Lots of friends have been pointing out that the Electoral College is broken, and I will agree. But the reason is not as simple and the solution clear-cut as it seems. As such, eliminating it via a Constitutional Amendment may be a worse solution than the problem. Consider the following: Among other things, when we read the writings of the Founding Fathers, such as the Federalist Papers or their private letters, we see that one reason they put the Electoral College (I will use EC for short) in place was to allow for preventing a demagogue into the position as our surpreme executive. It was, in their thinking not only a way of balancing between the farms/plantations and cities, but as a type of circuit breaker of last resort, to in their time, prevent the likes of a Benedict Arnold from gaining the office.
So what is wrong with the EC? The problem goes back to the Congressional Apportionment Amendment (the CAA), sometimes referred to as the “Article the First”. In the original set of amendments to the Constitution, before freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, or the right to bear arms, we had an amendment which was intended to tell us how to divvy up the House of Representatives, and thorough that, the EC itself. But, it barely missed being ratified, with just one state at one point being needed to ratify the amendment and become a part of our Constitution. This amendment would have required an additional member of the House for every 50,000 in population for a state. Think about this for a moment… the Founding Father’s wanted a member in the House representing his “neighbors”, which would know him and which the representative would be more like.
Compounding that problem is that the Congressional Apportionment Act of 1929 was a direct opposite of the CAA. Passed by a GOP controlled Congress and POTUS, this act limited the number of representatives to a fixed 435, with states guaranteed at least one. Because of this, there are some states which have one representative for 527,624 constituents (Rhode Island, 2010 Census) [1], and others which are nearly one million constituents per representative (994,416 – Montana). This is roughly a 2:1 ratio. For electors, the spread is even worse. Wyoming has 189,433 constituents per elector, while California has 678,945, for a ratio of 3.6:1. Think about those facts for a second… there is where our problem is.
Another problem which would be addressed by doing away with the 1929 act and going with the amendment would be gerrymandering. When a district shrinks down to a town, or sometimes even just a few city blocks, it becomes far more difficult to gerrymander a district. And right along with this, imagine the effects on the cost of running as opposed to the cost to buy a significant chunk of legislators. While the cost would be far lower for the house seat, the numbers required for lobbyists or corporations to buy influence would increase.
So with this, it would be far better IMO to give the CAA a try.
A friend of mine over on Facebook shared these two pictures (combined here), with the included comment…
I was going to do this as a reply to that post, on FB, but decided to make it a post of my own, and go even further, to make it a blog post here, which I would then share on FB (especially after WinBlows decided to eat what I had written in my paste buffer before I could even put it someplace safe to edit…
I will now say that I have have absolutely ***NO*** problem with this gesture in and of itself. After all, how many of us used the very gesture in high school, cheering on our team in the big game?? But as someone who has been a lifelong student of history and politics, even if I did not make it a profession, I can say with secure knowledge that it is a sign of unity… of solidarity… for all sorts of groups, some good, some not so. It was used by the descendents of former slaves when accepting awards at the Olympics, in solidarity and protesting the discrimination they and others were still dealing with more than a hundred years later. It was some years later used by Lech Wałęsa and the members of Solidarność to protest their own situation in Poland. And more recently, it was used to protest the situation in Wisconsin, where police and firefighter unions were being pushed towards the midden by Scott Walker and his backers. And in these and many other cases, it is the same… protesting the treatment by the oligarchs who have all the money and all the political and economic power. It is the peasants with pitchforks and torches, the common French citizen in 1789 and others standing up to the Oligarchs… and we are fast approaching the time where we will have our own Bastille Day, with a tax system which is in fact regressive, not progressive as it was until Reagan, allowing 90% of the wealth of the last decade to go to the very richest of the rich.
With that said, I will say that the gesture itself is also a warning sign. If folks have been paying attention, people such as Nick Hanauer and Robert Reich have been pointing out how the system is broken, and warning about what the future very well may hold for us. And this is not something which is recent thinking. My dad and I, when I was in high school and then college, had a number of discussions where we talked about this nation and the direction in which it was headed. We discussed presidential elections, the shakeups which occurred at fairly regular intervals, and we saw that we would see an early uprising of people who had grown dissatisfied with the direction things were going with things like big businesses/banks, politics and the like, and how were things not to change, within the period of roughly one more of those regular cycles, the proverbial shit would hit the proverbial fan and we would see a repeat of the French Revolution… Bastille Day, but this time, combining aspects of our own Civil War. That uprising, which we likened to a warning whistle and pressure relief on a boiler, was the Occupy movement… And one need only look around to see that Occupy, while disorganized, is still with us. And the cycle time is roughly 20-24 years, if you look at the US presidential elections.
