By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
There is a fun web game called “Redraw the States,”
which lets you reimagine the 2020 presidential election by moving counties from
one state to another. The idea is to flip the results of the election in as few
moves as possible. For example, Donald Trump would have won in 2020 if the
votes of just three counties – Philadelphia (Pa.), Fulton (Ga.), and Wayne
(Mich.) — had been reassigned to California or some other Democratic state. The
opposite strategy — turning blue states red by annexing Republican counties to
them — is a little more difficult, or at least I found it so, because
Republican votes tend to be spread out over a greater number of less densely
populated counties. So, you could have flipped a state to the Trump column by
adding in the votes of Lubbock County, Texas (120,000 votes, two-thirds of them
for Trump) to Georgia, but finding the votes to flip Pennsylvania or Michigan
in a single Trump county is a lot more difficult. The counties that Biden won
have in total 67 million more residents than the counties that Trump won.
I imagine that both of my Democratic readers already are
thinking: “Reassigning the votes of a handful of dense, urban, and
disproportionately black counties to California is effectively the same thing
as taking them right off the map, which is, of course, what Republicans are
trying to do by making it more difficult to vote.” The broad objection to the
Electoral College is similar: that our state-centered presidential elections
have the effect of quarantining big-city votes in a handful of states instead
of allowing their effects to be distributed across the country as they would if
we had a single national popular election for president. Lately that has worked
to the advantage of Republicans in two ways: by reducing the effect of the very
large Democratic majorities in California and by not reducing the effect of the
smaller Republican majorities in Texas and Florida. In 2020, Joe Biden won
California’s 55 electoral votes by a margin of 29 percent, while Donald Trump
won the 38 electoral votes of Texas and the 29 electoral votes of Florida by
only 5.6 percent and 3.4 percent, respectively. Put another way, the 11 million
votes that Biden got in California earned him 55 electoral votes, while the
roughly equal number of votes Trump won in Texas and Florida combined won him
65 electoral votes. Biden’s advantage of 5 million votes in California was of
less worth in terms of electoral votes than was Trump’s advantage of about 1
million votes in Texas and Florida combined.
There are many factors that go into that, including the
fact that Republican presidential candidates more or less forgo campaigning in
California and other states in which they are not realistically competitive,
while Democrats will put up a pretty good fight in Florida (and, to a lesser
extent, in Texas) because they believe they can win there.
It is impossible to disprove a counterfactual, but I
strongly suspect that if in 2000 George W. Bush had won the notional “popular
vote” while Al Gore won in the Electoral College, or if Hillary Rodham Clinton
had won an electoral victory over Trump in 2016 without winning more votes
nationally, then we would be hearing a good deal less from Democrats about the
purported injustice of the Electoral College. (Facebook would be a happier
place, too, if the Democrats hadn’t needed someone to blame for 2016 and
settled on Mark Zuckerberg rather than, say, their incompetent candidate.) But
that is not how our particular democratic cookie crumbles.
It is (entirely too) easy to oversimplify this. For example,
taking Philadelphia, Fulton, and Wayne counties off the electoral map by
consigning them to the oblivion of California or Connecticut would affect more
white voters than black ones (each of those counties has a larger white
population than black population) but would affect black voters
disproportionately (each of those counties is more than 40 percent black in a
country that is 13 percent black), while our current arrangement tends to
amplify the influence of voters in such largely white states as Wyoming and
North Dakota.
This is particularly galling from the point of view of
the gross majoritarians when it comes to Senate seats, which, unlike Electoral
College votes, are distributed among the states with no regard for population
at all: Why, they demand, should the half-million people of
Wyoming enjoy as much Senate clout as the 40 million people of California?
Again, reality is complicated: While small-state voters
are disproportionately white and Republican, this is not a straightforwardly
partisan issue, either: The same arrangement that benefits Republican Wyoming
also lifts up the voice of our lightly populated second-whitest state, Soviet
Bernistan.
