Evident defects of experience, judgment and character
Martin Wolf on democrats, demagogues and despots:
There exists no such thing as “the people”; this is an imaginary entity. There are merely citizens whose choices not only may, but surely will, change. While a way must be found to aggregate those views, it will always be defective. Ultimately, democracy, or a democratic republic, provides a way for people with different views and even cultures to live side by side in reasonable harmony.
Yet institutions matter, too, because they set the rules of the game. Institutions may also fail. The US electoral college has failed doubly. Its selection of Mr Trump neither accords with the votes cast in the election nor reflects judgment of the candidate’s merits, as desired by Alexander Hamilton. This founding father argued that the college would both guard against “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils” and ensure “the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications”. The charges of Russian hacking and Mr Trump’s evident defects of experience, judgment and character show that the college has not proved the bulwark Mr Hamilton hoped for. It is up to other institutions — notably, Congress, courts and media — and the citizens at large now to do so.
It’s the “in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications” part that keeps surprising me afresh every morning. It surprised me when Reagan was elected and when Bush was – and the surprise now is so profound that it just never goes away. How was this possible?
Demagogues are the Achilles heel of democracy. There is even is a standard demagogic playbook. Demagogues, whether of left or right, present themselves as representatives of the common people against elites and unworthy outsiders; make a visceral connection with followers as charismatic leaders; manipulate that connection for their own advancement, frequently by lying egregiously; and threaten established rules of conduct and constraining institutions as enemies of the popular will that they embody. Mr Trump is almost a textbook demagogue.
Well, he grew up with the example of Hitler to study and absorb.
Might this be the path some of the most important western democracies are now on — above all the US, standard bearer of democracy in the 20th century? The answer is yes. It could happen even there. The core institutions of democracy do not protect themselves. They are protected by people who understand and cherish the values they embody.
And here, right now, those people are outnumbered by the other kind. I have no optimistic remarks to offer.
“This founding father argued that the college would both guard against “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils” and ensure “the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications”.
Really? We can read anything we like into this. Wasn’t the Electoral college designed to provide extra electoral weight to those states with large slave populations? So an inherently undemocratic institution is presented as guarding the US from foreign intervention and preventing the ascendency of demagogues. Yeah sure.
“The core institutions of democracy do not protect themselves. They are protected by people who understand and cherish the values they embody.”
I’d agree with Wolf on this. Without political will, constitutions and the democratic institutions they embody are meaningless. If Americans really value democracy they should abolish the Electoral College.
It biases results away from popular vote results in two basic ways: (1) toward swing states, the ones that cannot be more or less counted on to have a predictable majority in favor of one party’s candidate or the other, due to the winner-take-all mechanic, and (2) toward states with relatively low populations on a per-state basis, since any state gets two Senators and the EC gives a state votes based on Senators plus Representatives from there.
The old slave states, nowadays, are for the most part not swing states – they’re the solid Republican bloc – and going back, I don’t believe they have often been particularly hard to call in terms of party loyalty. (Which party they tend to be behind has changed, of course, particularly after the Democrats got associated with civil rights in the 1960’s – but they tend more to be solidly on one side of the fence or the other historically, with switches being relatively fast historically.)
Counting slaves as 60% of a white person for representation would give those states even less representation in the House of Representatives and thus the EC than they would otherwise, so that would be an early feature of the Constitution and EC that would count against the slave states as favored by it.
So – were they ever below-average in population as states? Particularly early on, and with that 40% “penalty” for their slave population? I don’t know, I’d have to do more research into early censuses that I’d care to right now. Best guess – no. It’s more that the EC was crafted to get small states (regardless of their slavery stance) on board with the Constitution.
As time went on, mind you, and new states were admitted, how to slice them up certainly encouraged slave states to favor small numbers of free states and larger numbers of slave ones – however the population counts would go. And those without allegiance to slavery had every reason to favor the opposite approach. What we got in the early 1800’s was the result of that clash of priorities, until it got more heated than our political system could handle in the 1860’s.
