There are calls for the abolition of the electoral college.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College
The Electoral College is a body of electors established by the United States Constitution, which forms every four years for the sole purpose of electing the president and vice president of the United States. The Electoral College consists of 538 electors, and an absolute majority of at least 270 electoral votes is required to win the election.The electoral college in some respects might be described as a temporary parliament that has the sole function of choosing the national leader.
In a parliament, members who are elected try to form a dominant coalition, from which an acceptable member is chosen to be prime minister.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_system#Characteristics
The obvious difference between a parliament and the electoral college is that presidential elections are directly voted for by the people of the USA.
The college's electors in each state are determined by which presidential candidate in that state had the most votes.
But the elector can turn against the candidate of their own party in casting their own vote.
States have subsequently passed laws that force electors to vote for the candidate who received a majority of the votes in that state.
This is unconstitutional nonsense.
The original meaning of the Constitution is that electors are intermediaries between the popular vote and who ends up in the White House.
The electors are supposed to genuinely decide the election.
Today, the effort to abandon the electoral college is mostly on the part of the Democratic Party.
Because of the electoral college, the Democrats lost a couple of recent presidential elections despite their candidate winning the popular vote.
The Democrats desire to dismantle the electoral college resembles the ever-changing sentiments toward the line-item veto.
The line-item veto gives the President powerful editing power over bills that are given to him to sign into law.
The political party that has one of its members in the office of the POTUS loves the line-item veto, and the opposition hates it.
Likewise, there is some chance that the party that now complains about the electoral college may benefit in the near future from the electoral college.
One must look to the theoretical purposes given in support for the electoral college to understand this.
There was one particular historical legal and practical reason for the electoral college that involved moral compromise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College
- Congressional power was slanted toward smaller states (via the Senate) and slave-holding states (via the House, where slave states were given three seats for every five slaves). Basing the electoral college on this design would make it more appealing than the direct popular vote to the small states and the slave states, whose power was decisive.
First, there was a desire for balance.
- Originally, like a parliamentary system, Congress was to elect the president, but this was seen to conflict with the separation of powers.
- The Constitution was designed to find a balance between the interests of the general population (House) and the concerns of the states (Senate), a principle which an electoral college also satisfied.
- Because the electoral college is a temporary institution reconstituted every four years, its temporary members would be less likely to become corrupted or conspiratorial.
- The electors would make their decisions in the localities that chose them. They would thus be familiar with local issues and distant from the temptations of power in Washington, DC.
- The electoral college would weed out a candidate who was unqualified yet possessed a talent for "low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity".
- The electoral college reflected the hierarchical virtues of republicanism and federalism, which militated against selfish and destabilizing factionalism.
When historians look back on American civilization thousands of years from now, they will marvel at three things: baseball, jazz and the Constitution.
All three embody the American genius for improvisation.
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/jazz/note-from-ken-burns
Perhaps outshone by their creativity, it is easy to miss that baseball, jazz and the Constitution are also paragons of balance and compromise.
Hence, the purpose of the Constitution: to replace a populist confederate direct democracy with a more elitist stable federal republic while preserving the essence of democracy.
The electoral college was itself a compromise between the extremes of direct democracy, on the one hand, and a having an unacceptably exclusive and inbred group of electors (Congress), on the other.
The most important function of the electoral college was to prevent a tyrant from seizing power.
The tyrants of ancient Greece cast a long shadow over Western political history.
The tyrant was an ambivalent figure for the Greeks.
Despite their own aristocratic backgrounds, the tyrants seized power in city-states and shifted power away from the aristocracy to themselves.
The tyrant is power mad, and over time he would degenerate into paranoia and cruelty.
However, in order to keep power, the tyrants reformed their city-states and made the city-states wealthy, powerful and egalitarian -- and thereby made democracy possible.
The Greek philosophers developed various theories of how societies evolve politically.
This political development was typically perceived as a three-stage cycle in which the tyrant played a central role.
Society starts out as mob rule (ochlocracy).
