Somebody to blame
The liberal meltdown since Nov. 8, more remarkable in many respects than the election itself, can be attributed to three factors.
First, the surprising outcome—the Clinton camp was so certain of victory that the champagne corks were allegedly popping the afternoon of election day. A certain amount of shellshock is therefore to be expected.
Second, the nature of their conqueror: It’s one thing for Mitt Romney to lose to Barack Obama or Michael Dukakis to lose to George Bush, quite another for a nominee everything was supposedly rigged in favor of to lose to a wingnut with the highest unfavorable numbers in our electoral history.
Third, and not least, the smugness and arrogance of the contemporary left, which assumes that it is the repository of all virtue and its opponents (Republicans) the repository of all that is loathsome. Such Manichean thinking makes it difficult to accept defeat or attribute political setbacks of any kind to anything other than perfidy.
Taken together, such factors produce not just emotional discombobulation but a desperate need for scapegoats, with a succession of villains trotted out in the hope of creating an emotionally consoling narrative.
At last glance, we have sexism/racism (which apparently only explain electoral outcomes when Democrats lose), fake news (whatever that is), FBI Director Comey and the infiltration of his agency by something called the “alt-right,” and now Vladimir Putin and Russian hacking (minus any evidence that it influenced a single vote).
There will be more to come, but most disingenuous and revealing, because it’s most revealing of liberal desperation and neuroses, have been the shots taken at the electoral college.
Granted, getting more popular votes but losing in the electoral college twice over the course of the past five presidential elections can create a certain hostility toward the latter, but this one is something of an exculpatory double-dip for the left—by blaming the electoral college you also get to blame those long-dead, slave-owning, sexist white males known as the founders, thereby giving a certain holistic coherence to the liberal palliative.
Of course, claiming that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote as a means of solace and undermining Donald Trump’s legitimacy only works until someone states the obvious: that there is actually no way of telling how the popular vote would have gone if the electoral college hadn’t existed to dictate virtually every aspect of campaign strategy.
On most occasions, and certainly in the case of genuine landslides (1964, 1972, and 1984), you can assume a certain congruence between the popular-vote total and the electorate’s preferences between the candidates, but in close races like the one we’ve just witnessed it is meaningless in every sense, not just legally.
Like Al Gore in 2000, Hillary didn’t really win the popular vote and lose in the electoral college because those popular-vote totals were heavily influenced by the existence and logic of the electoral college. For the same reasons, we can’t really conclude that George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004, or that Barack Obama won it in 2012 either.
But then blaming the electoral college for denying Hillary the presidency only lasted up to the point when Democrats began to turn to the electors themselves to overturn Trump’s victory, after which a strange new respect was accorded those same slave-owning dead white males and their handiwork.
Once the sorest losers since 1828 settled on the stratagem of an electoral college coup, the left suddenly acquired great confidence in a document, the Constitution, usually viewed as an obstacle to the leftist project and even a bit of affection for “original intent” interpretation of its provisions that was thought to be shared only by hide-bound conservatives. Whereas the previous week the electoral college was an archaic obstacle to democracy, it all of a sudden became a solution to the problem of too much democracy and a means of protecting the shortsighted polis from itself.
Strangest of all was the idea that, in order to defend the Constitution from a demagogue, a couple of centuries of settled constitutionality should be abruptly dispensed with. If the village had to be destroyed in order to save it during the Vietnam War, at least some Democrats were quite prepared to destroy the nation’s long-established political customs under the pretext of saving them from a President Trump.
In short, the election couldn’t have been free and fair because the Democrats lost.
As with the weakening of the filibuster in the Senate and the unconstrained cheers for Barack Obama’s constitutionally dubious executive orders, one wonders if Democrats have any conception of the future in all this and how it might turn; more precisely, what arguments they can muster when they eventually win the presidency again (and yes, it will happen, eventually, given the logic of our two-party system) and the losing Republican candidate then attempts to suborn the electoral college electors to reverse the outcome.
It would be reassuring to see liberals quote Alexander Hamilton and cite the Constitution and the principles underlying it if not for the fact that their grasp was so weak for lack of practice and their intent so obviously malicious.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.