The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
November 16, 2017
The election of 2016 was a major miscarriage of justice and fairness inflicted on the American electorate by the hopelessly flawed concept and existence of the Electoral College. What you just heard is not necessarily the most objective statement ever made, but it is uttered equally from both the head and heart. The election of 2016 was the most stomach-churning, mind-warping, soul-wrenching presidential election in the memory of millions of Americans. Ditto re. the objectivity of that statement.
Neither of the candidates of the Republican and Democratic parties in the 2016 election had enthusiastic support from the vast majority of the voters in either party. The process of procuring a party’s nomination in the presidential primaries has become an increasingly dispiriting procedure in American politics, but 2016 produced a new revolting low. Fondly do we hope and fervently do we pray this scourge shall never again be repeated in the annals of American elections, but it would be unwise to count on it.
The Democratic Party presidential primaries began with five candidates seeking the nomination. In a relatively moderate amount of time, that number was whittled down to two, with Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders vying for the party endorsement to what turned out to be “the bitter end.” After some spirited if less than totally trustworthy debates with her original opponents and then with Bernie Sanders, the former first lady, Senator from New York, and Secretary of State received the required number of delegates to secure the nomination at her party’s national convention.
The Republican Party was faced with a vastly different drama. Initially, sixteen men and one woman officially threw their hats into the ring for the nomination. Had it been the Kentucky Derby, there probably would have been too many horses to fit into the starting gate in the run for the roses. As it was, the starting process featured an unwieldy large number of people, all trying to distance themselves from the rest of the pack. That was exceptionally difficult for the debate format, with so many candidates. One by one, various candidates dropped out of the sixteen-month marathon. The early primary debates featured platoons of people saying almost nothing, stretched across stages throughout the country, because there were too many of them to say very much. In the end, the candidate most pundits had predicted at the beginning did not stand the proverbial snowball’s chance of winning won.
In his campaign and in his presidency, Donald J. Trump has said things and done things such as no previous candidate or President has ever said or done. To deny that is utterly to ignore American history. No major politician has ever behaved like this man, whether seeking office or in office. To substantiate that statement is completely unnecessary, and to deny it is the most mulish kind of obduracy.
However, were she currently the President, Hillary Clinton would likely be even more unpopular than is Donald Trump. One of the most alarming features of the election of 2016 is the level of publicly expressed visceral hatred of both candidates by countless voters. I heard many thoughtful, decent, respectable people say during and after the presidential campaign, with no reservation or hesitation whatsoever, that they hated either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. I never heard anyone say they hated both of them equally, or that they hated all the candidates. Nevertheless, the election of 2016 seemed to bring out the worst in the candidates as well as the worst in the voters.
What has happened to American politics that so many Americans have become so repulsed by so many politicians? And why did the sole survivors of the whole sordid process of presidential primaries evoke such irrational repulsion? If the two candidates for the presidency had evinced more positive attitudes among Americans all across the political spectrum, might we be in a much more positive situation now?
I am only going to ask those questions, without attempting to answer any of them. Nonetheless I hope you will ponder them. But it is evident that a politically perilous line was crossed in the run-up to the November election in 2016. The American people are as mad as the very dickens (as I choose to express it, but most others nowadays would not), and they are threatening not to put up with it anymore.
Courtesy of James Comey, the previous director of the FBI, the election of 2016 might have turned out quite differently than it did. Mr. Comey, you will recall, made public a report which was very damaging to Hillary Clinton only days before the election. After the election, the new President quickly fired Mr. Comey.
Courtesy of Robert Mueller, in future revelations it may legally be determined that the election of 2016 was fraudulently and illegally won. Mueller may be able to prove that the Russians colluded to tip the election to Trump.
If that is the case, what would it imply should then happen? Should Donald Trump be removed from the presidency, and Mike Pence become President? Should Hillary Clinton become President a year or two or three after Mr. Mueller is able to verify crimes and misdemeanors have been committed, IF he can prove that? How do you fix a fixed election, if it was fixed? I’m not going to try to answer any of those questions either, because they are hypothetical, and hypotheses in the present moment may be fascinating but not very helpful. However, I also hope you will think about these questions as well.
Therefore we shall look at the electoral numbers themselves, and how many votes there were for the two candidates, and how the Electoral College cast their votes.
In 2016 there were two major candidates for President, as always, and a few minor candidates, again as always. We shall look at the numbers only for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump.
Hillary Clinton received a total of 65,853,516 votes, or 48.5% of the total votes cast. Donald Trump received 62,984,825 votes, or 46.1% of the total votes. To express it differently, she won nearly three million more votes than he did, and had 2.4% more total votes than he had. The President-Elect said he would verify that Mrs. Clinton had more than three million invalid votes, but neither as President-Elect nor as President did he validate his claim.
