The US system is fitting
This letter is in response to Jerome Keating, writing on democracy in Taiwan and the US (“US can learn a lot from Taiwan,” Nov. 23, page 8). I do not at heart disagree with his idea of the US adopting a popular vote for the election of the US president. Taiwan, itself an honored democracy, employs this approach.
There have been a number of US presidential elections when the winner did not win the popular vote. This has troubled many observers. The most recent such example, concerning US president-elect Donald Trump, has left a lot of people squirming in discomfort.
Why not use the popular vote in the US? After all, we us it to elect virtually all other officials. The US Electoral College might be starting to look archaic, and lots of people, Keating included, are proposing scrapping the system.
However, there is one thing standing in our way, and a very big obstruction it is: The Federalist Papers. Written by John Jay, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton — very smart men — the work has attained a status of the most important political writings in US history. And in them, the sometimes-defamed Electoral College was framed and proposed and then adopted.
I do not think these men, or a lot of other onlookers, would agree that what they proposed would somehow “fall short” in modern US politics. The Electoral College made its way into the US constitution after all.
Yes the US has changed, in many ways dramatically, and this could indicate that change is necessary. No doubt the country is a whole lot bigger than it was in the days of the founding fathers, but Madison foresaw this, and in the Federalist No. 10, he wrote of “extensive republics,” and saw them as “most favorable to the election of the proper guardians of the public weal.”
A “greater number of citizens” in large republics had many advantages, such as that it would be “more difficult for unworthy candidates” to take office, and his dreaded factions would have more difficulty getting off the ground.
As well, no doubt the founding fathers in general did not fully approve of full democracy, bedeviled by those factions and the “tyranny of the majority.”
Hamilton once spoke of “despotism” within “the extremes of democracy.” I suspect they, the Federalist writers, would feel the same way today and with the majority in the US now so much larger, it is probably yet more dangerous.
In Federalist No. 10, Madison wrote that “the public good” would be “disregarded” if decided “by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”
Many a full democracy had been “spectacles of turbulence and contention,” Madison added, and doomed to short lives and violent deaths.
An “intermediate body of electors” would preserve “the sense of the people,” avoid “tumult and disorder” and ensure that a president is chosen “by men most capable” “judicious” and “proper” Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 68.
The end result, he continued, would be that the office of the US president “will seldom fall to the lot any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”
We might have globalization, and yes, we have Facebook and the like (though many are saying such platforms are far more deleterious to democracy than the US Electoral College).
However, the writers of The Federalist Papers were not somehow disconnected from reality (I would not be surprised if these men saw something like globalization in their world) and their writings are recognized to this day as classics of political philosophy, discerning examinations of balloting and the polity, matched by few others.
It is for exactly these reasons that the Electoral College, troubled though it might be at times, is a fitting and well-designed system for the election of the US president.
David Russell Pendery
Taipei
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