EP: I’m talking with Elgin Hushbeck. He’s the author of a number of books, with Energion Publications. The book we’re most interested in today is the third edition, which will be released next week, of Preserving Democracy. It’s expanded or extended up to today because mostly we had to deal with predictions that were fulfilled in expanding the book, and so the third edition will be available next week. Elgin, glad to be talking with you today.
Elgin: Good to be here.
EP: And let’s get right down to the important stuff and say: what’s the greatest threat that’s currently facing the United States?
Elgin: I would say that the greatest threat is that of division and polarization. We can fix pretty much everything else. But, Henry, if you’re going to do it in a democratic fashion that requires people to talk to one another and work out a a solution that brings as many people into the picture as possible. And if your focus is on defeating those who disagree with you, the way to do that is, by default, to demonize them.
And then when you demonize them, you want to defeat them. And by defeating them, you can if you win your 50% plus one, well, you get to put your policies in place. But we’re in a 50/50 nation and sooner or later the other side’s going to get in and they’re going to take everything you did out and put all the stuff they want in, and you end up with an instability, increased polarization, and eventually people will start breaking the rules. And basically, this is where you get a tyranny because the only way you can maintain your side wins is if you set up basically a tyrannical system of some sort where the other side can’t possibly win. And
so that’s the biggest danger. If we can get that fixed,all the other things I talk about in my book are really not that difficult. Some of them are, but for the most part, the biggest problem we face is the fact that we just can’t talk to one another.
EP: Now, some people would say that kind of a dialog, that kind of exchange, requires you to not to hold firm convictions.
Elgin: Well, you can hold firm convictions, but you have to realize you’re in a democracy. You’re not a king. You’re not a dictator. You have to, you know, everybody gets a say. And so you can have very firm convictions. But the way to get your way is to argue for them, is to persuade people, not to defeat them. And that’s what makes the democratic system healthy because you build a consensus around an issue. If you got your way, you might get 50% plus one, but then four years later, the other side is going to get in and you lose everything. On the other hand, if you can put together a consensus that would get 60-70%, it doesn’t matter who comes in after that, because you’ve got a 70% consensus and the other side taking over isn’t going to disrupt that consensus.
So by building a consensus, you can actually maintain a more stable system, which in a democracy is really needed because if you’re going to play by the rules, you’ve got to know what the rules are. And if the rules change every four years, it gets really, really tough.
EP: Okay, I’m going to call a quick attention to, the book that I see up there over your left shoulder, Seeking Truth, in which you discuss precisely how to do that.
This is certainly covered in Preserving Democracy. but for our audience, I want to make sure they’re aware that there’s a whole book, dealing with both seeking the truth and how to discuss and defend the truth that you found. So now let’s go look at the backgrounds.
You commented that our biggest danger is being so polarized. And so the question is: why is the country so polarized? And, of course, following on that, what do you do about polarization once it has happened?
Elgin: Yeah. It’s kind of a chicken and egg problem. You know, do you have polarization because you have both sides trying to defeat the other side, or do you have both sides trying to defeat the other side because you have polarization? And it’s a feedback loop where the more one side seeks to defeat, the other will, (Guess what?) is going to have a response.
And so this goes back 40-50 years. It’s not something that that’s just started. In fact, it’s an inherent part of all democracies. It’s always there to some extent. But what you hope is — you hope that there’s enough, I guess the popular phrase today is: adults in the room. You hope there’s enough adults in the room that they realize there’s a value to building consensus and listening to the other side and realizing, — it’s a democracy!
It’s not a dictatorship! You don’t get everything you want. You have to listen to the other side and build consensus and argue for your positions. And over the last 50 years or so, we’ve seen both parties move more and more and more. You can say, you know, you could finger point and say “Who started it?” news, but that’s really not productive.
What really needs to happen as people used to say, “Okay, we got where we are. We shouldn’t be here. We really need to move back towards consensus.”
EP: Well, let’s go and look at a couple of the major issues on which we have a great deal polarization come up. When we talk about Supreme Court decisions that have come up recently, two of these, when the court over overturned Roe and the decision on Obergefell. In your chapter on stare decisis, you explain why the court overturned Roe.
You also argue that they will not likely overturn Obergefell. And why is that? And also explain for the readers what we mean by stare decisis. And you could pronounce it a little differently than I do.
