gracchusdixit

In less than 24 hours, the real 2016 presidential election will take place.  Not the mythical election in which the American people supposedly get to decide who their next president will be—but the real election in which an arcane and antiquated institution called the “electoral college” makes the actual decision.  When the 538 members of the “electoral college” gather in their separate states tomorrow to cast their ballots, they will, in all likelihood, elect Donald J. Trump, defying, for the second time in 16 years, the will of a majority of the American people.  In this case, that  majority will amount to almost three million votes—an historical record.  When this occurs (assuming that it does), it will be the culminating failure of a political institution that became obsolete almost on the day it was born and has now become completely moribund.

The principal architect of the electoral college was Alexander Hamilton.  Its purpose was two-fold:

(1) To entice the less populous slave states to join the union by giving them a disproportionate influence over the selection of the president;

(2) To check the impulses of pure democracy on the grounds that “the people” might too easily be persuaded to elect a tyrannical demagogue.

Writing under the pseudonym Publius (the Founders were deeply influenced by the history of the Roman Republic), Hamilton explained his reasoning in the Federalist Papers, a series of 85 essays he co-authored with James Madison and John Jay.  Their purpose was to advocate for the adoption of the Constitution of 1787, which, at the time, was by no means a sure thing. There were those—they called themselves the Anti-Federalists—who wanted a more openly democratic constitution, untrammeled by constraints like the electoral college.  To combat their arguments, Hamilton warned against a particular kind of presidential candidate:

Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.

Reading these words more than two centuries after Hamilton wrote them is akin to reading the declamation of an Old Testament prophet.  It is hard to imagine a more accurate and evocative description of Donald Trump’s particular awfulness than words “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.”

The electoral college envisioned by Hamilton was to be a body of men (it was only men in those days) who had sufficient “information and discernment” to prevent the election of just such a disreputable character—a candidate who was “not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

More specifically, Hamilton warned against the potential for “foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”  The prescience of this particular warning is stunning. In Donald Trump, we now have a president-elect who appears to welcome the idea of foreign powers—or at least one foreign power, namely Vladimir Putin’s Russia—gaining an “improper ascendant in our councils.”

The ultimate and tragic irony in all this is that the institution Hamilton designed to deny the presidency to a candidate precisely like Trump is now about to anoint him.  That is because Hamilton’s vision of the electoral college—a vision that in hindsight seems hopelessly naïve—went off the rails almost immediately.

In little more than a decade after the Constitution was adopted and ratified, the electoral college had become the plaything of the political partisanship the Founders abhorred.  Even Hamilton himself saw the mistake and the folly.  By then, however, it was too late.  He and his colleagues had given political parties and the individual states an instrument to defy the national popular will, all in the name of  “detachment” and “virtue.”  As wise as the Founders in so many ways were, in this particular way, they proved to be astonishingly foolish.  In striving to prevent an authoritarian demagogue from becoming the President of the United States, they devised an institution that, perversely, has paved the way for just such a result.

The final proof of their folly will almost certainly come tomorrow, when the electoral college votes to elect Donald J. Trump.  For this, we will have Hamilton and other, like-minded Founders to thank.  The electoral college they devised is not merely the political equivalent of a vestigial and useless biological organ, like the appendix or the prostate.  It is a danger to the body politic.  If, when tomorrow comes, the electoral college refuses to fulfill its role, if it refuses to reject a candidate who is “not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications,” it will itself—like other vestigial and useless organs—deserve to be cut out and incinerated.