We will start with 1860, we all know what happened there, and that war caused an adjustment which resulted in 1872, where χάος reigned with the EV being split 6 ways . Then there was 1892 , which saw Populist Party candidate James Weaver (a progressive, in favor of regulating big business) get 8.5% of the vote and 22 EV from 5 states, with just 400k votes separating the victor Democrat Grover Cleveland from incumbent GOP President Benjamin Harrison. Then in 1912, we have the next, where as the friend mentioned, we Theodore Roosevelt running on the Progressive “Bull Moose” party (following in Weaver’s steps, it should be added), being dissatisfied with how his GOP successor and the party had become conservative enough that TR gave ***the all time best performance of any third party candidate in the history of this nation***. With 88 EV from 6 states, and 27.4% of the vote, he beat out the GOP candidate and party from which he had split, where William Taft only got 8 EV and 2 states, from his 23.2% of the vote… yes… only 4.2% less than TR… but a critical 4.2%. Think about this… a progressive candidate split from the progressive party, and came in 2nd in the US Presidential election… something which has happened at no other time. And who did he lose to?? The even more progressive Democratic Party candidate Woodrow Wilson, who while living in NJ at the time, was from about 20 minutes from where I sit, here in the Shenandoah Valley of VA. This marks the true start of the transition of the Democratic Party from the conservative party it was in 1860 to be the progressive party in the Northern/non-Confederate states, and the GOP becoming the conservative party in the same. Indeed, were it not for Wilson’s view on race, which was the product of Virgina, the party in the north would have become what it was under FDR.
Conservatism would regain its hold following Wilson’s two terms and WWI, and from 1920 to 1932, this period is known as the “high tide of Conservatism”, where much as today, the mantra was smaller government, fewer regulations, and lower taxes. But things collapsed in more ways than one. Hoover and the 1929 stock market collapse collapsed the GOP, while Tammany Hall brought down the old-guard northern democrats, and where the 1932 election wrapped up the period known as the Fourth Party System, unlike many others, was marked more by solidarity than by fragmentation, with FDR getting 57.4% of the popular vote, but 88.8% of the electoral, with 472 EV and 42 states (the 88.8% of the EV comparing to 87.5% of the states). At this point, between the switch to the Fifth Party System period, the Great Depression, WWII and FDR’s unprecedented 4 successive terms. Next comes the 1948 election, where Strom Thurmond and those like him have clearly come to have their underwear in knots over the changes in the racial status quo which had existed from the end of the Civil War. Thurmond ran on the Dixiecrat ticket, beginning the move of the Southern Democrats to the now conservative GOP. This election marks the beginning of a continuous backing of the GOP by August County VA area, which has not supported a Democrat nationally since FDR. And as we go forward, we have 1968, which saw progressive Eugene McCarthy (not to be confused with Joseph McCarthy of the 1950s “Commie Hunt” infamy) shutout by the DNC establishment in favor of then VP Hubert Humphrey (who only indirectly competed in the primaries through proxies such as Smathers, Young and Branigin), after RFK’s assassination. And so, as a preview of what would happen in 2016, the DNC found themselves losing to a GOP presidential candidate. Nixon got 301 EV and 32 states, with 43.4% of the popular vote, while Humphrey got 191 EV, carrying DC and 13 states with 42.7% Also, we saw George Wallace, one of the last holdout’s to the old Southern Democrat tradition, get 46 EV and 5 states, with 13.5% of the popular vote. This culminated the GOP battle plan vision of Harold Stassen, a perennial GOP presidential candidate, who largely formulated what would become the GOP’s Southern Strategy. And thus began the DNC’s chase after what they had had for well over a century, and their move back towards the conservative views of the late 1800s.
Since 1968, we have to go to the 1992 election, and the 1996 election, where Ross Perot first entered the picture, and then continued to show the growing stresses set in place beginning in 1980 with Reagan’s and G.H.W. Bush’s deceitful policy referred to as “Trickle-down economics”, as well as events such as Iran-Contra. While WJC won in 1992 with 370 EV, having won DC and 32 states compared to Bush’s 168 EV from 18 states (43.0% vs. 37.4% of the popular vote), Perot managed to get 18.9% but no EV, which is the highest percentage for any 3rd party since 1912. And the 1996 election previously mentioned show the continued stresses as they start to build.
