The Electoral College Should Block Trump, Not Enable Him

Peter Beinart, in the Atlantic, explains how the Founders devised the Electoral College to prevent demagogues like Trump from reaching power, not to enable them to.

"As Michael Signer explains, the framers were particularly afraid of the people choosing a demagogue. The electors, Hamilton believed, would prevent someone with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” from becoming president. And they would combat “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” They would prevent America’s adversaries from meddling in its elections. The founders created the Electoral College, in other words, in part to prevent the election of someone like Donald Trump.”

David Kaiser says much the same thing in TIME.

From Federalist 68, the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton:

"It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice... It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief.”

Preventing a dangerous demagogue and liar and tax dodger and draft evader and con man and bigot like Donald Trump from seizing power is exactly why the Electoral College was invented. Trump’s whole life has been one of mischief. The Founders would be appalled.

Paul Abrams at Huffington Post cites the Russian spy agency's interference in this election as reason enough to use the Electoral College to block Trump––not to use it as a device to put him in the White House. After all, Hillary Clinton earned 1.7 million more votes than Trump did.

The Christian Science Monitor proposes some reforms to the Electoral College.

If the Russian interference isn't enough there is this: For 50 years the GOP’s game plan has included vigorous voter suppression.

ThinkProgress calls the Republican strategy a case study in voter suppression

How do we know the suppression and intimidation of voters has been central to the GOP playbook all along? They've boasted about it. They crow about each law they pass to disenfranchise voters. They boast about how it will elect Republicans if they can keep people from voting. This year's decline in voter turnout was the Republican Party's doing.

It's worth sharing this famous speech excerpt from the father of the modern right wing Republican Party, superchristian demagogue Paul Weyrich. Here, Paul Weyrich cheerfully derides Good Government. Over the past decades since then the Republican Party has done its damnedest to destroy Good Government and replace it with bad.

Farm Politics

A good story from NPR. (Does NPR do any other kind?)

This quote seems to catch the gist of it: "According to the Environmental Working Group's crunch of USDA numbers, between 1995 and 2010, 10 percent of farmers who received subsidies took home three-quarters of farm subsidy dollars. About 62 percent of American farmers don't receive any subsidies at all, according to 2007 data."

When FDR created the idea of farm subsidies it was to keep poor farmers on their farms during years of low commodity prices, and to help stabilize the prices of those commodities. It worked. Since then, though, farms have consolidated into immense businesses. Agri-business owns farmland. Farming has gone corporate, and the corporate side of farming is taking most of the subsidies. To borrow a farm analogy, the larger pigs have a way of shouldering the smaller ones away from the trough. Wrong? Maybe not, but we should know what is going on. There are good reasons for having small farms, family farms, just as there are good reasons for having small towns. But is modern farm legislation helping either?

Handling a Manic-Depressive Economy

For half a century it was the successful policy of the U.S. government to moderate the moods of the economy, mostly to keep the economy from dropping into a depression, but also to keep it from overheating. To act as a thermostat. This required government to modulate markets, to soften the hardship and deprivation at the low end of the cycle and rein in the excess reward at the upper end––something it's much harder to do because the rich investor class has thousands of lobbyists working to keep the upper end from any moderation however rational. When there is excess pressure in one direction it's necessary to pull in the opposite direction. This is what keeps boats afloat and cars on the road.

COUNTERCYCLICAL. Try Googling that word and you don't come up with much. A few arcane economic articles available in PDF. One of the most important jobs of government is to counter the irregularities of the economy. Prior to the regulations inaugurated in the early 20th century the U.S. economy had catastrophic nationwide bank panics every few years. These panics ruined millions of people and threw millions more out of work, broke up families, bankrupted thousands of farms and businesses, saw towns dry up and disappear, and precipitated waves of suicide and child abandonment.

