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It's obviously horrible that slavery happened, but what would add insult to injury would be to throw out a brilliant set of ideas Were it not for slavery, we a

It's obviously horrible that slavery happened, but what would add insult to injury would be to throw out a brilliant set of ideas Were it not for slavery, we arguably wouldn't have to put up with the Electoral College, and I would not place the Electoral College in the bucket of "brilliant ideas". Instead I argue, "see? Make too many compromises, and you end up with bullshit like the Electoral College, where white men get to override the wishes of the general population because those voters can't be trusted." My point is that, yes, it's obviously horrible that slavery happened. Now, how much of our governmental system is the result of "brilliant ideas" and how much is the result of appeasing those that feel they can own other human beings as property?

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Why does the mechanism of election for the head of the federal executive branch matter so much? Because the federal government has so much relevance to the matters of the individuals living in the states. The founders didn't care that much about maximizing fairness per person. They were trying to maximize fairness per state. The electoral college works fine for a federal government that's mostly confined to managing the states themselves which is what the founders were trying to build.
- tptacek 5y ago
  This stuff has been discussed in immense detail on AskHistorians, with citations to various historians (often with background on those historians for context), and the best you can likely say here about the electoral college is that it was a janky hack created to resolve an interminable squabble about apportionment. It had supporters among anti-slavery politicians and was uniformly supported by pro-slavery politicians, because it worked synergistically with the overt pro-slavery clauses in the constitution to tilt political power to the slave states.
hackeraccount 5y ago
"arguably" is doing a lot of work if you say that slavery was the reason for the E.C.
treis 5y ago
The electoral college has little if anything to do with slavery. That is all small state vs big state. It's mostly a wash for slave vs free states. The big slave vs free state issue was how to count slaves and that ended with the 3/5s compromise where slaves counted as 3/5ths of a free person.
rayiner 5y ago
Go look at the state populations in 1789. The small states and big states were roughly evenly divided between free states and slave states. Anti-majoritarian structures have nothing to do with "white men." They exist in many countries, like Switzerland, where the voters are overwhelmingly white. Indeed, for most of the 20th century, the Electoral College benefitted Black people and immigrants, because rural states voted Democrat. The FDR coalition featured rural whites and minorities against affluent coastal elites.
- tptacek 5y ago
  Wait, hold on. That logic doesn't work at all. For most of the 20th century, the Democratic party included the nation's staunchest supporters of Jim Crow. The Democratic and Republican parties of the first have of the 20th century have almost no relationship whatsoever to their modern incarnations --- we were, for much of the 20th century, effectively a four-party state, with two major factions of both major parties. The institutional Democratic party didn't even meaningfully challenge the segregationist solid south until '48, and Thurmond didn't switch parties until the '60s.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    It works well enough wrt. Black people in the North, where pervasive segregation and disenfranchisement weren't as much of a factor. Mind you, the Democrat coalition GP describes was not an easy one; there was plenty of conflict between often racist labor unions and the Black minority. But the new-comer Blacks in non-segregationist states shared enough commonality of interest with non-elite Whites and immigrants that, on balance, they were willing to join that political group.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      If you constrict the logic to the north, then the electoral college isn't doing the thing Rayiner says it's doing; the logic stops working in a different way.
      - 5y ago
mmmBacon 5y ago
Your statements regarding the Electoral College here are horribly simplistic and ill-informed about the separation of powers and system of checks and balances. There were no functioning constitutional republics (the US was never intended to be a pure democracy) at the time the Constitution was written. The tyranny of mob (majority)rule was as much of a consideration as tyranny by a king. The Electoral College was intended to be a check on rule of the mob. This is also why every state gets 2 senators. The founders intention was very much to prevent the kind of things that eventually happened during the French Revolution.
- monocasa 5y ago
  The electoral college was almost entirely intended to be a component of the compromises with slave holding states. That's why the number of electors is the number of congressmen from a state, your two senators plus the number of representatives. Originally the president was simply going to be elected by congress directly, but it was decided that that was an issue with separation of powers. Then a direct popular vote was suggested, but that had the same 'issue' that led to the three fifths compromise, so instead it's a vote from each state weighted by the same algorithm that became the three fifths compromise for federal representation in congress. James Madison saying at the time > There was one difficulty, however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llfr&fileName=002/llfr002.db&recNum=60&itemLink=r?ammem/hlaw:@field%28DOCID+@lit%28fr00218%29%29%230020061&linkText=1 http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llfr&fileName=00...
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    This is only a big factor so long as a large, disenfranchised population (whether as a result of slavery or Jim Crow) is concentrated in a minority of states. Black people ended up fixing this by voting with their feet and migrating en masse out of the segregationist South.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Why does the mechanism of election for the head of the federal executive branch matter so much? Because the federal government has so much relevance to the matters of the individuals living in the states. The founders didn't care that much about maximizing fairness per person. They were trying to maximize fairness per state. The electoral college works fine for a federal government that's mostly confined to managing the states themselves which is what the founders were trying to build.