At this point… let us look at the pattern established so far (with year differences from the previous shown in square brackets, bolded).
1860 [0] – Lincoln, Civil War
1872 [12]– χάος with a 6-way split of the electoral vote
1892 [20] – Progressive Populist Party candidate James Weaver gets 22 EV from 5 states
1912 [20] – Teddy Roosevelt as a progressive splinter candidate gets 2nd place with 88EV from 6 states, losing to progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson (and 1 year after another important event)
1932 [20] – Collapse of the GOP, old school conservative northern democrats, and FDR begins his first of 4 terms.
1948 [16] – Thurmond and the Dixiecrats burst forth from the bowels of the Democratic Party, beginning their move to the GOP.
1968 [20] – Establishment DNC hands Humphrey the nomination and the GOP wins
1992 [24]/1996 -Perot
I will also note that going backwards from 1860, interesting elections would be 1836 ([-24]), 1824 ([-12]… a really STRANGE election, even stranger than 1820, where James Monroe ran unopposed for his 2nd term), and 1796, the first post Washington election, with the first parties and contested election. But from here, things start to morph… as by now, the US is more and more appearing to be an unrecognized oligarchy. We have…
2008 [16] – Rise of the Tea Party Movement (interestingly, when you look at it, funded by the oligarch Koch brothers via their Americans for Prosperity PAC) and the Tea Party Caucus, whose platform resembles that of the Dixiecrats, with 60 years of GOP polish. Wall Street collapses.
2016 [5] (1992+24) – Bernie runs as a progressive democrat but is shut-out by the DNC, because while he consistently caucuses with them, the party has has left him behind. Trump runs as a “populist” GOP candidate and wins, while losing the popular vote by roughly 3 million votes, and where just 4 extremely close states with roughly 70,000 votes total difference could have resulted in Hillary winning.
Now, before I go on to look at the future, let me bring up something I have mentioned before… the “Nth Party System”. Here they are:
The pattern is actually overdue for a change, though some suggest that the last accepted one is thought by some to have perhaps begun as late as the 1990s. Perhaps, if we are still around in 30 years, they might agree that 1966 was the start of the period, and perhaps figure either the beginning of G W Bush’s time as the end… I would actually say that it was the former, given the 2000 disputed election, the 9/11 attacks and our reign of fear politics, and the increased gerrymandering by the GOP, where they took steps to secure the powerhold. Or, perhaps it is the latter, with events such as the 2008 crash, and the Citizens United ruling. I have to wonder what the data would show…
But from here, let us look at 2008 as our base, and look forward, to where solidarity and populism can be a major negative. Following the pattern, by sometime between 2024 and 2032 comes the next major event, based on the 20 year cycle from the elections. The past few years, we have seen groups like the KKK and white nationalists groups have a public resurgence, becoming visible like cockroaches pouring out of the walls of a old tenement house when someone pounds on the walls. And there is all the race baiting, lies and everything else to do with this kakistocracy (or kleptocracy, depending on how you look at things), both of which are grouped under the oligarchical forms of government (when looking at governments as their source of power… e.g. democracy, oligarchy, autocracy or anarchy). It is Germany in 1933, only worse. If we think 2016 was bad… 2020 is shaping up to be even worse, with no lessons learned not only from 2016, but from other historical elections such as 1912 or 1968 either. And the hypocrisy is rampant. There is talk of how some candidates like Bernie, AOC and others, who prefer terms like Social Democrats or Justice Democrats, are not actual democrats, and how populism is causing a vacuum… but it is not these individuals who have left the party, or are causing a vacuum… it is the movement of both the GOP and the DNC to the right (and I dislike that one dimensional term to describe something which in its way, requires nearly as many dimensions as String Theory does) which has left folks on that end behind, following the decaying carrot which was uprooted during the Civil War. And this is seen by Occupy, and even the Tea Party, which is now the Freedom Caucus… which IMNSHO represents nothing more or less than the oligarchs to conserve, concentrate and multiply (in the Biblical sense) their power and wealth at the expense of the rest of us.
