If you’re going to defend this terrible holdover, defend it for the single reason, the monstrous reason, some delegates demanded it and others acquiesced.
It is available, documented in the the original words of the founders, as recorded by those who were there.
Matt Christiansen writes and records prolifically. I find him entertaining as hell. But he is less an historian than a conservative provocateur. Here he defends the electoral college:
Pure democracy is not universally good. It lends itself to mob rule. It lends itself to tyranny of the majority. It rejects compromise and can silence minority interests. The Constitutional framers wrote critically of pure democracy. James Madison wrote:
In a pure democracy, a common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.
I don’t know why conservatives pick on poor James Madison to misrepresent so flagrantly, but they have been doing that since the late 1800s. Madison was not arguing in favor of a non-representative electoral system of choosing the President. In fact, he argued during the Constitutional convention in favor of proportional representation at every level of the new Republic. He was even against a Senate that would be based on the same number of votes for every state.
He was specifically opposed to an electoral system that was weighted against the majority of voters.
Although Mr. Christiansen does not say so, he is quoting Madison’s Federalist 10. Madison is not arguing against a democratic republic in which all voters are represented equally. He is not arguing in favor of the electoral college as it exists now. He was arguing against the notion that government by legislature should be abandoned in favor of townhall type gatherings of all citizens who showed up.
You know: pure democracy. Seems a little impractical for a national government. But it was sometimes offered as the ideal governmental model. So he argued against a system of direct votes by all voters on all laws. That was because … how did that go? …
… such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.
He was in favor of representative government rather than direct government by assembly of whatever citizens showed up to vote on everything. Instead, he wanted citizens to elect representatives.
He was against factionalism. He was afraid of different economic interests ganging up on each other: textile firms opposing little craftsman type shops, or agricultural landowners being attacked by manufacturers. And he was especially afraid of religious persecution: Baptists outlawing Presbyterians, that sort of thing. For myslef, I would have been okay with a national religion as long as it was Methodist. After the last General Conference, I’m not even really sure about that.
That’s why he argued for a Bill of Rights.
Matt Christiansen does not concentrate only on James Madison. He brings in Alexander Hamilton. So did Hamilton really oppose proportional representation? Let’s check it out, shall we?
He was speaking to the New York Ratifying Convention in 1788. They were talking about how many representatives there ought to be. Hamilton said it didn’t matter as long as citizens weere represented equally. Some poor slob had mindless parroted the old saw about abolishing legislatures and letting all citizens vote all the time, all year around, on everything. And so, good old Alexander Hamilton pretty much destroyed that argument, the idea he refered to as “pure democracy.”
Here is what he started to say:
It has been observed by an honorable gentleman, that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved, that no position in politics is more false than this.
And that is where Mr. Christiansen picks it up.
Alexander Hamilton said:
The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.
Yup he did say that. He just didn’t say it the way you say he said it, Mr. Christiansen.
He goes on to quote John Adams in a pesimistic warning about the fate of past democracies. Adams was not speaking about how to choose a President.
You get the idea.
So why do conservatives conflate “pure democracy” with popular elections in a democratic republic?
It is tempting to regard it as a clever slight of hand. When arguments for safeguarding liberty, as in the Bill of Rights, is presented as an argument against representative government, or when a case for proportional representation is distorted into an argument against it, it may seem reasonable to ascribe it to simple dishonesty.
It isn’t always so simple. Matt Christiansen’s polemic against representative government closely aligns with what many of us were taught in American classrooms through the 1950s and 60s. It can be traced back to the dominent scholastic culture after the Civil War.
That original historical research by a small group of historians at Columbia University was led by Professor Archibald Dunning. Plainly put, it seems to have been the patriotic trend of those times to interpret American history a little differently than reality. Let’s all pull together, let’s put the brutality of slavery behind us, let’s regard divisive ideas like equality as vengence against the conquered South.
Above all, let’s regard the original debates as something a little more noble than they might have been.
Not all conservatives are so sensitive today. The former governor of Maine, Paul LePage, had a few words about a proposal that we move away from the electoral college.
Minorities are gonna well, actually what would happen if they do what they say they’re going to do, white people will not have anything to say.
It’s only going to be the minorities that will elect.
Well that’s … refreshingly blunt.
And LePage does have a sort of permutation of the original constitutional debate that Matt Christiansen overlooks. That oversight is understandable. Textbooks that were used to instruct my generation, and some that came after, sort of skipped over it.
There were notes taken during the original Constitutional Convention in 1787. Madison himself kept a careful account. During the debate on how to elect the President, there was only one mention of small states vs large states. Elbridge Gerry raised the point briefly. That’s the Elbridge Gerry for whom gerrymandering is named. He was ignored and the issue was never mentioned again.
There was debate, to be sure, about how to choose a President. Slaveholders did not want a national leader making decisions that might end slavery.
So they had demands. One was that there be an system of electors chosen by states. Another was that each state be given two votes in addition to proportional representation. The third was the killer. They wanted the number of slaves counted in while deciding how many votes each state would have. So, if half the population of a state was owned by the other half, that state would have twice as many electors. They eventually compromised that down, counting only 3/5 of the slaves.
That was pretty much the only issue in how to choose a President. Nothing about the tyranny of the majority. Nothing about mob rule. Nothing about factionalism. Very little about small states and large.
It was about how to preserve slavery.
James Madison was explicit. He finally went along with what we now call the Electoral College. He said the racist element of protecting slavery was the only way he could see to get slaveholders to agree to the establishment of a nation that might actually be able to govern.
Matt Christiansen and other conservatives do raise an additional point. They challenge the integrity of those who don’t like the electoral college. We are just sore losers.
You lost the game, so you complain about the rules. And that’s mostly why I’m annoyed. I don’t buy these complaints as principled. I don’t think they’d be happening if their candidate won. I think these are sour grapes.
And we can see his point. Questions about voting rights are really only motivated by politics.
Those college kids who traveled the South in the 1960s registering people to vote, and whose bodies ended up in earthen dams, the youngsters advocating for voting rights who wound up hanging by nooses decorating trees, those whose bodies were found in swamps in bayou country, those who were never found at all, were only risking their lives for political advantage. Their struggle for equality would be forgotten by the rest of us if our candidates would benefit.
I think we can do better. I don’t challenge the integrity of those who still think the electoral system was invented to prevent mob rule, or the tyranny of the majority, or to protect small states.
Some are trapped by the same educational moray in which many of us weree taught.
Many are guilty only of ignorance.
And a few by original Constitutional intent.
…what would happen if they do what they say they’re going to do? White people will not have anything to say.
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