- It then becomes a monarchy, which degenerates into tyranny.
- It then becomes an aristocracy, which is corrupted into oligarchy.
- It then becomes a democracy, which degrades into mob rule.
- And the cycles repeats itself again.
According to Polybius, who has the most fully developed version of the cycle, it rotates through the three basic forms of government, democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy and the three degenerate forms of each of these governments ochlocracy (mob rule), oligarchy, and tyranny. Originally society is in ochlocracy (mob rule) but the strongest figure emerges and sets up a monarchy. The monarch's descendants, who because of their family's power lack virtue, become despots and the monarchy degenerates into a tyranny. Because of the excesses of the ruler the tyranny is overthrown by the leading citizens of the state who set up an aristocracy. They too quickly forget about virtue and the state becomes an oligarchy. These oligarchs are overthrown by the people who set up a democracy. Democracy soon becomes corrupt and degenerates into ochlocracy (mob rule), beginning the cycle anew.In ratifying the Constitution, the USA adopted a mixed form of government, with executive (monarchic), judicial (aristocratic) and legislative (democratic) branches.
By institutionalizing each form of government found in the Greek theory of the cycle of political history, the Constitution was meant to inhibit the tumult of the cycle.
Because of the Greek political experience, there might continue to be an ambivalence in the modern world toward upper-class reformists like the Kennedys and the Roosevelts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchi
There might be two recent American presidents who fit some of the description of a tyrant, but in very different ways.
The first is George W. Bush.
Born into a political dynasty, Bush had a resentful, rebellious streak, a hatred of elites and a love of ordinary folks.
This pushed him not towards the left, but toward a new kind of conservatism -- the neoconservative movement.
Bush ran for president preaching limited conservative reform (for example, introducing Christian the teaching into prisons that saved his own life).
Despite professing limited government, Bush harbored extreme ambitions to revolutionize every aspect of American policy.
Bush covertly championed the grandiose neoconservative agenda dreamed up largely by Jewish academics who were former communists.
Yet despite this policy overreach, Bush did not seek to amass power either for his office or for himself.
The second quasi-tyrant is Richard Nixon.
Unlike Bush, Nixon was born into poverty.
Nixon was a typical conservative who, distracted by the Vietnam War, largely allowed or even encouraged Congress to push through liberal legislation.
In the context of the Cold War, however, Nixon sought as a matter of national security to secretly vest government power in the executive branch -- that is, in himself.
Also, after a lifetime of being mocked by and discriminated against by refined rich people, Nixon was a genuine paranoiac -- a classic feature of the tyrant.
But its not just tyrants from the upper classes at the early stage of the cycle who threatened society according to the Greek theory of political cycles.
At the end stage of the cycle -- mob rule -- society was susceptible to the insidious influence of demagogues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis
Accordingly, democracy degenerates into "ochlocracy", literally, "mob-rule". In an ochlocracy, according to Polybius, the people of the state will become corrupted, and will develop a sense of entitlement and will be conditioned to accept the pandering of demagogues.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue
A demagogue /ˈdɛməɡɒɡ/ (from Greek δημαγωγός, a popular leader, a leader of a mob, from δῆμος, people, populace, the commons + ἀγωγός leading, leader)[1] or rabble-rouser[2][3] is a leader who gains popularity in a democracy by exploiting emotions, prejudice, and ignorance to arouse the common people against elites, whipping up the passions of the crowd and shutting down reasoned deliberation.[1][4] Demagogues overturn established norms of political conduct, or promise or threaten to do so.
"What is a demagogue? He is a politician skilled in oratory, flattery and invective; evasive in discussing vital issues; promising everything to everybody; appealing to the passions rather than the reason of the public; and arousing racial, religious, and class prejudices—a man whose lust for power without recourse to principle leads him to seek to become a master of the masses. He has for centuries practiced his profession of 'man of the people'. He is a product of a political tradition nearly as old as western civilization itself."
