BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

And then, thinking rationally, we do ?

Premise: The American people cannot be trusted to choose a president.
By logic, we should therefore change the constitution so that a person becomes president as a result of ?

A little more realistically - in a state likely getting carried by Democratic presidential candidates in close elections, but under Republican control, Republicans could always pass such a law before the election.

Scenario.
Say in 2020, Republicans again control all branches of the government in North Carolina.
The Democratic candidate loses the popular vote, but barely wins the electoral college, while winning North Carolina.
What would stop the NC legislature from changing state law between the election day and the electoral college meeting and require their electors to split the vote in proportion to the state results, thereby ensuring a Trump reelection? Shame certainly won't stop them.

" The American people are responsible for the leaders we choose."

I see this as fundamental. It is the defining feature of being a democracy. So yes, this was a choice of the American people, and we are responsible. But then what? Hrothgar quotes Mencken: "No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."

We can go that way, but really Mencken is arguing against democracy: We are, as a people, just too dumb for self-government. By which Mencken meant that the people did not agree with Mencken.

A few posts back there was a discussion of the electoral college. Part of the explanation for its existence, and it is one I learned in school, is that the creators of our government thought in this Mencken way. We cannot have people making the choice directly, rather the people should elect, or maybe the state legislatures should choose, presidential electors and then we let them choose wisely who should be president.


This idea has merit, but I think we have decided not to go that route. We have decided that the people will elect the president. The electoral college still exists, perhaps an anachronism (but only perhaps, in my opinion), but we have now decided that people will go to the polls and vote for whom they think should be president. The electors are supposed to do what the people say (there was some recent re-thinking of this but predictably that went nowhere).

If we are going to stick with this idea that the people will elect the president, and I hope that we will, then this decision seems to imply that we simply must put some trust into the collective judgment of our countrymen. And this means that when we do not like the result, we must respectfully ask why our countrymen chose as they did. Writing them off as just too stupid to consider is not an option.

You seem to assume that our countrymen (or at least most of them) are rational people -- that they are not idiots, or devoted racists, or insane. It would be nice to be optimistic enough to believe such a thing, and I confess that prior to this election I would've shared your outlook. However, at some point it's necessary to accept that the data invalidates your hypothesis. For me, this election was that tipping point.

Donald's attitudes to racism, women, torture etc are wrong. In other threads, however, some BBOers seem to justify rendition, torture, etc on pragmatic grounds. We should avoid double-standards about human-rights, especially when principles are under severe test.

awm thinks Trump-voters are immoral, idiotic or insane. Perhaps they just fear nuclear war more than they hate discrimination, etc. Optimistic they might be -- but not necessarily irrational.

The majority of people in the focus groups knew little about the intense social conservatism of people Trump has surrounded himself with. Shown a document listing Vice President–elect Pence’s legislative history on reproductive rights, a 54-year-old man in Phoenix said: “I’m astounded. I guess I’ve been living in a bubble. I wasn’t aware of this. He sounds like a tyrant when it comes to this.”

Clearly, the EC was designed for, of and by well-to-do, property-owning white men. That was their time. The fact that the EC still stands is tribute to its effectiveness as a means of ensuring representative democracy, for which it was invented and to which it has evolved. The majority of the states went for Trump and being wrong in both your personal choice and attitude (not to mention so many other areas) makes no difference, fortunately.

California allows residents to register with no proof of citizenship.

While it's true that undocumented people in California can obtain a driver's license, the state has not passed any laws which also gives them the right to vote. The New Motor Voter Act was passed in an effort to improve voter turnout, and while this law does automatically register citizens to vote when obtaining or renewing a driver's license, this only applies to citizens who are already eligible to vote.

On a personal level, move to another country. For the US, of course, there is little that can be done because any solution would require a super-majority that there's no reason to think our electorate will produce any time soon. Perhaps it's best that the states separate amicably citing "irreconcilable differences"?

For the longest nights of the year, there is no better place to be than on snow-crusted ground, staring up at Montana’s big empty sky. Democrats across rural America must know the feeling, this Christmas week, of looking into a black void and feeling so very alone.

There is a chance for the pulse to quicken — a flash of the northern lights, perhaps, the distant howl of a wolf — in that utter darkness. And there is hope for a party spurned in the wide-open spaces of the country, as well. Meet Steve Bullock, the newly re-elected Democratic governor of Montana.

Donald J. Trump took Montana by 20 percentage points — a rare win for celebrity-infatuated megalomaniacs in a state whose voters can usually smell the type from a hundred miles out. But once again, Democrats won the governor’s office, and did it with votes to spare. Bullock’s Mountain State secret sauce is something national party leaders should sample during their solstice.

