All the Electorate's Men
OP-ED
Tomorrow, the United States of America will elect their 45th president.
Of course, especially from this far away, we’d be forgiven for thinking that particular milestone already past. If the international spotlight has ever rested on the peculiar institution of the Electoral College, though, it does so now. I’ll leave it to readers to review the details of the system for themselves; there’s a litany of articles, essays, thinkpieces, and general entreaties circulating now on the topic, many of which contain the germ at least of some genuinely marvelous speculative fiction.
For this eleventh hour, I’d like to call instead for all of us to step back for a moment, and reflect on the true meaning of the Electoral College. For this December 19th is much more than merely a moment for American families to gather and give thanks for the gift of Representative Democracy over their traditional meal of Chicken Tetrazzini, blissfully oblivious to whatever’s actually cogging on in the background.
No; this year, let’s all of us, in every nation, let America’s Electoral College be a reminder of what true national sovereignty is, and must be: a compromise, between the interests of a state’s citizens as individual persons, and the interests of the state’s communities as individual groups.
This is deep, serious stuff! And too often forgotten or full-out ignored, even by the high priests who ought to know better. Among all the punditry we hear things like “the Electoral College has failed” (by which of course is meant that it’s failed to conform to the popular vote), or that it’s an “anachronism” that needs to be abolished or “reformed” (by bringing it more fully into line with the popular vote), or, in its defense, that it’s an “emergency brake on the process of selecting a president” (Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor).
Of course that’s all rubbish. The College isn’t a failsafe to the process; it is the process. There are some stops and whistles attached, to be sure, but they’re attached TO the core organ, rather than visa versa. If there’s an emergency brake, it exists in Congress, which has a last opportunity to object to electors’ legality as electors, and does, in fact, rubber-stamp the whole thing. The popular vote is properly sideshow.
Now, why on earth should we care, you ask, half a world and a daylight away? The Electoral College remains significant for all of us, wherever we are, precisely because of how sharply its perceived flaws throw into relief the terms of that national compromise required of any state.
What the crowds and coneheads clamoring for the primacy of the popular vote are really doing is declaring the interest of the individual person, as a policy consideration, to be sacrosanct, and taken over all other considerations. In order to seriously and consistently argue like that, “One Man, One Vote” has to be treated as a sort of Single-and-Alone, with an almost fundamentalist fervor.
But no society is simply a clustering of citizens. Nor, when voting, is any but the most tragically hermetic citizen voting purely based on his or her own ‘individual’ interests. The communities to which we belong – especially those communities in which membership is most normally inherited, into which we are naturally born, to which we are native, those communities defined by a national quality like language, or ethnicity, or religion, or tribe – these communities have individual interests of their own, as a body.
In the US, the communities that matter, that are allowed to vie equally with each other as communities over shaping state policy, are defined by territory, and called states. America’s system is laughably far from perfect, and even so has been shamelessly declawed over the decades; but the spectacle of an Electoral College every four years, consisting of individuals representing by constitution and with their conscientious vote their state, rather than simply some faceless plurality of yesses, is a visceral reminder of a basic truth. Individuals matter, but not at the expense of the communities to which they belong, and which in turn constitute the State at large.
Without passing any judgement or suggesting any change, then, let us consider our own state. Is the Republic of Georgia in fact quite as monolithic as its electoral practice suggests? Does the district system adequately reflect the full diversity of communities and communal interests that make up the state? Are, in fact, the most essential communities within Georgia even recognized as such under the law? In America, a country of transplants and colonists, the political simplicity of distilling all communal bonds down to the essentially economic ones formed by land ownership and tenancy is – without further commentary – possible. Is the same possible, or even desirable, here?
The closer we come to simplicity in electoral practice, the closer we come to autocracy. This can seem benign and even positive seen in passing, or perhaps purely superficial; but who wants to live under an autocracy of someone else’s sheer majority? If states aren’t made complex, they either homogenize and bleach out, or break apart. If small language communities aren’t given policy protection, aren’t allowed to legally voice their own interests as an individual group at the forum of state policy-making, they will disappear under the chatter of majority. If territorial communities feel frustrated in their attempts to influence state policy, they’ll leave – as happened, violently, in the US in 19th century, in Yugoslavia in the ‘90s, and, of course, here. Needless to say, I make no commentary here on the morality of this – only on the fact of it.
Protests continue now across America. To the extent that these protesters simply feel that Hillary Clinton has won the right to be President, or that her lead in the popular vote proves the need to abolish the Electoral College, they are deeply misguided. Her much-discussed 2.8 million margin of victory is attributable almost entirely to the combined six counties of New York and LA alone – completely entirely if we ignore Staten Island (and who doesn’t?). That isn’t to say that she won 2.8 million votes in those two cities – she won 2.8 million more votes there than did her opponent. Ignoring, for now, the (grotesquely unfit) character of that opponent, we ought at least to appreciate a system that protects Alabama, and even New Hampshire, from the autocracy of the Brooklynite.
The challenges here are different. Guria probably doesn’t need protection from the whim of the Tbiliseli. But here, as in any country, there are assuredly groups and communities that DO need extra care – and if they can’t be immediately, instinctively identified, then it’s probably a matter of even more necessity.
So, as the United States of America deconstruct themselves, the innards of what’s been a fair machine should provide some engaged study for a newer and smaller democracy now working to make the best of itself, for all its citizens and all its communities, in the century that comes.
By Robert Isaf