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Illegitimate Donald?
Richard
P. Boyle, December 10, 2016
It is in the spirit of our nation
to keep an eye on the legitimacy of our government, because while legality is
determined by the law, legitimacy is granted by the people. In that spirit we
could state today: We hold this truth to be self-evident, that the people of
the United States did not elect Donald Trump. To appreciate how true this is we
need to look closely at the systematic distortions the Electoral College system
now imposes on the popular vote.
As everyone knows, Clinton led the popular vote by 2.0
percent or 2.7 million votes but lost in the Electoral College 305 to 233. This
raises red flags, of course, but what is really important is to understand the
forces that produced the distortion. Begin by to dividing each candidate’s
popular vote by the number of electors they won. This tells us that 281,266 popular votes for Clinton translated into one electoral vote, compared with 206,093 popular
votes per electoral vote for Trump. The ratio is 4 to 3 - it took four popular
votes for Clinton to produce the same Electoral College result as three votes
for Trump. Or, one vote for Clinton was worth only .73 of a vote for Trump.
The inequality occurred, of course, because
Clinton won her states by wider margins than Trump did, but “wasted” votes in
the process. In California she received twice as many votes as Trump, leaving
her with a blow-out victory but more than four million popular votes that were
redundant in California and worthless anywhere else. So the question becomes,
what produced the clumping together of Clinton votes into a smaller number of
states? It was not a random event but, like global
warming, was the end result of a chain of natural causes.
First, for most of our history people have been
moving from rural areas into cities, so that today just over half of us live in
the fifty-four metropolitan areas with populations of more than 1,000,000.
Second, these areas are concentrated in the states Clinton won. Third, large
cities are the vital engines of economic growth in this country, and they
attract people with higher levels of education to work in and propel that
progress. Fourth, people with more education increasingly vote for Democratic
candidates. Putting these together, people with more education tend to live in large
metropolitan areas, vote Democratic, and be discriminated against in presidential
elections.
So, how would this look to
the founders of our nation? We have always based the legitimacy of the
Electoral College on the spirit and word of the constitution. It is
clear that the Constitutional Convention intended the presidency to represent
all “people” (free male property owners) equally, balanced by a senate
representing each state equally. Whether “the people” should be represented
directly or indirectly, however, was a contentious problem requiring
considerable negotiation and compromise. Most of the founders preferred
indirect representation, whereby people in local areas elected representatives
they knew and trusted, who then met to decide who would be president. This arrangement
appealed to the South because the population on which the number of electors
was based could then include 3/5 of the slave population without allowing
slaves to actually vote. The next question is, how have these two bases for
legitimacy worked out in practice?
First, the founding fathers who thought the Electoral College system would result
in wiser and more informed decision-makers would be appalled to learn, 226
years later, that it now serves to give better educated voters considerably less
influence than those with lower levels of education. Second, as an expedient
compromise the Electoral College system worked – by giving the South more
electoral votes than the number of people eligible to vote justified, it
brought together in one union states that allowed slavery and states that
opposed it. The fight against slavery eventually succeeded and today all Americans
can vote, but the structural distortion currently built into the Electoral
College system continues to give the southern states and their bloc more voting
power – one-third more – than the rest of the country. In both cases, far from
deriving legitimacy from the constitution, the Electoral College today actually
contradicts and works in opposition
to what the founding fathers had in mind.
As a result, we now have a
president whose legitimate right to rule is questionable. There are, of course,
sources of legitimacy that do not depend on historical origins. In Max Weber’s
classic analysis, legitimacy can be earned
by action that furthers the interests and will of the people. According to a
recent Quinnipiac Poll, more than two-thirds of voters:
Agree
with the Roe v. Wade decision establishing a woman's right to abortion.
Express significant concern about global warming.
Oppose
lowering taxes on the wealthy.
There are many, many more
polls indicating where the will of the people lies, and where they would like a
legitimate president to lead them. Few of us may expect this to happen, but the
path is open. Obviously the best way to return legitimacy to the presidency
would be to eliminate the Electoral College entirely and let the people vote
directly (and in fact a majority of the public supports doing just this).
Meanwhile, I think we should
use the question of legitimacy as a form of protest. Picture bumper
stickers everywhere saying “Illegitimate Donald?” They could come with
instructions: “Put a line through the question mark when you have made up your
mind – only you can grant legitimacy.” And in general, we should continuously
remind everyone that the legitimacy of the Trump presidency will have to be
earned, whatever role the Russians played in it.
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Cracking the
Buddhist Code:
A Contemporary
Theory of Awakening
(Slightly
revised version of a paper submitted
to the Journal of Consciousness Studies)
Abstract
The
theory proposes that what Buddhists and others have called awakening is the
same thing as “pure perceptual experience,” defined as the awareness our
perceptual systems would present to us if they acted on their own, with no
interference from conceptual systems. Two forms of interference are
particularly apt to interfere with pure perceptual experience: uncontrolled
inner speech (wandering thoughts, monkey mind) and distortion of perception to
fit reified conceptual structures. Monkey mind has been shown to be caused by
hyper-activity in the Default Mode Network (DMN) of the brain, which happens
whenever nothing else demands our attention. Reification occurs, especially, in
three kinds of symbolic structures, all of which we acquire as part of the
culture we are born into:
1.
Scripts, which describe situations and events
and prescribe appropriate behavior.
2.
Conceptual systems – theories, belief systems,
social reality, world views, theologies and ideologies, etc.
3.
The underlying construct of four dimensional spacetime,
in which we think we live.
The
fact that predispositions toward uncontrolled DMN activity and reification of
conceptual structures are essentially universal among humans means (at least
within the realm of science) that they must have evolutionary roots. However,
some people have and do overcome these two biological predispositions by
engaging in such special practices as meditation and forms of inquiry. The
theory seeks to specify how all this works in more detail and a way that allows
the predictions to be studied.
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