Demagogues have appeared in democracies since ancient Athens. They exploit a fundamental weakness in democracy: because ultimate power is held by the people, it is possible for the people to give that power to someone who appeals to the lowest common denominator of a large segment of the population.[7] Demagogues usually advocate immediate, forceful action to address a crisis while accusing moderate and thoughtful opponents of weakness or disloyalty. Once elected to high executive office, demagogues typically unravel constitutional limits on executive power and attempt to convert their democracy to dictatorship.
- They present themselves as a man or woman of the common people, opposed to the elites.
- Their politics depends on a visceral connection with the people, which greatly exceeds ordinary political popularity.
- They manipulate this connection, and the raging popularity it affords, for their own benefit and ambition.
- They threaten or outright break established rules of conduct, institutions, and even the law.
- 3.1 Scapegoating
- 3.2 Fearmongering
- 3.3 Lying
- 3.4 Emotional oratory and personal charisma
- 3.5 Accusing opponents of weakness and disloyalty
- 3.6 Promising the impossible
- 3.7 Violence and physical intimidation
- 3.8 Personal insults and ridicule
- 3.9 Vulgarity and outrageous behavior
- 3.10 Folksy posturing
- 3.11 Gross oversimplification
- 3.12 Attacking the news media
Huey Long was a left-wing populist politician from Louisiana who sought the presidency during the Great Depression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long
As the political leader of Louisiana, he commanded wide networks of supporters and was willing to take forceful and dictatorial action. He established the long-term political dominance and dynasty of the Long family.Much like a tyrant, Huey Long was a dynamic leader who built up Louisiana's economy, which was always backwards, during the ravages of the Depression.
During Long's years in power, large expansions were made in infrastructure, education and health care. Long was notable among southern politicians for avoiding race baiting and white supremacy, and he sought to improve the conditions of impoverished blacks as well as impoverished whites.[1] Under Long's leadership, hospitals and educational institutions were expanded, a system of charity hospitals was set up that provided health care for the poor, and massive highway construction and free bridges brought an end to rural isolation.
A Democrat and an outspoken left-leaning populist, Long denounced the wealthy urban Baton Rouge and D.C. elites, oligarchs and the banks. Initially a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt during his first 100 days in office, Long eventually came to believe that Roosevelt's "New Deal" policies were an insufficient compromise and did not do enough to alleviate the issues of the poor or tackle the Depression. As a result, he developed his own solution called the "Share Our Wealth" program, which would establish a net asset tax, the earnings of which would be redistributed so as to curb the poverty and homelessness epidemic nationwide during the Great Depression.[2]
Long's Share Our Wealth plan was established on February 23, 1934, with the motto "Every Man a King." To stimulate the economy, Long advocated extensive federal spending on public works, schools and colleges, and old age pensions. Long argued that his plan would enable everyone to have at least a car, a radio, and a home worth $5,000.[2]Shrewd and ambitious, Huey Long allied himself with fascists in his run for president.
Long split with Roosevelt in June 1933 to plan his own presidential bid for 1936 in alliance with the influential Roman Catholic priest and rightwing populist radio commentator Father Charles Coughlin. Long however was assassinated in 1935, and his national movement soon faded, but his legacy continued in Louisiana.Interestingly, even though Huey Long was from one of the poorest areas of Louisiana, he was from a well-educated and reasonably well-off family.
Rather than being a classic tyrant from the aristocracy, Long was a classic "semi-have".
He was talented, ambitious and well-educated, yet a disgruntled outsider.
The degree of poverty in Winn Parish was extreme, but in general Louisiana was a very poor state, with the 1930 census showing that one-fifth of White Louisianans were illiterate, with rates for Black Louisianans being much higher. As someone who was born and grew up in Winn Parish, Long inherited all of the resentments of its people against the elite in Baton Rouge who ruled Louisiana.[9] While Long often told his followers that he came from the lowest possible social and economic stratum, the reality is that Long's family were well-off compared to others in the largely destitute community of Winnfield.