The veers and spikes of the economy allowed a few speculators to become enormously wealthy. Bubbles inflated and popped leaving millions in the hands of a few clever people. Sometimes the speculators precipitated the bubbles and the panics in order to profit from them. Regulation put an end to the worst predatory market behaviors and ushered in the long period of broad prosperity that characterized the best half century in American history. It was a bit boring, perhaps, but homeowners and families don't benefit from financial rollercoasters. The dismantling of those regulations in the years after Reagan took away or weakened the countercyclical tools of the federal government and ushered in poorer labor markets, more fluctuations, more bubbles, more Wall Street misbehavior and led to the near collapse of 2008-2009. If the government had a stronger hand we'd be recovering more broadly now, but Reaganism has concentrated the recovery at the top. We have a topheavy poorly balanced economy that is more unstable and less seaworthy.

Unregulated economies sometimes behave like those overloaded ferries that occasionally capsize in the straits of southeast Asia. When they become overweighted on one side, everyone rushes to the opposite side and the craft capsizes. In moments of imbalance the craft needs a counterbalance to remain afloat. In the economic context this is the job of government. To put weight on the side that everyone is rushing away from. To spend money when everyone is afraid to. To spend money in areas that are slack, on necessary infrastructure that has been neglected––even when there is a shortage of revenue to do so. That is a function only government can fulfill, because government works over longer spans of time and across broader areas. Government thinks in terms of economic climate patterns rather than the weather of the moment. Across the United States one year's drought will visit another region next year. Knitting smaller regional markets and different sectors together helps keep the broad economy afloat.

Government's job is to moderate the spikes and the depressions, to balance the interests of different sectors, and it's foolish to take that capability away. There is a name for that do-nothing philosophy. Herbert Hooverism. Government isn't the enemy in an economic crisis. As was seen in the worst weeks of the crisis, government is essential, and never more essential than when free markets fail. We need a better vocabulary for explaining this. A better set of descriptive models. The government is a sure hand on the steering wheel, a thermostat to keep the house livable summer and winter. The government is also fire and police and public health departments when things go wrong. But this countercyclical role of government, this balancing mechanism, is key and little discussed. It needs to be part of the public conversation. When no one is spending is the most important time for government to keep money flowing in the economy. Government is the only entity that can and will work in opposition to the frightened impulses that have us paralyzed. Countercyclical is a cumbersome word. Maybe we need a better one.

We Could Afford To Be More Scandinavian

Some of our parents think very highly of their Scandinavian ancestors and friends. They go there when they can and like to show us their photos afterwards. They admire all things Norwegian/Danish/Swedish, the neatness of the landscape, how well kept everything looks, the good repair of the infrastructure, the modesty and decorum of the people, also of course the blonde hair and the cheekbones. We sometimes hear them wishing America could be more like the old country.

There are a number of ways we could be more like Scandinavia, and it would make us a better society and a fairer one. Raise taxes on the very rich, for instance. Scandinavia is full of rich people who live very very well, who pay very high taxes on the upper end of their incomes and in this way help the less fortunate, less successful, the less healthy, take care of themselves. These rich Scandinavians haven't moved away in droves. They haven't shut their businesses and moved to Mexico or Malaysia or some other low tax/low wage country. Employment is robust (Norwegian friends of ours have noted that a lot of Swedes now work in Norway where there are more jobs than people), national debt is low compared to the U.S., contentedness is high, the sense of economic freedom is equal to ours.

And the Scandinavian economy has functioned just as well as our own, possibly better during this economic crisis. In Scandinavia the basic security of the population hasn't made them too afraid to buy goods and services they need.

Anyway, an excellent analysis can be found at Lane Kenworthy's blog. Worth reading and sharing with your Scandinophile friends and relatives. Kenworthy did his comparisons with Denmark and Sweden. Norway being a very rich oil exporting nation makes the comparison less apt; oil wealth subsidizes a lot more there. We could learn a lot from Scandinavia. How to be a better and fairer, a more efficient society. It's actually wasteful to throw too much money at people who already have too much.