A week after the election, Bullock went deer-hunting with his 10-year-old son. This doesn’t mean Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey should start shooting Bambi near the Meadowlands. But the cultural thing is a wash for Bullock. As a Montana native and a graduate of Columbia Law School, he has a foot in both coastal elitism and prairie pragmatism.

“Every morning my wife and I drop our kids off at the same public schools that we went to,” he said. Public, that’s key. As in public land — the great shared turf of the American West. Public health, which the governor expanded in this poor state. Simple stuff, grounded in the nontoxic populism of the past.

So when the Trump administration starts taking away people’s health care, trashing public schools with a church-lady billionaire as education secretary, or colluding with a Congress that wants to offload public land, Montana can offer a resistance playbook.

I asked the governor to give some specific advice to fellow Democrats. “Show up,” he said, noting that Barack Obama was at the Fourth of July parade in the hardscrabble Montana mining town of Butte in 2008. That year, the black community organizer from Chicago came within 2 percentage points of winning a state with one of the smallest black populations in the nation. To Hillary Clinton, on the way to fund-raisers with tech millionaires, Montana was flyover country.

Had she gone to Great Falls or Glendive, she would have seen that struggling white people desire the same things that struggling people in diverse urban areas want. Bullock brought Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion to his state — a literal lifesaver to thousands, forcing Republicans to defend the indefensible. He attacked Republican calls for tax cuts as budget busters and community-killers. And in a state where hate groups still pop up like poisonous mushrooms, he was a champion of Native American sovereignty and gay and lesbian rights.

“It’s not about identity politics,” he said. “It’s about trying to bring everybody up.”

That’s the theme. Everybody. Not just the “emerging demographics,” charted on many a Democratic PowerPoint. Vice President Joe Biden, that son of Scranton, Pa., sounded much like Bullock, but his fellow Dems didn’t listen. Perhaps they’re listening now.

“I mean these are good people, man!” Biden said on CNN this month. “These aren’t racists. These aren’t sexists.” A former Iowa governor, Tom Vilsack, tried to remind Democrats that rural America is about 15 percent of the population — larger than the Hispanic vote.

Democrats shouldn’t need a translator to learn how to speak to these lost constituents. Franklin Roosevelt, a bit of a dandy from Hudson Valley wealth, knew the language. It’s about lifting up those left behind. And taking it directly to those who obstruct progress.

Bullock didn’t abandon people whose paycheck is dependent on coal. Nor did he make false promises about coal roaring back. Even coal plant owners acknowledge that their days are numbered as the free market turns to cheap natural gas to generate power, and as the world turns away from it for self-preservation.

With the Trump presidency, truth will be a commodity more precious than the gold lining his throne in Manhattan. He no sooner won the Electoral College than he started the Trump era with a big lie, saying he’d achieved “a historic electoral landslide.” For the record: His victory ranked near the bottom, 46th out of 58 presidential elections.

But it was historic — no president has ever lost the popular vote by a larger number, almost 3 million votes. And yet half of Republicans believe that he won the popular tally.

As we say goodbye to a dreadful year, one that should be bound up in chains and dropped into the Missouri River, Democrats should not forget that they have the majority on their side on almost every major issue. It’s time they got reacquainted with the millions of other people who make up that majority.

Guest post from Timothy Egan:


Indeed. More than 40 years overdue actually.

The horror show that was the 2016 election will be examined and reexamined for years, and depending on how bad things get, quite likely decades to come. There were, of course, a lot of factors: Cultural change, economic change, racism, liberal complacency after Barack Obama, the FBI manipulating the election, the Russian government manipulating the election, hatred of feminism and so on.

But it’s also important to notice that Donald Trump’s election is the culmination of decades of right-wing media teaching its audience that liberals are subhuman scum, and that hating liberals — whatever their stereotype of a “liberal” looks like — is far more important that minor concerns like preventing war or economic destruction.

Friday morning, the phrase “preparing for Trump” started trending on Twitter. It appears to have started with liberals tweeting out an article by Peter Dreier laying out a 10-step process to resist Trump’s attempts to turn our government into a kleptocracy at best, and a fascist state at worst. But of course the meme was soon taken over by right-wingers eager to exclaim how excited they were about the Trump presidency.

But what’s fascinating is how few of them, had anything positive to say about Trump and his coming presidency, despite their apparent love of the Great Orange Grimace. On the contrary, the contributions of Trump supporters on the thread were almost exclusively negative: They are gleefully certain that he will rain destruction on the heads of the hated liberals.

Trump’s fans on Twitter don’t seem to think that he’ll improve the economy or foreign relations or anything at all, really. In fact, they seem wholly opposed to the concept of improvement. Their worship of the man lies with their belief that he’s an agent of destruction, who will hurt people they have been trained by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to believe are evil.

And then, thinking rationally, we do ?

Overhaul processes used to draw lines for congressional and state legislative districts to make them less political and consider introducing multi-member districts.