All that said – I think Hamilton was trying to squint and cross his fingers and hope the twisted abomination that political compromise foisted on the Founders with the Senate and Electoral College could still somehow do good work, and wrote about it that way to try to nudge it in that direction. It’d’ve been nice if it could’ve worked, but you’re quite right, it hasn’t and needs to be put out of our misery.
“How was this possible?”
I find myself obsessing over this question, much to the detriment of my mood, health, etc. In particular, I don’t really see how Trump could “make a visceral connection with followers as [a] charismatic leader”. “Visceral” maybe, but where is this charisma? Doesn’t this imply charm, warmth, or some other attractive quality?
Frank Bruni wrote an NYT editorial back in January titled “Obnoxiousness Is The New Charisma”, discussing the puzzling appeal of both Trump & Ted Cruz:
“They market name-calling as truth-telling, pettiness as boldness, vanity as conviction.”
In the midst of all the discussions about what Hillary did “wrong”, Russian interference, the Comey factor, the misguidedness of third party voters, and the influence of fake news, I am still at a complete loss to explain the appeal of this hollow, vain, mean, corrupt, and thoroughly stupid man. These defects are of no consequence because he’s on our team? He’s famous, and that’s enough? This is what we (pause for nausea) actually want?
It’s obvious to me that his “qualities” will soon lead to his universal rejection, just as it was obvious to me that he was thoroughly unqualified and could not be elected. I also thought I knew what “obvious” meant. I guess I live in a “bubble”.
I know. Same here. He seems so utterly repellent in every way I can think of…and yet many people think he’s just awesome.
The gestures alone should be enough. Those hideous, stunted gestures.
The gestures. Yes. Perhaps I sell him short because I can’t watch/listen once he starts to spasm. If he then proceeds to a sober discussion of public policy, feel free to dismiss me for my liberal myopia.
An interesting dissection of his gestures:
http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37088990
So, it’s a New York thing, in part. But I wonder… Is this something that he actually (consciously) cultivated, or did he do a random walk through his life experiences and arrive at this place where these particular gestures yield these particular responses and he gets a positive feedback which reinforces the behaviors, etc, etc? I find it hard to credit him for the cleverness of doing this deliberately – I really believe that he has duped himself at the same time as he has duped the minority of US voters.
I don’t know, but I don’t agree with the clip that he’s “got this nailed” – I think the gestures are clumsy and repetitive and terribly impoverished. The pinch, especially, makes me want to SCREAM.
Jeff Engel
Thanks, very informative.
Ophelia – I agree with you, but it’s clear that his jerky (double meaning alert!) gesticulations and vocal excretions have resonated with a significant population. I had the same reaction as you did to the elections of Reagan and Bush (particularly the second time, because WTF?): what is the appeal of these people? How is Reagan perceived as some sort of ideal, with his cloying folksiness and genial disregard for suffering? My mistake was that in each case, I convinced myself that we had reached the bottom, and we could not possibly repeat (or amplify) our mistakes. Clinton & Obama were not perfect, but that’s really a different standard, no? If we extrapolate from Reagan to Bush to Trump… what next? I’m gonna go with an inbred, rabid wolverine, but that is probably optimistic (and unfair to inbred, rabid wolverines).
Jeff – It was always my understanding that the 60% person for the slaves was intended to increase the south’s strength, because slaves weren’t actually considered people at all by many people at that time. And then, of course, once they became full citizens, it would increase their representation to have them counted as a full person, which they did, but often didn’t allow them to vote, so….
Overall, the south appeared to dominate our election cycle for a long time. It was said that you couldn’t win the presidency if you lost the south – until Obama did just that.
Helicam #3
I think the people who respond to him like that he is outspoken and unfiltered, and they like that because they mistake it for genuineness.
A lot of people have found him appealing for decades. I remember a liberal cousin of mine, back in the early 1990s, thought he was awesome and bought his board game (yes, Trump had a board game.)
‘what is the appeal of these people?’
