During the recent travails our nation has gone through in a debacle of an attempt to elect a president, there has been a surge of calls for the abolition of the Electoral College, citing a lack of fair and democratic machinery to fill the highest office in the land. This is just one more symptom of the blind rush to make America act like a pure democracy. But America is not a democracy, and citizens should start remembering that.
It is a common notion nowadays that this country is a democracy and that all accompanying values are at the heart of our political machinations, though that is not our common beginning at all. Everyone knows the nation’s founders were distrustful of big government, but it should be noted that some were equally distrustful of the masses. Decisions on policies and personnel should not be made directly by a relatively uninformed public, many founders effectively reasoned.
Such a wariness is how we arrived at representative democracy. Population dictates our representation in the house of representatives, but each state received an equal number of senators so that states could retain some decision-making power of their own. Thus, when electoral votes are tabulated for each state, it equals the total number of representatives and senators, so citizens from large states are actually underrepresented compared to their smaller state neighbors and total equality is lost.
Proponents of direct elections, the very epitome of pure democracy, argue that each voice should be counted equally. This notion is entirely frightening because it implies that every voice is equally well-informed and wise. Anyone examining the large audience for “The Tom Green Show” knows that not all citizens have the same intellectual capacity.
If you need proof that the public’s wisdom doesn’t always trump that of political powerbrokers, examine several presidents in American history. Honest Abe Lincoln was approved by a group of men in a smoky back-room deal and became one of our most respected leaders, taking the country to civil war and back whilst freeing the slaves. On the other hand, recent popular elections have tapped Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter as leader of the free world. Now try to assert the public’s great wisdom.
It is not all that hard to deduce why there has been this push toward democracy. It was important to give disillusioned Americans the notion that they still had a voice in their government, and during the civil rights movement it was important to know that every voice had equal value, regardless of race.
One particularly interesting note on this push for a more perfect democracy is that one of the movement’s greatest proponents, a liberal-leaning media, creates an interesting paradox. On the one hand they want high voter participation, theoretically the shining moment of a democracy, but are for the quieting of political discourse via campaign finance reform that severely limits the voice of third parties to the system. In the media’s perfect world, elections would consist of high turnout and low voter information.
The answer to all America’s problems are not solved through a deep and abiding trust of the average man. We elect representatives to use their knowledge and experience for the common good. The Electoral College is just one aspect of that greater machinery that should not be tampered with simply to feed an appetite for democracy borne of misunderstood civic history.