Hi.
So, I’m going to make a habit of this and I gotta start somewhere. This is a snippet of a post, but it’s a true story and it seems like it is, or could wind up being, relevant.
Back in the late 1990s, my father suggested that I check out his favorite web site. It was…not my personal favorite. It was about as far right-wing as you could go without being off the charts. He pitched it as a frank discussion of intellectual conservatism, as opposed to what was practiced by the Republican party. If you squinted, you could kind of see it from that angle, but really, it was just a bunch of folks who didn’t think the Republican party went nearly far enough if you know what I mean.
Anyway, the 2000 election rolled around and it was one of the sites I kept tabs on to see what their take was. It was interesting. Believe it or not, there was a very real possibility that Al Gore would wind up winning the electoral college while George W. Bush took the popular vote. For a good part of the night, that seemed the most likely scenario.
They. Went. Ballistic.
Pages after pages of people claiming they would take up arms and take to the streets if “the will of the people” was overturned by a relic of the 18th century. They were serious. They weren’t “armed militias going to cities the President was mad at” serious, but they certainly weren’t having a laugh either. They fucking hated the Electoral College.
Until, of course, they didn’t. As things turned out, Gore won the popular vote and Bush won the EC. All threats of violence were scrubbed from the site (interestingly, their willingness to scrub the site of things they didn’t like wound up being the basis for a precedent-setting lawsuit which they lost, but that’s another story). All the subsequent posts were about the “wisdom of the Founding Fathers” and how prescient their decision to create the Electoral College was.
So, the lesson I learned from all this was: All that constitutional originalism stuff is hooey. They love whatever wins for their side. That’s the alpha and the omega of their political philosophy. All of the philosophical underpinnings are just retcons to back up anything that lets them win.
Is the same true of the other side? Probably? It’s hard to say because, as a member of “the other side” my objectivity is not what it should be. Also, you have to remember that in 2000, there was nothing remotely close to a leftist online presence that could be compared to the “Fans of Rush Limbaugh” sites. The left couldn’t get anywhere near the enthusiasm required to build a proper echo chamber back then.
Now, as of this minute and without having seen the result of counting and re-counting the ballots or the outcome of the barrage of lawsuits we’re going to see, it doesn’t look like the Electoral College is going to make a difference here. It appears as though Joe Biden will win both the popular vote and the EC, which simplifies matters a little. But, if you run into folks claiming that the Electoral College is some sort of God-given instrument of His Infinite Wisdom, I encourage you to remember this story and, if you’re of a mind to do so, call them out on their b.s.
-R.K.