That reminded me of the introduction to George Lakoff’s book, where he writes that he was watching Dan Quayle giving a speech–as far as he could tell it entirely consisted of gibberish and platitudes, but the crowd was going wild; he realised he had no idea what kind of communication these people were receiving.
Thinking about this, I’m wondering (based on Lakoff’s ideas) if Trump represents a father. I can kind of see it, now that I’m considering the idea; in some ways he could even represent my father, in my eyes–large, clumsy, unattractive, forced genial, anti-‘culture’ and anti-intellectual, happy to belligerently assert retrograde ideas with inappropriate and cruel vocabulary (I’m being unfair to my father here–he was a highly educated man responsible for groundbreaking work that you would all have heard of, and almost always keen to encourage his children to question and grow, as well as occasionally providing surprising insights, but I can justify the (to us) unpleasant image I’m presenting here, that he often chose to present to others).
And also…a father who protects his children and ensures their success.
It was never a very good idea in the first place in my view, as if we take the loftily stated purpose of the thing as granted, it remains that it provides an avenue for a select few to overturn the popular vote. But in practice it is even worse, as the elector vote distribution by state shows clear bias against the more densely populated states, effectively handing the more rural areas greater weight in deciding elections.
And so while it may not have been designed as such, this hands a clear conservative slant to the Electoral College. A question for those more knowledgeable about American elections than me: how many times has the Electoral College overturned the popular vote to 1) a conservative candidate, vs. 2) to a liberal? The only ones I know of have been the former.
The winner-take-all system may end generating more bias. That’s not a matter of Constitutional design though – states decide for themselves how to distribute their EC votes. But when other states are winner-take-all, you handicap your own weight in the system if you divvy up your votes by some proportionate system.
We’ve had four elections with decently known popular vote totals in which the EC victor was not the popular vote victor – 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016 – and one, 1824, where there wasn’t even an EC majority winner and it got turfed to the House of Representatives.
In 1824, Andrew Jackson had the highest popular vote total and John Quincy Adams won the election through the House. It’s hard for me at least to try to map that difference onto a modern left-right axis. Jackson had more rural support, anyway, versus Adams’ urban/manufacturing support.
1876, Samuel Tilden wins the popular vote, Rutherford B. Hayes wins the election. The EC distribution was murky. Hayes got the win as a compromise in which Tilden’s Democrats got Reconstruction ended, leading to Democratic domination of the South til the civil rights era switch. Soooo… call it a win for conservative policy at least.
1888, Grover Cleveland wins the popular vote, Benjamin Harrison wins the EC. Tariff policy was the biggest issue – again, it’s tricky to map that onto a left-right axis, but Harrison was favored among rural voters and Cleveland among urban ones by it.
2000, Gore wins popular vote, Bush wins… the Supreme Court, really. Definitely the conservative candidate winning there.
2016, Clinton wins popular vote, Trump wins EC, conservative candidate wins EC there too.
I’ve had a few more thoughts on ‘the father’–when we were kids, our dads knew everything and could do anything. This ‘I’m the best, only I know, I’m smarter than anyone’ boasting is pathological for ‘normal adult’, but is consistent with a kid’s-eye view of ‘my dad’. Of course not everyone grows up with the same experience of ‘the father’, but I suspect the mindset I’m describing here and above is not uncommon in America, particularly traditional ‘heartland’ America, and isn’t necessarily negated (possibly the opposite) by having a remote or absent father. You may be half-consciously aware that it’s Mom who keeps the family together, with her labour and maybe her paycheck, but no one, least of all Mom, would dream of challenging or questioning Dad’s position as the ruler of the family, the best person ever, the knower of everything.
The forced recounts gave a glimpse of just how dishonest the Presidential election process is. Apparently both parties are doing their best to cheat, why else would they both be so reluctant to have people take a close look at the actual ballots. The two times lately that the popular vote and the EC vote did not line up were marked by especially blatant voter suppression. In the other ‘normal’ elections just using the popular vote would have given the same result as the EC system. In this last election we saw that EC Electors are under too much political pressure to ensure “the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications”.