4 ms·
The US is not and was never supposed to be a popular vote democracy. The founding fathers recognized the dangers of populism and subsequently made sure that the
by ceilingcorner 6y ago
The US is not and was never supposed to be a popular vote democracy. The founding fathers recognized the dangers of populism and subsequently made sure that the government is a republic.
- krapp 6y ago>The founding fathers recognized the dangers of populism and subsequently made sure that the government is a republic. Yeah, umm... about that...
- ceilingcorner 6y agoTrump, for all his bluster, is not really a populist in any serious sense of the word. True populism doesn't exist in a state with a balance of powers. For example, Caesar was a populist (Populares).
- Gwypaas 6y agoMichael Barbaro: So this winner-take-all system, this is not something envisioned by the framers. It seems like it kind of came to us in a pretty haphazard way. Jesse Wegman: Right. People like to imagine that the system that we used today was handed down to us from the framers. And in fact, the framers didn’t talk at all about the winner-take-all rule. It didn’t come up at the convention. And when they saw it start to be adopted in the states in the early 1800s, they were horrified. James Madison, the man we think of as the father of the Constitution, tried to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting the use of winner-take-all rule because he saw how corrosive it was to erase up to half of voters in the state. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/podcasts/the-daily/electoral-college-trump-clinton-gore-bush.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/podcasts/the-daily/electo...