Reflections on U.S. Election Day

We haven’t done too badly.  Things could have been a lot worse.  With the exception of what a certain area of the country used to call “The Late Unpleasantness” (ie. The Civil War), we’ve avoided major upheavals.  We could have had multiple civil wars, or military dictatorships.  And things in general could have worked out quite differently.

We could have had multiple presidential impeachments.  Instead, it took almost eighty years to arrive at our first one, and another hundred and thirty roughly to arrive at our second one (although you really should also count Nixon, who would have been impeached if he hadn’t resigned).

We could have had frequent tie votes in the Electoral College, throwing presidential elections into the House of Representatives.  I’ve read that this is actually what many framers of the Constitution actually expected to happen.  And, of course, some people might prefer this; it more approximates a parliamentary system where you can’t have the Presidency and Congress controlled by different parties.

Or we might have had (as some founders hoped) a system without political parties.  That I can’t even begin to wrap my brain around!  We still might one day develop major alternatives to the “two party system”—which would also probably make us more like a parliamentary system.  But would any of this be better?

We may someday abolish the Electoral College.  Many people want to.  Apparently it was introduced at the very end of the constitutional deliberations as being better than the alternatives.  Was it?  I can just barely begin to imagine Presidential campaigns if we simply used the popular vote. 

But, whenever we face strife and gridlock, I remember that the alternative to the politics of a democracy is simply going at one another with pitchforks or bazookas.  I’ve read about Germany in the early 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the Latin American military dictatorships (many supported by the U.S., incidentally), the Lebanese Civil War.

We’ve had one bloody Civil War, the long Jim Crow period, the era of lynchings, the Civil Rights struggles, and much else.  But it could have been a lot worse. It was—in a lot of other places.