tptacek 5y ago
This stuff has been discussed in immense detail on AskHistorians, with citations to various historians (often with background on those historians for context), and the best you can likely say here about the electoral college is that it was a janky hack created to resolve an interminable squabble about apportionment. It had supporters among anti-slavery politicians and was uniformly supported by pro-slavery politicians, because it worked synergistically with the overt pro-slavery clauses in the constitution to tilt political power to the slave states.

hackeraccount 5y ago

"arguably" is doing a lot of work if you say that slavery was the reason for the E.C.

treis 5y ago

The electoral college has little if anything to do with slavery. That is all small state vs big state. It's mostly a wash for slave vs free states. The big slave vs free state issue was how to count slaves and that ended with the 3/5s compromise where slaves counted as 3/5ths of a free person.

rayiner 5y ago

Go look at the state populations in 1789. The small states and big states were roughly evenly divided between free states and slave states. Anti-majoritarian structures have nothing to do with "white men." They exist in many countries, like Switzerland, where the voters are overwhelmingly white. Indeed, for most of the 20th century, the Electoral College benefitted Black people and immigrants, because rural states voted Democrat. The FDR coalition featured rural whites and minorities against affluent coastal elites.

tptacek 5y ago
Wait, hold on. That logic doesn't work at all. For most of the 20th century, the Democratic party included the nation's staunchest supporters of Jim Crow. The Democratic and Republican parties of the first have of the 20th century have almost no relationship whatsoever to their modern incarnations --- we were, for much of the 20th century, effectively a four-party state, with two major factions of both major parties. The institutional Democratic party didn't even meaningfully challenge the segregationist solid south until '48, and Thurmond didn't switch parties until the '60s.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  It works well enough wrt. Black people in the North, where pervasive segregation and disenfranchisement weren't as much of a factor. Mind you, the Democrat coalition GP describes was not an easy one; there was plenty of conflict between often racist labor unions and the Black minority. But the new-comer Blacks in non-segregationist states shared enough commonality of interest with non-elite Whites and immigrants that, on balance, they were willing to join that political group.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    If you constrict the logic to the north, then the electoral college isn't doing the thing Rayiner says it's doing; the logic stops working in a different way.
    - 5y ago

mmmBacon 5y ago

Your statements regarding the Electoral College here are horribly simplistic and ill-informed about the separation of powers and system of checks and balances. There were no functioning constitutional republics (the US was never intended to be a pure democracy) at the time the Constitution was written. The tyranny of mob (majority)rule was as much of a consideration as tyranny by a king. The Electoral College was intended to be a check on rule of the mob. This is also why every state gets 2 senators. The founders intention was very much to prevent the kind of things that eventually happened during the French Revolution.

monocasa 5y ago
The electoral college was almost entirely intended to be a component of the compromises with slave holding states. That's why the number of electors is the number of congressmen from a state, your two senators plus the number of representatives. Originally the president was simply going to be elected by congress directly, but it was decided that that was an issue with separation of powers. Then a direct popular vote was suggested, but that had the same 'issue' that led to the three fifths compromise, so instead it's a vote from each state weighted by the same algorithm that became the three fifths compromise for federal representation in congress. James Madison saying at the time > There was one difficulty, however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llfr&fileName=002/llfr002.db&recNum=60&itemLink=r?ammem/hlaw:@field%28DOCID+@lit%28fr00218%29%29%230020061&linkText=1 http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llfr&fileName=00...
- zozbot234 5y ago
  This is only a big factor so long as a large, disenfranchised population (whether as a result of slavery or Jim Crow) is concentrated in a minority of states. Black people ended up fixing this by voting with their feet and migrating en masse out of the segregationist South.