However Americans just voted, they can be in absolutely no doubt that the 2024 election was the most important ever. That, after all, is what both candidates have ceaselessly been telling them. For Kamala Harris, this is “one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime”. Donald Trump would surely not disagree. “She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist,” he’s warned about his Democratic opponent. “We must stop her country-destroying liberal agenda once and for all.”
Of course, these frantic proclamations make sense electorally: what better way of rallying the troops than monstering the enemy? Nor are they entirely wrong — whatever your politics, it’s clear that Harris and Trump represent, from economics to citizenship, two vastly different visions of the nation. Yet whatever happens over the next few days, I’d nonetheless argue that these scrambling attempts to save Americans from themselves are missing the point. For amid the ceaseless howls about guns or abortion, what everyone ignores is that our very Constitution is rotting at the roots. Until we pull it out, and start again, our democracy will continue to wither.
Until recently, Americans on both sides of the aisle wallowed in US exceptionalism, the idea that we represented the greatest democracy in the history of the world. Like most national myths, that inevitably involved some fudging. Yes, American democracy excluded a lot of people in the early days. But so did every other representative political system. Sure, America had seen its fair share of demagogues, from Huey Long to Dubya. But in the immortal words of Martin Luther King, this was also the country where the right to protest was sacred.
Seen from this angle, all that hand-wringing about our democratic discontent can feel like an aberration — or even shamefully un-American. The irony here is that these fears ignore the anti-democratic strain that’s thrived in our politics since the founding. As far back as 1776, after all, John Adams argued against expanding the franchise in his native Massachusetts, warning that it would eventually “prostrate” all ranks to a single level. Heaven forbid, Adams added for good measure, that children or even women should get the chance to vote.
Nor was he alone. In Federalist 10, for instance, James Madison rejected a “pure democracy” — by which he meant direct rule by citizens, claiming that such societies become “spectacles of turbulence and contention”. Like Adams, moreover, Madison expressed particular reservations about the dangers comprehensive democracy could pose to property. “Those who hold and those who are without property,” he says, “have ever formed distinct interests in society.” Even Thomas Jefferson, arguably the most democratic of the Founding Fathers, remained confident that there was a “natural aristocracy” which the best kind of government selected for high office.
These ideas endured long after the early republic of frock coats and periwigs vanished into history. From the mid-1820s, for instance, Vice President John C. Calhoun worried that an abolitionist populous North might one day wield excessive political power over the slaveholding South. And though these fears were clearly partly motivated by grubby sociopolitical realities — a South Carolinian, Calhoun owned some 50 slaves himself — he equally couched his concerns in the high-minded constitutional principle. In his A Disquisition on Government, for instance, he warned against the dangers of an “absolute democracy” which holds that a mere “numerical majority” should rule. This, in turn, would facilitate an egalitarian push, whereby the majority would attempt to “force the front rank back to the rear, or attempt to push forward the rear into line with the front” through the “interposition of government”.
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SubscribeThe US system of government has its flaws, but so do most democracies. In much of Europe and Canada parties that receive less than 40% or even 30% of the popular vote coalitions with other parties to become the government. This way the governing party will have been against the choice of some 2/3 of the electorate.
By the same token though in PR at least a majority voted for at least one of the parties in government. Other countries also tend to have many more parties to choose from which splits the vote somewhat, you’ll rarely get any party winning much more than a third of the vote
The electoral system does seem a stupid way of counting votes.
If a state currently gets 20 electoral votes why not simply divide that State into 20 similarly populated areas (like the UK seats) and give each a vote, rather than giving all 20 to a party despite it possibly only winning 10 or 11 areas?