-like plague of federalism to fester in our body politic far too long.
In their defense, some might argue that those aristocratic old SOBs in 1789 just wanted to get their faulty Constitution passed and get on with the business of running their new country, so there had to be some compromises. But haste makes waste, and their haste has helped lay waste to American democracy and may well kill it.
Federalism, i.e., states’ rights, almost destroyed this nation in the 1860s with the Civil War, and nearly again in the 1960s with the civil rights movements. But right at the start, it caused problems by allowing the creation of the Electoral College and the US Senate. These vestiges of English fascism were even worse at the beginning. The College is composed of electors from each state, its number of House members plus two for the Senators. But initially that 3/5 rule for counting slaves (later changed) meant that the southern slave states had more House members than the northern states; even though those slaves were “represented” by House members, they couldn’t vote! How democratic is that?
Let’s drill down and ask the fundamental question that any representative democracy must consider: Why should the weight of a citizen’s vote depend on where they live? A person’s vote in Iowa, for example, counts more than mine in New Jersey! That’s what the Electoral College leads to: An anti-democratic way to determine our highest ranking federal officials that has taken America far too close to becoming an oligarchy or theocracy (effectively both, right now, and they’re both forms of fascism).
I’m not complaining about the effect on federal elections of different voter attitudes in Des Moines, Iowa versus Montclair, NJ. I’m complaining about the fact that anyone’s vote in Des Moines counts more than anyone’s in Montclair!
Stupid idiots (channeling our next president, that “f*&^ing moron,” who successfully took advantage of it recently, although he eked out a win in the popular vote this time—no landslide or mandate, though) might argue that the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College to avoid the “tyranny of the majority.” Yes, maybe that was their excuse to sell the idea! But what the hell: Isn’t a democracy “majority rule”? In any case, the Founding Fathers’ error has just led to another new and worse travesty: The tyranny unleashed by cults and sects and other extremists who want to have control so they can force their beliefs on others. In other words, a small, less diverse state like Iowa—WASP country, although there might be a few Catholics, probably far-right extremists who think the pope is too liberal, here and there found among the cornfields—can force their beliefs, customs, and fascist political proclivities upon a large, populated and diverse state like New Jersey that looks a lot more like America as a whole than Iowa ever can. In other words, the Electoral College creates a built-in bias in every damn presidential election, with the consequence that our representative democracy is put in dire straits.
Jamie Raskin (House D, Maryland), who led the second impeachment trial against Donald Jackass Trump, in his book Unthinkable points out “the massive problems of the Electoral College.” My summary here cannot compete with his learned analyses, but I’ll add some details that are also important taken from that fantastic book: Mr. Raskin mentions that for the 2020 election, Dems prepared for the fascists’ tactics, outlining the constitutional flaws the jackass and his fascist followers might use. They prepared for them all except an attempted coup. No one would have ever believed that America’s wannabe dictator would ever try that! But a psychotic sociopath can do anything!
Among the MAGA maniacs supporting the jackass’s campaign in 2020 were some fascists who were a lot smarter than Narcissus le Grand aka Donald Jackass Trump, and they came up with a contingency plan that the flawed US Constitution permits: If neither candidate receives more than 270 electoral votes in the Electoral College, the decision about who wins would be the US House’s to make. In that case, each state would only have one vote! That, of course, would favor the GOP (which still barely existed at the time, i.e., it hadn’t yet become DJT’s Fascist Party of America). All the machinations the fascists tried (the current House speaker supported that famous lawsuit that even the fascist SCOTUS judges rejected) were designed to achieve that contingency. They failed, so the recourse became a coup attempt!
I assume that a majority of the Founding Fathers believed creating the Electoral College was an appropriate compromise to satisfy the aristocratic fascists of their day, so it became the first serious blow they made against the fledgling democracy they hoped to create. They failed miserably in creating a representative democracy by creating such loopholes, and they’ve saddled us ever since with a nearly insurmountable problem that today’s American fascists aka MAGA extremists are only too eager to exploit. Narcissus le Grand’s re-election will probably only be the beginning!