In the Electoral College, however, Donald Trump won by a margin of 304 to 227. Stated differently, he won the Electoral College vote with 16.6% more of the Electoral College votes cast in that election, but he lost the popular election by 2.4%.
How can that be? What can explain that? How could such a mathematical, political, and philosophical injustice be perpetrated on the American people? Those questions I shall answer, and the answer is to be found in just three words: The Electoral College.
These four lectures or essays are entitled The Elections of 1860,1960, 2000, & 2016; The Electoral College; States’ Rights. All presidential elections have consequences, but those four particular elections had particular consequences for the American nation.
The first election of Abraham Lincoln as president occurred as the nation was finally tearing itself completely asunder. It was a colossal rending which resulted in the Civil War. Four candidates ran for the presidency in 1860. Lincoln received the highest number of votes that were cast, and the highest number of Electoral College votes, but he won, not surprisingly, by a plurality, not a majority. The bitter feelings represented by that election lasted well beyond it, and well beyond Lincoln’s second election and his assassination. In a sense the Union victory in the Civil War was no victory at all, because for millions of Americans, a “confederacy” of some sort is still preferable to a “union” of any sort. By that rationale, states’ rights should almost always trump federal or national rights. I shall address this at greater length when we come to a consideration of the circumstances in which the United States Constitution was drafted.
The election of 1876 was the first election in which a candidate won who received fewer votes in the popular election than his opponent. Rutherford B. Hayes was almost unknown in 1876, but he likely won the presidency by promising to remove the federal troops in the South who were the federal enforcers of Reconstruction. Hayes had 4,036,000 votes, and his opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, had 4,300,000 votes. Nevertheless, Hayes won the presidency by one vote in the Electoral College, 185-184.
In 1884 Grover Cleveland was elected President. In 1888 he lost the Electoral College vote by 233-168, even though he had a hundred thousand more total votes than the winner, Benjamin Harrison. Once again, the loser was the winner, and the winner was the loser. Four years later Cleveland defeated Harrison in both the Electoral College vote (233-168) and the popular vote (by almost 400,000 votes). Grover Cleveland was the only President to win two terms one term apart.
The election of John Kennedy over Richard Nixon was a very close one, as we learned when we previously studied it. Nixon claimed that the election was stolen in the states of Texas and Illinois, but the claim was never proven. Because of their personality differences, but especially because of Mr. Nixon’s paranoid and insecure psychology, a political partisanship was set in motion which has grown to this day.
The election of 2000 was another election in which the winner of the popular vote lost in the Electoral College vote. Al Gore was 103 votes short of 51,000,000 votes in that year, and George W. Bush was slightly over 50,450,000 votes. Yet the presidency went to Bush in the Electoral College by 271-266. That was another impetus to the partisanship that has characterized American politics ever since the Kennedy-Nixon election. There is a natural and unavoidable partisanship which looms up when candidates win the popular vote and lose in the Electoral College. The losing candidates voters feel cheated, and with every good reason.
However, it is the election of 2016 which has split the parties and the American people as no other single factor in recent history, and perhaps in all of our history. Given the nature of the personalities and personal tendencies of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, it is no surprise that there was unusually widespread animosity throughout the nation after their campaigns for the presidency. But the glaring disparities in the popular and the Electoral College votes highlight the wounds inflicted on the body politic. As long as Donald Trump is President, millions of severely disgruntled Americans are going to believe he is a total usurper of the nation’s highest office. And as long as he is President, millions of other jubilant Americans are going to support him, no matter what he says or does. Political partisanship cannot get any more partisan than that.
The purpose of reviewing these particular presidential elections is to illustrate that very close elections, especially where the popular vote is overturned by the Electoral College, create a destabilizing political situation. The partisanship which emanates from such elections produces the most noxious possible political climate.
And that brings us to the final segment of these four lecture/essays with a very long title. That segment is - - - states’ rights.
STATES’ RIGHTS
After the United States of America declared victory in the American Revolution in 1783, and Great Britain conceded defeat, the American national government operated under the intentionally anemic Articles of Confederation. The Articles clearly decreed that the states possessed all the political powers not specifically designated to the national government. By design, very few powers were granted to the federal government. Most of the people who supported the revolution did not want the kind of government from which they fought to break away, namely, the powerful and autocratic British monarchy. But on the other hand, even more they feared democracy, where potentially if not actually unformed citizens should be allowed to sway elections.
The federal army was deliberately kept small during the Revolution. The colonists feared that a strong central government and military might do what the monarchy had done in England so frequently throughout its history. That is, the kings would squash and squelch the interests of British subjects in blatant favor of their own interests or those of the aristocracy. Thus it was state militias far more than the national military which led the USA to victory. Even though they were fighting for their lives from Lexington to Yorktown, the Americans perceived they were in combat for their individual colonies-which-became-states much more than for “America,” whatever that nebulous idea might mean to them.