Our Founding Fathers feared Direct Democracy for a reason, and justifiably so. They knew that people as a whole become complacent, and because of that, ignorant to matters which folks such as Madison, Jefferson and the others were quite learned. Mankind…Humanity… People are selfish and seek overly simple solutions/answers. They come up with mechanisms which we give names like “religion”, “political parties”, and countless more to justify actions, and those in power abuse those who are not, leading to events like the Crusades, the Battle of Hastings, The War of the Roses and the events through Henry VIII’s reign and onward… and to the American Revolution itself… where a small number of people, after power, manipulate people through those mechanisms and end up at the center of wars, and how the people are the ones who are hurt. And yet, just two years after the signing of the Constitution, France saw the same coin tossed, showing what happens when you also ignore the people. Democracy is the edge of a coin upon which things ballance, and you cannot ignore the people as they push the coin from both sides. And that requires people educating themselves, and feeling that they have a voice. That is why, out of all Amendments, the one which predates all others, is the most important. For before there was the Amendment protecting freedom of speech and religion (our 1st Amendment), or the right to bear arms (our 2nd Amendment), or even limiting how Congress can vote to increase its salary (our 27th Amendment, which was the second proposed), there was another amendment proposed… The Congressional Apportionment Amendment, which does the exact opposite of the Apportionment Act of 1911, would give people a better voice in Congress. But having limited the voice of the people, we are heading to a point where the people will soon follow in the footsteps of the French in 1792, or the Poles in the 1980s… and stand up to the oligarchs. Only, this time around, it seems we will be uniting behind two banners, and likely we will see an American version of the French Revolution… only far FAR bloodier. This next time, unless things change dramatically, rather than in the polls and the Electoral College, or being a minor inconvenience like Occupy was, it will involve the pitchforks Nick Hanauer has mentioned threatening the balance of that coin. And this time, we also have the SVR and GRU of rebranded USSR (now USSR v2.0) not only trying to push the coin over, but to obliterate it if they can.
I have been seeing lots of posts of late from folks, which make statements which could be boiled down to “Help our vets, screw the illegals” or “Feed our own hungry, and let the refugees fend for themselves”. All of these are commonly seen in posts and memes on Facebook, in statements by pundits and politicians, and elsewhere. And, it is an incessant drone, just like the tinnitus I deal with every waking moment, or like the cicada which come around every 13 or 17 years (depending on which brood you are dealing with). And it has passed the point of being annoying, so that I want to do my equivalent of this…
Seriously, our country has always had its issues, going clear back to at least the months following Cornwallis surrendering at Yorktown. But things currently are like a pot which has been left on the stove to boil for too long, and the contents of the pot are now stinking up the house. Slavery, the wave after wave of immigrants who are first treated as barely human, and then later when they have become mixed in, they treat the next wave the same way… the examples go on. But in the last century, humanity, mankind, homo sapiens has learned more ways to be inhuman, unkind and dispicable to others in greater numbers and with less effort than at any time before. Consider that just 100 years ago during WWI, 20 million were killed, representing roughly 1.25% of the population. For WWII, which started just two decades later, including those who died to disease or famine, the number is thought to be 80 million (some estimates are as high as 118 million), for around 3.5% of the estimated world population. Indeed, the death toll of just two missions at the end of the war resulted in roughly 200,000 dead.
But it is not just the technology that has allowed us to kill in “job lots”. Our attitudes have changed, and for the worse. Even though he would have done things exactly the same, Gen. Tibbets had on a couple of rare occasions gone past his “there is no morality in warfare” to admit that when isolated from the rest of the war, such an act was bothersome… but like so many others, they feared that far many more would die if we had had to invade Japan itself. And views changed even more during the Cold War, which was framed as a battle against “godless Commies” during the 1950s (and which is when the phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance and elsewhere), and became even more calloused during Vietnam. Throw in the writings of Ayn Rand, the fallout from the Civil Right’s movement and the Dixiecrats, and the resulting growth of Evangelical Christianity and the Moral Majority, and we have become a society where a significant proportion of folks have no issues with a group whose philosophy attitudes can best be summed up as “I have mine, screw you!” And this is even true of folks who are being screwed over, because they have latched onto a different group to which they can pass along the sentiment. Conservatives since at least the time of Reagan have been all over the idea of “Trickle-down economics”… well, it is not the money which is trickling down. Instead, what is trickling down is brown, runny, and smells like a cattle barn on a hot August day. But, you know what… those folks just gobble it up, along with the pablum fed to them by the likes of the Falwell family, Creflo Dollar, Joel Olsteen and others, who have twisted Christianity into a gordian knot to suit their desires, just like so many times before, both in the history of this nation and in the world (such as Nazi Germany, Spain during the Inquisition, and the Crusades themselves, just to pick a few “highlights”).
This twisting has been subtle. For much of the history of the Catholic Church, people were kept generally ignorant of the Bible, either through illiteracy, the scarcity of books in general, and for those who could afford a Book of Hours, by keeping things fairly selective. Indeed, it was not until the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council that services were conducted in the vernacular language instead of Latin on a widespread basis. And for those of you who have not studied a second language (while rusty, I have been quite fluent in both Spanish and German in the past, and have studied others), it is not easy to get all the nuances of a language when translating from a different language into your own. Even understanding the English of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean Eras (such as used by Shakespeare and the King James version of the Bible) is tricky at times. And with the rise of Evangelical Christianity in the US, we have new versions which have subtle differences from their older counterparts. But the net result has been that we have we have numerous demagogues who use their positions as political and religious leaders to multiply their power and wealth to have personal mansions, private jets and other idols to their personal egos. And when we have situations like the three richest “Americans” having more wealth than the bottom 50%… nobody can in their right mind and soul think that the problem is illegals or people being lazy. The problem is the fat cat at the head of a banquet table having created a system where they get the vast majority, the people sitting closest to him get a portion, and the people who could be sitting at the rest of the table left hoping that if they support that fat cat and grovel enough, they might get a bite or two of the leftovers. And so, we have the likes of Trump, Pence, Sessions, McConnell, Ryan and others in the political halls of this nation gaming the system, folks like the Falwell’s, Robertson’s and others going along with the game, and their supporters thinking that it is a choice of vets vs. immigrants, or our hungry vs. refugees, when that is far from the truth.
What is the truth… it is one of priorities being wrong. In 2017, we spent $610 billion, compared to the combined total of $578 billion spent by China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the UK, and Japan combined (add in Germany, and their total would only be about $620B). You wonder why China and Russia spent $228 billion and $66 billion respectively? We are the bully on the block, and a chunk of their mindset is “We need to protect ourselves”. And Saudi Arabia, which just tortured to death a journalist in their own embassy, and to whom folks like Pat Robertson and the TOTUS are giving a pass because of a arms deal… their roughly $70 billion represents 10% of their GDP, while most countries are well under 5%. If we took just $100 billion from defense, what could we do with that? Well, we could repair 50,000 miles of roads and bridges, feed 3.4 million people, build 1000 miles of street car/urban rail (~50 cities with new systems), run fiber internet to 8.3 million households, and power 700,000 homes with solar energy…. ALL COMBINED… and I am sure somewhere in all of that we could find $2.5 billion for 50000 teachers. Another $25 billion would also allow us to build roughly 294,000 houses… but then, Fox Business found in 2014 that there were roughly 18.6 million homes without residents, while the homeless numbered only 3.5 million. So instead of building new homes, refurbish and upgrade existing homes where possible, and give them to those who are homeless… But why can we not do these things… PRIORITIES! We have to do tax cuts, corporate subsidies for already profitable industries, and military arms spending to allow our wealthiest individuals, as well as the banks and other corporations including defense contractors arms manufacturers they heavily invest in to gather up more riches (or put another way, to multiply their riches), and screw the rest of us… while paying lip service to religion, which was never supposed to be a part of our government.
Lip service? I can actually think of a different term. I’ve already covered the swords instead of plowshares part. Let us consider our treatment of immigrants and the poor. In places such as Hebrews 13, Leviticus 19 and Matthew 25, it talks about how we should treat those strangers among us, as well as the poor and hungry. But instead of doing as was written about the feeding of the masses, where they gathered up five loaves of bread and two fish, and redistributed it to in the end satisfy 5000 with bread left over. But in the gospel according to Ayn Rand and many conservatives today, Jesus would ignore the sick, poor and hungry, and rather than feeding the masses, Jesus and the disciples would have kept it all to themselves and eaten it in front of the masses. And so many go on about how our nation is declining because of things like abortion and gay marriage, even invoking Sodom (where do you think the word sodomy comes from)… Consider this… Ezekiel 16:49:
Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.
Even when you read the total context of it, and Genesis 19 with the context of Genesis 18, there is overall the theme of hospitality. Abraham and Sarah were blessed for their hospitality in Genesis 18, and Lot and his family were saved due to their hospitality and Sodom as the whole condemned for the lack of it. And you can find many articles out there on the topic written by clergy and scholar alike, such as this one.
So rather than forget that one of the primary topics of the New Testament is LOVE (remember how John 3:16 starts? For G*d so loved the world…), meditate upon this as demagogues spout their message of fear, hatred and judgement, and try to encourage us that it an either/or type decision on our part, when the true either/or is they multiply their power and riches at the expense of the rest of us, as opposed to a more equitable solution where none are left wanting.
