RE: Petition to abolish the Electoral College
October 15, 2020 at 11:33 am
(This post was last modified: October 15, 2020 at 11:40 am by The Grand Nudger.)
I did mention hat I'm not convinced it was well intentioned - but being undemocratic in this sense is a nebulous claim. It would be just as undemocratic if the ec was invented to prevent the majority from asserting the validity of slavery, or if a small group of people decided that they didn't give a shit that the majority were in favor of slavery - which, fact check....we did exactly that once upon a time.
Being democratic is not interchangeable with being a good idea, or the right idea. The inherent weakness of democracy is that it's only as good as it's people...and whatever the ec (or any other lever like it) may have been created to do, it's an effective means by which we can reject and deny the worst impulses of the democratic body.
I get that, when The People are better (or at least we can convince ourselves that they seem better) than our current government, it seems like maybe we should do away with shit like this - but it should be just as easy to conceive of a time and of a people who do not live up to the premise of their governments. Perhaps the mistake, in the current moment, is recognizing that the government sucks, but not realizing that the majority of people like the way that it sucks and keep voting for it to keep sucking in precisely this way. We've got the worst of both worlds, and so we lash out and talk about breaking something that isn't broken, something that could help us fix the thing that is. We mistakenly declare that the ec is broken because it stymies what we believe to be the democratic mandate not recognizing that this is exactly what it was designed to do, and what it's good at doing - for better or for worse.
Being democratic is not interchangeable with being a good idea, or the right idea. The inherent weakness of democracy is that it's only as good as it's people...and whatever the ec (or any other lever like it) may have been created to do, it's an effective means by which we can reject and deny the worst impulses of the democratic body.
I get that, when The People are better (or at least we can convince ourselves that they seem better) than our current government, it seems like maybe we should do away with shit like this - but it should be just as easy to conceive of a time and of a people who do not live up to the premise of their governments. Perhaps the mistake, in the current moment, is recognizing that the government sucks, but not realizing that the majority of people like the way that it sucks and keep voting for it to keep sucking in precisely this way. We've got the worst of both worlds, and so we lash out and talk about breaking something that isn't broken, something that could help us fix the thing that is. We mistakenly declare that the ec is broken because it stymies what we believe to be the democratic mandate not recognizing that this is exactly what it was designed to do, and what it's good at doing - for better or for worse.
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