The United States of America during the period of the Articles of Confederation was anything but united. It was chaotic and anarchic. Interstate commerce was almost non-existent because state tariffs made trade nearly impossible. Government finances were unpredictable at best and dangerously underfunded at worst. Whether the national government was to be located in New York, Philadelphia, or --- later in their thinking --- Washington, DC, there could be no serious national government until the Articles of Confederation were officially scrapped and a new Constitution was drafted in their place.
Succeeding in the Revolution was one thing. Trying to establish a new government permanently to replace the British crown was quite another. There were serious differences in what the revolutionaries wanted in their new system of government. What would be the qualifications for citizens in the new nation? Would everyone be citizens and voters, or just certain kinds of people? Should they name their own king, and create an American monarchy, with nobody voting on anything? Should they build a democracy, where everybody would vote on everything? Would that even be organizationally possible? Or were they attempting to create some sort of a republic?
It was obvious to nearly everyone that the Articles of Confederation were hopelessly defective. The purposes of the Revolution seemed to have been lost within four years of the Revolution having been won because the national government was virtually stymied. A major change was necessary; on that they all agreed.
To most people elsewhere in the world, the word “state” means exactly the same thing as the word “nation.” In fact, most non-American English speakers frequently use those two words interchangeably. Thus when they speak of “state-sponsored programs,” they mean nationally-sponsored programs. The state health system is the national health system. The state military is the military of the nation. The state lottery is the national lottery.
The whole of Eastern Canada was settled as one very large colony. The various provinces did come into existence until long after the American Revolution. But by an historical quirk, everything south of Canada was colonized as thirteen separate colonies, each with its own economy, traditions, and even culture. It was not one long, narrow colony along the Atlantic Ocean; it was thirteen individual colonies. That peculiarity of historical development had an outsized effect on what was finally adopted as our nation’s Constitution.
The thirteen states which ultimately gave state affirmation to the United States Constitution in 1787 perceived themselves to be much more like thirteen separate nations or thirteen individual republics than thirteen regional government bodies in a brand-new nation. However, they all also knew they were not thirteen equal nation-states in terms of size, population, wealth, economic interests, demography, geography, topography, culture, climate, or class. New England was cold and rocky, the South was warm and largely tillable for agriculture, and the middle states were a mixture farmland, forests, and mountains. State populations varied greatly.
Thus when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, a large majority wanted to be sure to retain the greater degree of political power in the hands of the states. A much smaller minority, who became known as “the Federalists,” wanted the national government to be constitutionally mandated to hold the primary reins of power.
The Federalist Papers were written primarily by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, with John Jay as the author of a few of these historic writings. Although Hamilton was born on the British-owned Caribbean island of Nevis, he emigrated to New York as a teenager. From then on, he always considered himself a complete New Yorker. As such, he represented the sentiments of New England and New Yorkers for a strong central government. However, James Madison was a native Virginian. Madison realized that The United States of America could not long survive under the Articles of Confederation. He believed a major overhaul of the nation’s constitutional structure had to be instituted. Nevertheless, Madison retained some of the traditional Southerner’s suspicion of a central government that might be too powerful. Both his writings in the Federalist Papers and his participation in the Constitutional Convention indicated his ambivalence regarding a truly strong federal government.
Thus the convention became a battleground of powerful states’ rights vs. a powerful federal form of government. Many compromises and concessions had to be made on each side. The result of these political squabbles was a pattern for government that was neither “fish nor fowl,” as we say, but perhaps a “fil” or a “fosh.” Two hundred and thirty years later, strong central government or states’ rights advocates can claim their side won, pointing to selectively chosen Articles and Sections of the Constitution to fortify their cases.
The impetus in calling the Convention itself was a new departure from previous political discussions. Patrick Henry declared that the Constitutional Convention was “a revolution as radical as that which separated us from Great Britain.” And the outcome of this second revolution was as uncertain as that of the first and armed revolution.
James Madison is often called “the father of the Constitution.” Though Madison was a committed federalist, even if less so than Alexander Hamilton, he knew from the beginning that, as he said, “a consolidation of the States into one simple republic” was an impossible goal. Madison hoped instead to achieve what he called “a middle ground.”
Why was it impossible to consolidate into one republic? It was because the smaller and less populated states were adamantly opposed to it. They did not want either to be or to feel swallowed up by the larger, more populace states. In addition, the “agricultural” states (the South) did not want to be dominated by the “industrial” states (the Northeast), although “agriculture” and “industry” did not mean to them then what they mean to us now.
What were other issues dividing the delegates? If they were to create a Congress, what would be the nature of its representation? Perhaps that was the primary sticking point. Optimally, the small states wanted every state to be equally represented. The large states wanted representation based on the size of the population.
The compromise they reached regarding representation in Congress is where we shall, begin the next lecture, called States’ Rights.
John Miller is a writer, author, lecturer, and preacher-for-over-fifty-years who is pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC.