Democrats Aren’t Losing Faith In Our Constitutional System. They Just Don’t Like It
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
In the liberal imagination there are only four ways to lose elections — and none have to do with their increasingly leftist turn, their hysterics, or their one-dimensional identity politics. Democrats lose because of “gerrymandering,” “voter suppression” (sometimes known as “asking for ID”), Russian mind-control rays deployed by social media, and our antiquated and unfair Constitution.
The final one of these excuses is becoming increasingly popular among liberal pundits who continue to invent new crises to freak out about.
Take Vox’s Ezra Klein, a longtime champion of direct democracy: “I don’t think people are ready for the crisis that will follow if Democrats win the House popular vote but not the majority,” he tweeted before the midterms. “After Kavanaugh, Trump, Garland, Citizens United, Bush v. Gore, etc, the party is on the edge of losing faith in the system (and reasonably so).”
The “House popular vote” now joins the “national popular vote” and “ Senate popular vote ” (a particularly dishonest one considering California didn’t have a Republican on the ballot) as fictional gauges of governance used by Democrats who aren’t brave enough to say they oppose the fundamental anti-majoritarianism that girds the Constitution.
Otherwise, why would Democrats lose faith in a “system” that is doing exactly what was intended? The Constitution explicitly protects small states (and individuals) from national majorities. The argument for diffusing democracy and checking a strong federal government is laid out in The Federalist Papers and codified on an array of levels. This was done on purpose. It is the system.
I mean, do Democrats really believe the Electoral College was constructed to always correspond with the national vote? Do they believe that the signers of the Constitution were unaware that some states would be far bigger than others in the future? If the Founders didn’t want Virginia to dictate how people in Delaware lived in 1787, why would they want California to dictate how people in Wyoming live in 2018? If you don’t believe this kind of proportionality is a vital part of American governance, you don’t believe in American governance.
You can despise Brett Kavanaugh all you like, but why would Democrats lose faith in “the system” that saw Republicans follow directions laid out in the Constitution for confirming a Supreme Court nominee? Why would Democrats lose faith in “the system” that elected Donald Trump using the same Electoral College that every other president used? Why would they lose faith in a system that houses a Supreme Court that stops the other branches from banning political speech? When the Supreme Court affirmed the election of George W. Bush, it turned out to be the right call .
It’s because they see the system as a way to achieve partisan goals, not as a set of politically neutral idealistic values.
It’s not a civics problem, either. One hopes liberal activists like Ken Dilanian, who wonders “how much longer the American majority will tolerate being pushed around by a rural minority,” understand sixth-grade civics. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman surely knows that the Constitution doesn’t give “disproportionate weight” to smaller states. It intentionally gives all states the same weight in the Senate. Krugman only finds this idea “disproportionate” because it protects millions of Americans from the centralized coercive state that he envisions for them. The disproportionality he sees merely reflects his own concerns. It has nothing to do with the system.
Also, rural America doesn’t “bully” people like Dilanian. The federal government was never supposed to be this powerful. The non-“forward moving” America—those dummies Krugman would like to nanny from Washington—doesn’t very much care how Dilanian lives. He, on the other hand, has big plans for them.
It should be noted that these majoritarians throw millions Americans aside to make this argument. We don’t know how a national majority would vote. There are many millions of Republicans in New York and California who don’t involve themselves in the futility of state politics. There are more Republicans in California than there are in Wyoming.
But as you can see on Election Day, liberals have made “democracy”— a word mentioned zero times in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence—into a sacramental rite. Getting more votes in an election outweighs the inherent rights of liberty that are laid out in the document. Unless, of course, that right happens to incidentally intersect with some advantageous partisan idea, like birthright citizenship; then Democrats become strict originalists. Everything else is up for discussion. Well, up for discussion now . It wasn’t a big topic for the hundred or so years Democrats were vastly overrepresented in the House.
The only reason these folks, who claim to want to save Constitution from Trump, see crisis in the “system” is that it fails to deliver for them politically. They’re not losing faith in the system. They just don’t like the system.
Article is LOCKED by author/seeder
Who is online
216 visitors
Progressives seem to think they represent a majority view, thus the anger every election cycle since America gambled on Obama.
Well to be fair, by vote count, the Progressives do presently represent the majority view of this country.
Things like gerrymandering and the EC have skewed the results between the type of representation the voters were looking for and what they've gotten instead.
In the 2010 midterms when, by a 7.1% margin, American voters had backed GOP candidates over Democratic candidates the GOP picked up 63 seats in congress but after nearly 2 decades of Republican gerrymandering the D's got a winning margin of 7% from the American electric in the 2018 midterms but the voters only will only rewarded with just 29+/- more Demarcated seats in Congress.
Of course the courts are presently considering cases to determine if gerrymandering the R's have been doing to keep the people from getting the representation they want is as illegal as gerrymandering to block a voters will because of their race or religion.
We'll have to wait on the court to see how that turns out.
The EC is a mess. Both parties know it but it lets one party that can't win the backing of the voters still have a chance to field a president.
Hamilton backed the EC to keep the unwashed masses from being fooled by a buffoon with foreign ties. It's never been used that way in our history, a fact that was gruesomely highlighted in the 2016 election.
Another noted reason for including the EC in the Constitution was as a sop to the slave States and Three-Fifths Compromise.
The EC is still in place due to the apathy of the American public.
Since it has only supersede the will of the voters 5 times in our nations history why bother to go through all the trouble it takes to ditch it.
But now that the last two times the EC has forked things up happened within a single generation and both times of those times the losing party that got the Presidency was the same party, well of course the majority of voters are going to go all Jeffersonian and start advocating for a change to the Constitution and the expulsion of the corrupting force of the EC from our presidential voting.
Wanting and advocating for a more representative voting system is not whining it's just being a thoughtful, conscientious Jeffersonian style American.
(some of Jefferson's thoughts on the Constitution and why he thought it should be completely revamped every generation in order to keep up with the changing times and needs of the Country )
.
To be fair, you wouldn't define the strength of an ideology by vote count. Gallup Polls have routinely identified those who consider themselves liberal or conservative or neither:
"Longer term, the percentage of U.S. adults identifying as liberal has climbed from 17% the first year Gallup used this measure in 1992 to 26% in 2017, while the percentage calling themselves moderate has fallen from 43% to 35%. Conservatives' share of the political pie was about the same in 2017 (35%) as in 1992 (36%), although it rose to 40% several times in between. The residual group, generally 4% to 5% in recent years, is unable, or refuses, to classify themselves with one of the three terms.
Voting results for political parties comprise a lot more than ideology. For instance public workers and minority voters vote democrat regardless of the party's ideology.
As for changing the EC, the Constitution provides for the procedures for doing so.
Good article.
For many on the left, the Constitution is just a concept to champion about when useful to achieve their ends.