Whodunit? It feels like a bizarre game of Clue.
It was the white working class in the upper Midwest with the rage. It was the Bernie bros in the craft brewery with the Green Party. It was the liberals in the bubble with the complacency.
I think we know how this game ends: fights, recriminations, someone tips over the board and runs home, then we have to pick up the pieces and start all over again.
So yeah, I've been thinking about identity politics. It's all the rage these days. Which got me thinking about identity in relation to another big topic of discussion.
It doesn't seem have become a full-on circular firing squad, but the Electoral College is also generating much heat, and some light. The basic question: Ditch the damn thing? I'm not convinced getting rid of it is the right thing to do, but I do want to point out a couple of the roots it grew from.
One: slavery. From the political melee that was Constitutional Convention we got some of The Framers greatest hits, like the Three-Fifths Compromise. Worth acknowledging the role this played in shaping the civic structure and basic governing institutions of our country — and its uncomfortable echo in the acceleration of voter suppression based on race that we're now witnessing.
Another — and yes, related — factor: property rights. Used to be, you could only vote if you owned land. (Goes without saying that you had to be white. And male. And you probably owned some people, too.)
Slavery has been outlawed and, in theory, more people have the right to vote these days. But the shadow these issues cast is immense, in spite of — no, because of — the fact that as applied to presidential elections, these roots have become almost invisible. They've been absorbed into our body politic, transformed from peculiar institution into a quirky All-American institution we can carp about once every four years or so.
In case you didn't click through, the property rights link above copies a tweet storm (which for the record is not from James Fallows, but from "Fames Jallows") that highlights the extent to which this has skewed our civic perceptions. It presents an insidious definition of who matters and who doesn't — directly reflected in our current red/blue divide, one in which land counts more than people. And not just in a literal sense. The psychological impact of seeing a mostly red electoral map is powerful, even knowing in our rational brain that it doesn't accurately reflect population — or, once again, the popular vote. It's easy to feel isolated, in the minority, when it looks as if 75% or more of the country disagrees with you.
So even as our definition of eligible voter has changed over the last couple of hundred years, remnants of the old order are baked into the system. There is real, outsized political power in being from a state with more land and fewer people. (At the national level, it's not just the Electoral College; it's the Senate, too. Which, once upon a time, didn't have direct elections either.)
There is also huge symbolic power. It’s not the only cause, but our political structure feeds into and reinforces things we all, as Americans, are supposed to know: that small-town values are the best values, and small-town citizens are the salt of the earth, and small towns take care of their own and don't need city slickers (or feds) to tell them what to do. This is Real America. This is our national fetish — something that's hardwired into our sense of self; something that everyone seems to buy into, no matter where they live.
There's something wrong with this picture.
Frankly, I'm tired of being told what Real Americans think, when that definition leaves me out. (Yeah, I know — join the club, Mr. Straight White Male.) Of course we should pay attention to the needs and concerns of flyover states and rural residents and the white working class. We should be equally concerned about the needs and concerns of coastal dwellers and people who live in cities and middle class people and poor people and black people and brown people and gay people and female people. And everyone else I just left out.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean equally concerned in a lowest common denominator, color-, sex-, religion-blind kind of way — that just forces us back inside the Real American box, which simplistically and inaccurately defines and limits who we are and what we’re supposed to want. It’s the box in which we believe that coastal elites can't possibly "get it," and that people who live in cities don't have values worth respecting.
Maybe that’s why it feels as if attacks on identity politics are attacks on acknowledging difference — specifically, differing from that generic, exclusionary American Ideal. And why calls to rally around economic policies that lift all boats seem to willfully ignore the fact that many people — by custom, compromise or official policy — only have access to leaky boats, or have never seen a boat, or once had a boat but saw it stolen away.
Identity matters now, because identity mattered in how we got here.
So no, I'm not sure exactly where I stand on the future of the Electoral College. But I don't think we can have an honest conversation about it without understanding what shaped it in the first place — and how those forces are still playing out today.