On Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) spoke at the 2018 Center for American Progress (CAP) Ideas Conference. During her speech, Warren claimed Clinton losing the presidential race despite winning the popular vote was a sign that our democracy is not “healthy.”
… democracy is crumbling around us. And I’m not saying that to whine; I’m saying it because until we face this crisis head on, we will never be able to build the future that the American people deserve. So today, I want to talk about this crisis in our democracy, and about what we as Democrats need to do about it. In 2016, nearly three million more people voted for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump — but Trump took the presidency.
That is not exactly the sign of a healthy democracy. Democracy hangs on the idea that whoever gets the most votes wins. That’s the central starting point, and it’s worth repeating every single day.
For years, a movement has been growing just outside our field of vision. This movement has two designs. First, they want to cultivate within the American consciousness a belief that the best form of government is not a constitutional republic, but a direct democracy (i.e. popular vote system). Second, they want to use this belief as a tool to change the process by which we elect the President of the United States.
Because culture is generally upstream of politics, these processes must happen in the order described above. Popular politicians like Elizabeth Warren repeat phrases like “democracy is crumbling” and “democracy hangs on the idea that whoever gets the most votes wins” as a kind of soft brainwashing. As time passes, and the American people become less and less familiar with the reasoning behind the Electoral College system, their inclinations will begin to bend toward the direct democracy advocated by high-profile individuals like Warren.
Let’s be clear — there is no perfect system by which a nation can elect its leaders. However, it cannot be denied that some systems are better than others at preserving the cohesion of states while still representing the will of the people. The Founding Fathers devised a system that walks that tightrope with relative grace.
With that said, this is not a dissertation on the virtues of the Electoral College, but a warning to those who may not be paying attention to the way in which progressives like Elizabeth Warren use language to seed and cultivate ideas in the minds of the American people that would be politically expedient for the Democratic Party.