In the last entry, I explained clearly how Trump won. The following rounds of consciousness-streaming offer a crystal ball — like early images of Pluto, fuzzy on details but increasingly apparent on overall features — coming into focus on where we go from here. Some topical highlights will be posted in segments, starting with the Electoral College…
Trump won the presumed Electoral College delegation. Hillary appears to have won the popular vote by a narrow margin (count still not final). [How many of those votes were illegal, whether from dead people, fake identities, or non-citizens, likely never will be known.]
In younger and more naive times, I favored the popular vote as the truest vote, and dismantling of the Electoral College via Constitutional Amendment. As with my youthful dalliances in liberalism, that faded as I gave these issues deeper thought than that found on emotional levels, and in doing so, grew up.
It still will take a necessarily and wonderfully difficult process of amending the Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College. Good luck with that. As this video marvelously explains, the Electoral College was enshrined into your Constitution brilliantly to avoid precisely what a lot of liberals want to prevent: the tyranny of an impulsive majority and the dominance of high-population states’ favorite sons at the expense of more rural areas.
Another video from the same online educators explains the “national popular votes” movement, its Constitutional deceptions, and bad unintended consequences. In short: Be careful for what you ask, lest you get it! What if half of just New York’s and California’s electors had gone Republican? You know the Red States aren’t going to go for any Electoral College changes anytime soon. If only Blue States do, it’s left-wing self-sabotage. Go ahead, shortsighted fools, bring that on. Please!
As Tara Ross notes in those videos, advocates of basing state electors on national popular votes think they are wiser than every generation that preceded them, including the Founders themselves. They suffer from a massive logical fallacy known as “recency bias”. Of course, many of these advocates also voted for either Hillary or Trump, which calls that alleged wisdom into question.
In the next part, to be posted soon, I shall warn of the risks to conservatism.