Democracy in the Rearview
OUR FOUNDING FATHERS REJECTED DEMOCRACY because they believed it would lead to the election of populist leaders and, by extension, mob rule. They implied that democracy was a less virulent form of anarchy, yet something to be avoided like the plague.
In 1755, during a dispute between Benjamin Franklin, who was serving in the Pennsylvania Assembly at the time, and Governor Robert Morris, they traded insults accusing each other of attempting to make Pennsylvania into a democracy. In response to Governor Robert Morris casting blame on the Assembly, Franklin rejoined with,
“We are not so absurd as to design a democracy, of which the governor is pleased to accuse us. Such a conduct in a Governor appears to us the most likely thing in the world to make people incline to a Democracy, who would otherwise never think of it.”
Consequently, the founders built legal and institutional safeguards into the Constitution to ensure that their worst fears about democracy would never be realized. They threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, rejecting democratic principles in favor of representative rule, a key principle of republicanism. Two primary examples of this are the Senate and the Electoral College.
Senators are elected at-large, two per state. They are not representatives of the people like members of the House of Representatives; they are representatives of the states, or more accurately, the states’ legislatures. Before 1913, with the passage and ratification of the 17th Amendment, Senators were elected by state legislators. The Electoral College was designed as a political firewall against the election of a populist president. The electors are not representatives of the people; they are representatives appointed by state legislators. Historically, they have cast their electoral votes for the winner of the state’s popular vote for president. However, they are empowered to cast their votes for alternates if they choose. They are not bound by law to cast their votes for the popular vote winner.
In modern presidential election history, only two candidates have lost the popular vote but won the presidency by an electoral majority. George Bush was the first in 2000, when the Supreme Court stopped a recount of the popular vote in Florida that would have given Al Gore the presidency. Bush was a product of the Bush American political dynasty and not considered a populist. The other was Donald Trump, who won an electoral majority but lost the popular vote to Hilary Clinton in 2016. Clinton was a long-time operative in American politics. Donald Trump is the personification of a populist, playing on people’s fears and emotions to win elections. At the time of his election, he was a political outsider.
It has taken our country 238 years to recognize that the republican principles and structures embodied in our Constitution do not prevent the election of a populist demagogue who also exhibits many fascist traits. Given the Herculean task of amending the Constitution, it may take far longer to fix it. In the meantime, Donald Trump will continue to dismantle and attempt to control our election system in his favor. And democracy, as a governing alternative, will grow even smaller in the rearview mirror of the American experiment.
If there are corrective measures to prevent further erosion of our constitutional ideals, who has the courage to show us what they are, explain what role the people can play in implementing them, and lead us through this national identity crisis? If America was ever a “beacon on the hill,” we owe it to the world to rekindle it.
