Government system

Political campaigns always lend themselves to overstatement and scare tactics, but this midterm season has exceeded all standards of exaggeration with Democratic and Republican candidates, advocates, TV commentators and the press all raising the specter of the “loss of our democracy.” This outrageous hyperbole is bad enough if it were credible. But the truth is, we don’t have a democracy. Ours is a democratic republic. There’s a huge difference.

In drafting the Constitution, James Madison had studied political history from the Greek city-states and onward and had learned that a pure democracy must always fail because short-term passions of a dominant majority eventually lead to misuse of power and destructive decisions. The Romans learned this from the Greeks and created an early republic with a separation of powers. Madison used this as a guide to devise a Constitution with checks and balances between the executive, legislative and judicial branches to avoid this “tyranny of the majority.”

We are a democratic republic of states, not peoples. The Electoral College was designed to protect the smaller states from this tyranny of the majority, just as the composition of the Senate — with two senators per state — guards against the same problem from occurring in Congress.

The real threat to our democratic republic is public support for eliminating the Electoral College and federalizing national elections to a total vote, which would create an unstable pure democracy.

George Mozingo Henderson