A Check Against Thralldom

Law & Liberty published “The Electoral College in Context” by Robert G. Natelson—who provides historical context to help us appreciate the wisdom behind the Electoral College in the US system of electing the executive. The main point of controversy today is that, as compared to a straight national popular vote determination, the Electoral College apportions a bit more sway to less-populous states. Natelson explains one important point about how the Electoral College’s apportionment of sway is for the good. But outside the scope of Natelson’s essay lies another, more important reason for defending the institution: the Electoral College checks some of the nastier hazards of mass politics.

Natelson does make the point that the Electoral College helps to ensure that the party that wins the presidency has “enough support to govern and forestall sectional break-up.” The Electoral College helps to ensure a wide geographic distribution of support for the winner. That is important because, as American history has shown, keeping the Union together has not always been something to take for granted.

However, Natelson does not explain what I regard as a more fundamental argument for the Electoral College.

A perennial concern about determination by simply popular vote is that it breeds a brand of politics that seeks to induce 51 percent of the population to support the party that seemingly supports them. The plainest way for a party to engender that support is to pay people to support it. Thus, the party seeks to take from the very wealthy few to distribute jobs, contracts, projects, and other material benefits to the 51 percent, who in turn scratch the party’s back. Such a transaction will grow a crude rhetoric to justify it.

Material benefit is not the only way to induce 51 percent of the population to support your party. Another way is by threats, veiled or otherwise: “Nice business you’ve got there, would hate to see anything happen to it.” For example, consider Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to Representative Jim Jordan, explaining that “in 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content.”

Both carrots and sticks can be utilized to make people dependent on the party. A party devoted to government dependency might secure a permanent majority to support it and indefinitely. People feel, if only subconsciously, that their carrots depend on it and that not getting the stick depends on it.

Yet, a related method is indoctrination and propaganda. If large population centers can be subjected to indoctrination, every individual there may feel an irresistible pressure to conform to what the overwhelming majority in his locale believes. The doctrine propagated will hold that the people who support the party are good people and that that goodness is proven by “almost everyone” in the locale saying so.

Through these forms of dependency, clientelism, and mass groupthink, a party may sustain a level of support that amounts to 51 percent of the entire country’s population, even though that 51 percent is highly concentrated in certain areas or urban centers.

The Electoral College helps to check the success of such a political strategy of thralldom. The Electoral College requires a greater geographical spread, and geographical spread means that the clientelistic party must reach out to more of the country and plant its hold in more communities.

The Founders were not innocent of the danger of political thralldom inherent in mass democracy. Though the eighteenth century was not a time of mass democracy, thinkers of the time knew from history how democracy could go wrong. Adam Smith, for example, in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, discussed a period of ancient Athens and of “the Democraticall government.” He writes, “those … who desired to ingratiate themselves [to the People] … found it easier to give them riches which they had no title to from the Plunder of their fellow citizens.” Smith also talks about “a law that every citizen should receive the same sum from the Community in order to enable him to attend the Theatre. … This was the foundation of all their disorders.” He continues:

From this time the People became altogether idle and unactive; they received the same pay for sitting at home and doing nothing but attending the publick Diversions as they did for serving their country abroad, and the former was without question the easiest. … The Athenians from being the most enterprising people in Greece were now become the most idle and inactive.

James Madison was concerned about the abuse of power. He defined a faction as a segment of the population “adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community” and said that, on that discreditable basis, a majority could qualify as a faction. He was concerned about checking “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”

In Federalist #10, Madison wrote:

[A] pure democracy … can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert, results from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths. 

In the Federalist Papers, Madison looked to ensure that “the concurrence of separate and dissimilar bodies is required in every public act.” Factious leaders, he explained, “may kindle a flame within their particular states but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states.”

The Electoral College hinders the strategy of thralldom to the government as led by a party cultivating that thralldom. As Madison wrote, prudence requires “the distribution of the supreme powers of the state.” The geographically dispersed weighting that attends the Electoral College is another example of prophylactic against tyranny, as it checks the sway of regional concentrations in thrall to government power.

This article was adapted from its original feature on Law & Liberty.