For people of their time and socioeconomic standing, Long's parents were well-educated, and stressed often to their child the importance of learning.[6] For many years, Long was home-schooled, although when he was 11 he began attending local schools. During his time in the public system, he earned a reputation as an excellent student with a remarkable memory. After growing bored with his required schoolwork, he eventually convinced his teachers to let him skip seventh grade.[11] When he was a student at Winnfield High School, he and his friends formed a secret society, which they broadcast to others by wearing a red ribbon. According to Long, his club's mission was "to run things, laying down certain rules the students would have to follow."
The teachers at the school eventually learned of Long's antics and warned him to obey the school and its faculty's rules. Long continued to rebel, eventually writing and distributing a flyer that criticized both his teachers and the necessity of a recently mandated twelfth grade. This resulted in his expulsion in 1910. Long sought revenge by drafting up a petition calling for the principal of Winnfield High School to be removed from his post. He managed to convince enough people in his town to sign it, resulting in the principal's being fired.Huey Long was a magnetic and talented public speaker.
[Huey Long, "Share the wealth"]
Donald Trump is an interesting political figure.
Despite his inherited wealth, Donald Trump does not fit the typical profile of the upper-class reformist tyrant.
First, he has none of the refined traits of the upper class, such as education and good taste.
Second, he has never had a political consciousness or an interest in public policy, only a desire for attention.
Rather, in his public persona, Trump resembles the "semi-have" outsider demagogue who has a gift for the "common touch".
Because of his approachable, unpretentious personality, his self-parodying sense of humor and his flashy personal style, Trump has the ability to pass himself off as a self-made man.
Trump's wealth thus raises the approval rather than the resentment of the lower classes.
Trump's appeal among the "poorly educated" (in his words) is buttressed by his genuine yet amorphous feelings of being persecuted by the establishment.
Yet despite his demagoguery, in some ways, Trump does not fit the picture of a would-be revolutionary.
Trump lacks political beliefs, has no real political agenda, has no idea how government functions and is almost purely focused on public image (Twitter) and on his own personal wealth.
Ironically, because the Republican establishment knew that Trump would be a passive and inept office holder, they chose to reconcile themselves to him for their own profit and power.
In this light, there has been a shift in Donald Trump's rhetoric since the 2016 election.
Trump was elected based on his populist appeal.
Trump promised to be a revolutionary who would change everything.
In fact, once in office, Trump did not even try to change anything.
In the 2020 election, Trump's rhetoric lost its populist anger and took on a nostalgic, complacent tone.
One stark example of this was Trump's dismissal of the South Korean movie "Parasite" winning the Academy Award for best picture.
Trump stated “Can we get like ‘Gone with the Wind’ back please? ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ so many great movies.”
Trump's rejection of a Korean movie and praise for "Gone with the Wind" is seen as an example of racism.
But this misses a couple of big points.
First, "Parasite" was a populist critique of inequality.
Still appealing to nationalism, Trump is backpedaling furiously away from his old populism.
Second, "Gone with the Wind" and "Sunset Boulevard" are old films, and Trump is evoking a reactionary nostalgia.
Moreover, subject of both of those films is nostalgia itself -- for the long, lost aristocratic antebellum South and for the glory days of a faded movie star's career, respectively.
Also, the main figures in the two films are wealthy women.
Trump's rhetoric is still nationalist, but no longer populist, no longer revolutionary.
The Republican Party does have its own sincere point of view that includes a fear of tyrants and demagogues.
From their point of view, the two political figure who conforms more perfectly to the stereotype of the dangerous, would-be tyrant or demagogue are Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama.
She is the strident, immensely capable, diligent, educated outsider who self-righteously seeks to enrich herself even while she sincerely seeks serious societal reform.
Likewise, Barack Obama was a charismatic, articulate, highly educated, cynically ambitious outsider who was so determined to make his mark in policy.
The Republican electors might never vote for HRC or Obama in the shadow of the figure of the tyrant or the demagogue.
But they might cast a ballot for a mainstream, moderate, old political pro of the opposition party if they perceive the alternative in their own party to be more similar to a tyrant or demagogue.