The point of view of the gross majoritarians makes sense
only if the states don’t. And so it is no surprise to find voices ranging from
the dopey Left to the zany
Left calling for the abolition of the states: Writing in Jacobin,
Rob Hunter dismisses the states as “an ignoble legacy from the early history of
the republic,” part of “American federalism’s long tradition of strangling
popular sovereignty and democratic equality in the knots of competing and
multiple state jurisdictions.” Lawrence R. Samuel, writing in the Washington Post, insists that diminished regional
differences have turned “the once radical proposition of the ‘United States’
into an anachronism that now has little or no real value.”
I find myself agreeing with the gentleman from Jacobin in
his assessment but not his conclusion: Yes, federalism and many other aspects of
American government are very much designed to strangle popular sovereignty and
to frustrate democratic equality by dividing power into competing
jurisdictions. I think he has it about right when he writes: “Federalism
multiplies the loci of power that must be captured by popular movements seeking
to transform the capitalist state, or even just win some advances within it.”
I differ from Rob Hunter in that I thank God for it.
Why do we have states at all?
(Why, for that matter, do we still have counties when
we have no counts, while we have no shires in
spite of our having so many sheriffs?)
Hunter supplies part of the answer to his own question:
Dismissing the value of the states as theaters for policy innovation, he
writes: “History has shown how those little ‘laboratories of democracy’ are
just as likely to be run by mad scientists as they are by benevolent
researchers.” Indeed, they are. But what is true of the small ones also is true
of the big ones, as 20th-century and 21st-century national governments broadly
allied to Jacobin’s view of the world amply demonstrated by
murdering some 100 million people in labor camps and gulags and through the use
of such innovative tools as mass starvation
as an instrument of political discipline. These United States are one of
the few polities in the world that can be characterized accurately as enjoying
open borders — between the states — which makes fleeing bad public policy and
abusive government relatively easy. Relocating from California to Texas is
pretty straightforward.
(It is a hell of a lot easier than relocating from Texas
to, say, Switzerland.)
If you happen to be advancing a fundamentally
totalitarian view of the world that recognizes no legitimate sphere of private
life outside of political control that rejects liberalism and pluralism and the
rule of law itself, and that deifies the “will of the people” — then, in such a
situation, competing loci of power must be understood to be
intolerable. Socialists are not content to live as socialists on their own
terms — they insist that you must live as a socialist on their terms, too. (And
if it comes down to it, better you than them: If a high-ranking apparatchik enjoys a dacha and
an extra ration of caviar, then that’s really, somehow, the will of the people,
too!) As libertarians sometimes put it: In a free society, there is no reason
that a bunch of lefty crackpots couldn’t put together a worker-owned,
democratically managed steel mill that supplies its product to a worker-owned,
democratically managed automobile factory, which could build cars and
distribute them in whatever way best satisfied its members’ sense of justice.
(There will be only one sense of justice, because there can
be only one — in the socialist republic, disagreement on that point is
tantamount to treason.) But the opposite — a free-market subculture in a
socialist society — would be impossible. Totalitarian politics is total on
more than one front: total authority, total discretion, total reach. To
fracture political power is to recognize limits on political power, which is an
unthinkable thought for the totalitarian.
In the American context, the states are an embarrassment
to the Left and an impediment to the Left’s increasingly totalist project.
Hence the efforts to abolish them piece by piece: by dissolving the Electoral
College, by deforming the Senate, by preempting state elections with a new Washington-run electoral system, by removing their discretion in financial matters, by
supplanting local standards and practices in education and administration, etc.
Totalitarianism fully realized requires that there be
nowhere to run. It ultimately requires defacing civilization to extirpate the
genuine organic diversity of peoples, cultures, religion, regions, and modes of
life. This is why socialist governments, for example, so reliably turn abusive
and repressive when they are not outright genocidal. But socialism is not the
only species of totalitarianism, and the current right-wing populist rhetoric
that similarly deifies “We the People”
is based on a similar set of assumptions. And what happens when “We the People”
demand something We the People’s self-appointed populist spokesmen
dislike? False consciousness, says the Marxist. Media bias
and left-wing educators, says the rightist.
