They want to rule, Part eleventy-twelve?
by Tom Sullivan
The flippant explanation for why conservative pedants argue the U.S. is “a republic not a democracy” is that those making it tend these days to be Republicans and, you know, for some reason republic just sounds right to them. Those insisting the U.S. is, was, and always will be a capitalist country, or a Christian one? Similar motivated reasoning.
A thorough answer is more complicated. A Twitter exchange between Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) led Jamelle Bouie in search of one.
AOC began a thread arguing for abolishing the Electoral College in favor of a national popular vote. Bouie links to this one:
5) The Electoral College isn’t about fairness at all; it’s about empowering some voters over others.
Every vote should be = in America, no matter who you are or where you come from. The right thing to do is establish a Popular Vote. & GOP will do everything they can to fight it.— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 23, 2019
In response, Crenshaw tweeted:
Abolishing the electoral college means that politicians will only campaign in (and listen to) urban areas. That is not a representative democracy.
We live in a republic, which means 51% of the population doesn’t get to boss around the other 49%. https://t.co/eZilBsVhyP— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) August 24, 2019
Crenshaw never says “not a democracy,” but it is implied, Bouie argues. The founders had a classical (read, “Greek”) understanding of direct democracy and crafted a “representative democracy” with counter-majoritarian features to guard against
direct democracy’s weaknesses. But “it was not designed for minority rule.”
Nicole Hemmer, author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics” traces “a republic not a democracy” to the 1930s and 1940s. Franklin Roosevelt argued for taking the U.S. to war in Europe to defend democracy. He got pushback from non-interventionists:
One Roosevelt opponent, for example — Boake Carter, a newspaper columnist who supported the America First Committee (which opposed American entry into World War II) — wrote a column in October 1940 called “A Republic Not a Democracy,” in which he strongly rebuked the president for using the word “democracy” to describe the country. “The United States was never a democracy, isn’t a democracy, and I hope it will never be a democracy,” Carter wrote.
The term went from conservative complaint to right-wing slogan in the 1960s, when Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, used it in a September 1961 speech, “Republics and Democracies.” In a democracy, Welch protested, “there is a centralization of governmental power in a simple majority. And that, visibly, is the system of government which the enemies of our republic are seeking to impose on us today.”
“This is a Republic, not a Democracy,” Welch said in conclusion, “Let’s keep it that way!”
“They *know* they aren’t the majority. They rely on establishing minority rule for power,” AOC argues today. GOP voter suppression efforts support that. As I’ve said before, royalists don’t want to govern, they want to rule.
But backing up to AOC’s original point about the electoral college, Bouie writes:
Crenshaw is wrong on the impact of ending the Electoral College. A presidential candidate who focused only on America’s cities and urban centers would lose — there just aren’t enough votes. Republicans live in cities just as Democrats live in rural areas. Under a popular vote, candidates would still have to build national coalitions across demographic and geographic lines. The difference is that those coalitions would involve every region of the country instead of a handful of competitive states in the Rust Belt and parts of the South.
Neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump campaigned in 17 rural states, Bouie observed in March (linked in graf above). Contra Crenshaw’s pro-Electoral College argument, candidates already don’t campaign in many rural areas.
Bouie’s point about needing rural votes to win the presidency in a popular vote contest is also true of state races. Democrats in states such as North Carolina may be able to squeak out a win for governor in a statewide, popular-vote contest on the strength of the blue vote in urban areas. And they may lose both U.S. Senate seats and the legislature for lack of strength in rural areas. Depending on the state, there may not be enough Democratic votes in blue, urban areas to build a governing majority.
Another of the problems with the Electoral College is how it programs how we think about elections in general. Democratic presidential campaigns focus on big, blue states they believe can give them an Electoral College win whether or not that win represents a broad, national consensus. As we’ve seen, an Electoral College win may not even represent a popular majority. In the states, similarly, Democrats bust their tails to get out the vote in large population centers because that’s where Democratic low-hanging fruit is for statewide and/or national candidates driving the turnout operation. But without also winning legislative seats in more rural areas, control of legislatures and control of redistricting (until laws change) will remain in the hands of the GOP.
Howard Dean’s 50-State Strategy premise was you can’t win where you don’t show up to play. My corollary is you can’t compete there if you don’t have “game.”
UPDATE: Here’s additional background on the distinction (if any) between republic and democracy.