Last edited Sat Jul 28, 2018, 05:04 PM - Edit history (2)
In fact, it has been a question worth asking since the beginning. On my view, it has been the ONLY question worth asking since the beginning. Only the vapidness of our access-seeking press stopped it from, in fact, being THE question, and the only question from the start.
Strangely, the one person who seemed to get it was Trump himself. He and he alone knew from the beginning that the question would come to the fore, and come to the fore with trumpets blaring eventually. That is why he dismissed the Mueller probe from the very start. That is why he bragged about his crowd size. That is why he switched gears from 2012 when he predicted that Romney would win the popular vote but lose the electoral college and that this would be an outrage against democracy. Suddenly, he saw the "wisdom" of the electoral college.
The Media, though, was dying to let him off the hook. They wondered aloud again and again why he wouldn't just distinguish between legitimate questions about the Russian attempt to sabotage our democracy from pseudo questions about his own legitimacy, as they themselves were willing and eager to do. Just get on with being president, they urged him. And let us get on with covering you in your role as president. But here Trump had it right and the vapid, access seeking media -- who were at first eager to normalize Trump, so that they could get on with the playing their role as color commentators on the passing political show -- had it completely utterly wrong.
The questions of Russian sabotage and Trump's legitimacy could not possibly be separated, not for long, and not by people wiling to to take a cold hard look at what our dysfunctional political system has become. A people's media would have dug and dug from the beginning. It would have sought to lay bare how ripe for the pickings by malevolent agents both internal and external the electoral college makes us. A little voter suppression here, a successful influence operation there, a little corruption over here, and --presto chango -- the electoral college nullifies the collective vote of the people. And this time all it took was the swing of a mere 70,000 votes ... a rounding error ... out of the 130 or so million that were cast. And all this In the name ... of what? Only God, if he exists, now knows.
Once upon a time, the Founding Fathers knew. And knew well. In the name of enticing the reluctant South, with its minimal suffrage and its peculiar institution of slavery, to join the new Union and to set aside its inordinate fear that the political weight of the North within that new Union might, with a different electoral scheme, force the suffrage-stingy, slave rich South to abandon its beloved institution. But once the bloody war that that bargain made all but inevitable finally came, and slavery was finally abolished, and there was nothing left of the peculiar institution to preserve, what was the enduring point of the electoral college? To guard the nation against the will of the people, considered as self-governing corporate body, and to keep the choice of the presidency in the hands of a narrow cabal of wise electors? But by that time the narrow cabal had long been exposed as a mere hope and wish of the founders, a reality that was never to be. It had long been replaced by a merely mechanical vote weighting mechanism, devoid of even the pretense of being a deliberative body that would act on behalf of the nation and with greater wisdom than the people themselves could possibly muster.
That after two highly problematic elections, one decided by a usurping Supreme Court, in the name of "equal protection," one decided by an archaic dysfunctional mechanism that has no present day justification, the so-called American people have not taken to the streets en mass to demand better, but instead servilely and hopefully wait in an infantilized stupor for Mueller or perhaps the slumbering Congress to save them from this nightmare shows how devoid of true political agency we have become.
But this too was part of the founder's design all along. It never ceases to amaze me how a nation born of revolution managed to give birth to a constitution that so disempowered the very people in whose name that revolution was supposedly fought and won.
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