None of those gets to the facts about democracy,
facts that were well understood by John Adams and others among our Founding
Fathers: Democracy is at best a procedural convenience for choosing
representatives and ensuring a minimum level of accountability in elected
officials. Democracy is not a synonym for “good government” —
often it is the opposite — and democratic is not another way
of saying “decent” or “intelligent.” We all understand this at the moral
margins: If the United States had had a national referendum on slavery in 1862,
slavery would have won in a landslide. But we know slavery was wrong and needed
to go. A century later, a national referendum on civil rights for the
descendants of those slaves would have failed at the polls. The framers of the
Constitution knew that We the People cannot be trusted very long or very far,
which is why the most important of our liberties — freedom of speech, of the
press, of religion, to keep and bear arms — were put in the Bill of Rights,
placing them beyond the reach of mere democratic majorities. We the People need
to be told “No!” pretty often and “Hell, no!” from time to time.
Every time a populist initiative strips away some layer of insulation keeping
the People from exercising direct power, it also strips away some layer of
insulation protecting the People from having direct power exercised on
them. Populism means government modeled on Twitter.
Hell, no.
The creator of “Redraw the States” offers it as an
invitation to “weep at how arbitrary our electoral system is.” Arbitrary is
offered as a synonym for undesirable or unfair,
but the fact is that all voting systems have arbitrary rules. Why on earth we
let 18-year-olds vote when we won’t sell them a handgun or a beer is a mystery
to me. (No, I don’t want to lower the drinking age to 18 — I want to raise the
voting age to 40.) Our system has a lot of pressure points and a lot of veto
points, and it has them by design. And we are hardly the only country that has
such measures in place: In Switzerland, for example, national referenda must
win both a majority of the overall vote and a majority in a majority of the
federation’s 26 cantons to take effect. That’s a high bar to clear, which is
why Switzerland has no national minimum wage (thunderously rejected by 76
percent of voters) or a strict “corporate
responsibility” law (approved by a majority of voters but not in a majority
of cantons).
About a third of the U.S. population lives in just four
states (California, Texas, Florida, and New York), but our system of government
ensures that a handful of populous states cannot dominate the affairs of the
entire nation. South Dakota soybean farmers have their own interests, distinct
from — and sometimes rivalrous to — those of Wall Street financiers or Silicon
Valley entrepreneur or low-income people in San Antonio. Federalism, properly
understood and properly implemented, gives them a chance to say “Hell, no!” (or maybe just “No, thanks!”)
to policies and laws reflecting values and priorities at odds with their own.
Unhappily, our politics has for many years now run in the opposite direction:
Rather than working to restrict the national government to matters that are
genuinely national in character (foreign policy, immigration), the schemers and
snoots and do-gooders and botherers have pushed Washington’s big ugly snout
into every corner of American life — public life, yes, but increasingly into
private life, too.
All systems based on definite rules can be manipulated,
and all political systems include rules that are arbitrary. But our arbitrary
rules serve a necessary purpose — or two: The first is giving people the means
to put up roadblocks in front of nonsense, and the second is providing a means
of escape when those roadblocks fail. If you would like to know more about the
practical realities of living in a society with no means of internal exit, some
of your immigrant neighbors might be able to fill you in.
The worst effects of leftish/progressive government in
these United States can still be avoided by moving to a state with different
practices. And people unhappy with the Republican dominance of Texas or Utah
can always move to a Democrat-dominated state — there is more room in those
states every day. The power of exit puts real pressure on dopes and miscreants
and charlatans and fools such as Andrew Cuomo and, you know, every single
sad-faced clown holding office in the extra-long stretch-limo clown car that is
California. When the people pack up and go, so does the tax base, and politics
is no fun at all without easy access to other people’s money, and lots of it.
Progressives prefer a world in which you cannot leave
California even if you leave California, in which the Golden State really is a
Hotel California from which you can check out but never escape. There’s a
reason Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed a confiscatory tax on the assets
of Americans who renounce their citizenship and move to another country.
Americans should think a little bit about why a
particular political tendency would desire to create conditions making exit
from its jurisdiction impossible.
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