The Framers of the US Constitution created it in the name of the People. At the same time, they did not trust the People to govern fairly. In a system divided by class & race this isn’t exactly surprising./1

What the Framers had was a theory and a set of facts. The theory was Aristotle’s, that the best state would combine elements of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy into a balance that would produce stability & longevity to the state./2

The facts were the history of the ancient Roman Republic. It achieved /almost precisely the balance that Aristotle wanted , except that the political executive was a dyarchy not a monarchy./3

The Framers were very aware of this, and aware that the Roman Republic failed after 5 centuries and became an increasingly corrupt and tyrannical empire, with rulers who treated the populace not as a People but as a mob./4

What they feared was the possibility that a leader might do just that, playing to the crowd in order to assert absolute authority over the state. They worried that any extension of democracy beyond the election of legislators/5

would lead ineluctably to tyranny. So they sought to avoid it by doubling down on the monarchic & oligarchic elements in order to ensure that rulers would not use the political weight of the masses to maintain permanent rule./6

Their solution (and I know I’ve buried the lede) was to make the election of the president indirect by giving the power to elect to state legislatures expected to contain not the People but the gentry./7

This was, of course, the Electoral College, a body designed to give more weight to the wealthy while preserving the image of rulers chosen by the popular will. That had interesting consequences that were hoped for./8

The most important was that the will of the People could be frustrated by a paradoxical electoral outcome: The choice of a minority outweighing that of the majority. This was a feature, not a bug./9

The need to fix the rules as originally written because the outcome of the 1800 election, a draw, was unwanted, did not remove the principle. What did change wasn’t he replacement of indirect voting by state legislatures/10

by the People of each state directly choosing the electors. The latter do not, in almost every state, face any limitation on their voting for a candidate or person to whom they are not pledged./11

This was not a problem for the Frames. Neither was the fact that because electors are chosen state by state smaller states are given more weigh & that this could produce the paradoxical result that the candidate preferred by the voters could lose./12

As I said, this is a feature, not a bug. It ran, after a few decades, into a problem: The Civil War. After the Civil War, Americans came increasingly to see themselves as a single, indivisible, nation./13

The Electoral College, however, makes the presidency a product of the desires of states, particularly the less populated, not of the Peple, because the Framers did not trust the people./14

Thus the outcomes of the elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016, in which the more popular candidate lost, were ones the Framers had anticipated. They hadn’t expected, however, that the federation they created/15

would become something more like a unitary state with harmonization of laws across states & the identity of American rather than state citizenship predominating: Prior to the Civil War people saw the name “United States” as a plural,/16

afterwards it quickly became a singular. Americans saw themselves as a single people transcending the division of states. The expectation became that the popularly preferred candidate would be elected./17

But that’s not how it works. Because the population is concentrated in a relatively few states, the possibility continually exists that the less popular candidate will be chosen./18

But while John Quincy Adams was a man of talent and ability, we cannot necessarily say the same of Rutherford Hayes or Benjamin Harrison. We absolutely cannot say it it of either George W Bush or Donald Trump./19

We especially cannot say it of that last fellow. He is where he is because James Madison did not want government to rest on the will of the People. I doubt very much, however, that he wanted the power of the federal executive/20

in the hands of a narcissistic clown. The system that he had a huge hand in shaping did precisely that. It did so because Aristotle distrusted the popular will, and the Framers concurred./21

They did not anticipate the transformation of the US into a singular nation, nor did they expect that the institution they created to act as a check on the popular will could be manipulated to enshrine the power/22

of a predatory minority. A minority minority that behaved in a corrupt manner anticipated by Machiavelli. Machiavelli did warn that freedom; once lost, would be hard to regain./23

So far, at least, freedom still exists, and the People are still sovereign, but popular sovereignty was not the goal of the Framers. The problem we face today is one of they worried about less/24

because they thought the structure of checks and balances they created would prevent oligarchy as well as democracy (they wanted elements of both, but not the full form of either). It has clearly frustrated the latter./25

It did not anticipate corrupt oligarchs turning the People against itself and entrenching their power by persuading half the population that they constituted the actual People and that the other moiety was not merely not/26

the People but its actual enemy. Manipulation of the Electoral College is a strategy to exclude the larger moiety of the People from participating in government, & entrenching that oligarchy in power permanently./27

The Aristotelian ideal is; paradoxically, being subverted by the very institution designed to keep it in balance. The past couple of decades, and particularly the past quadrennium, have been reminiscent/28

in some ways to the last decades of the Roman Republic, as oligarchs strive to subvert the state & suppress the popular will. In Rome the oligarchs lost. But they lost not to the People but to a new monarch./29

Donald Trump is a tool of the oligarchs who has mistaken himself for a monarch. The greater danger is that someone who is not a clown can use the People to crush the oligarchs, & in the process nullify the popular will./30

It is not a long distance from an Augustus to a Nero or a Caligula. We are in grave danger of discovering how short that distance is. Machiavelli, by far the wisest of republican thinkers, noted that/31

the wealthy craved infinite power while the People wanted to be left alone to live free lives. The latter requires institutions that truly represent the General Will. The Electoral College is not one of them./end