Elgin: That’s, how I pronounce it: stare decisis. it basically means, it’s Latin for “the decision will stand” and it’s recognized when you’re dealing with the Rule of Law. One of the key features is stability.
You can’t have a Rule of Law if the laws are constantly in flux, which is one of the problems we have. With sort of the large administrative state that we have, it’s really tough to know what the laws even are. One of the people I quote in my book is an author who wrote a book called Three Felonies a Day, [Harvey A. Silverglate] where he argues that our laws and our regulations are so vastly complex in so many different areas, that the average citizen commits three felonies a day without realizing it, because they just don’t, you know, nobody can know what all the law is.
So judges realize that’s a problem, too. If you’re a judge and there’s a whole issue of how you reach your decision, which is the previous chapter in the book, but let’s say you’re a judge, you’re sitting on a case, and you need to rule on something that was ruled on in the past. You got a new case before you and it deals with something that the courts already ruled on.
Well, there’s a you know, there’s the concept of stability of the law & there are incorrect decisions. So what happens if the judge before you made a mistake and so do you just fix the mistake or do you leave the law? And that’s where the whole issue of stare decisis comes in. The sort of the assumption is that you will leave that previous decision because it’s there.
Now, it’s not an absolute rule. And I lay out in the chapter some decisions I think are pretty darn clear they should have been overturned. One of them is Dred Scott and the other is Plessy versus Ferguson. Both were rulings by the Supreme Court, which, thankfully today they’re considered anti canon. They’re considered by legal scholars mistakes by the Supreme Court.
And I go into the details as to what was wrong with those decisions and why they were — why they were wrong. But then when you get to say: you’re now the Supreme Court and Brown versus Board of Education, and you’re now looking at: “Should you have separate but equal schools that are segregated?” and if you’re going to stay by the previous rule, stare decisis, then you would say: “Yeah, the courts already ruled on this, and we’re going to stick with what was there.”
But the court didn’t, or at least not quite. They overturned informally, not formally, but they overturned Plessy versus Ferguson. And I think that was a very good decision. In fact, virtually all legal scholars think it’s a good decision. There are legal scholars who have some, you know, quibbles about some of the particular reasoning, simply because there was a corresponding case, issued the same day, that dealt with segregation in the District of Columbia.
And when you look at the reasoning behind the two rulings there, they’re somewhat in conflict. And, so it’s like, yes, the rulings were correct. How the justices got there was a little strange in spots, but today, nobody really argues against Brown versus Board of Education. And if they do, they shouldn’t, at least in the in terms of the outcome.
So there are some rulings. Plessy. Dred Scott was not formally overturned by the Supreme Court. It was overturned by the 13th amendment. So, because following the Civil War during the reconstruction era, a great deal of progress was made. And they wanted to make sure that progress was maintained. And so they passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to try and cement the freedoms for blacks that had been won in the Civil War and then gained during reconstruction.
They wanted to cement those in. Unfortunately, those were erased by the compromise of 17 or 1877 and the end of reconstruction. Hayes became president by basically agreeing to end reconstruction in the South, which is where you started getting all the “Jim Crow laws”. And we ended up with actually Plessy vs Ferguson and segregation for 50 years!
So all of that progress was pretty much wiped out until the mid-60s. But bottom line is, when you get into a lot of this, it’s like, okay, now what do you do when you’re a judge and you think the earlier court made a mistake? You can’t just blanketly, say, “We’re going to toss it out because it was a mistake!”
Nor can you just say, “Well, we’re going to keep it because this is what the early court read.” You have to have a clear set of guidelines as to when it’s okay to overturn the law. And that’s what I do in the chapter on decisis. And that’s why I argue that, yes, they did overturn Roe,
and if you look at the reasoning that Scalia gave in that ruling, when you then go and look at something like Obergefell, you can you can say Obergefell was not a good ruling. But I don’t think it’s going to be overturned. And that’s because the same reasoning that applied to overturning Roe does not fit when you go to overturn Obergefell and I basically point out why.
And I don’t see where you get that overturned.
EP: Okay, one of the things, just as a side comment then, a lot of the time, and I’d like to just clarify for people, a lot of times, we debate these decisions on the result. And you’re, you are focusing on the reasoning or the process. Can you comment briefly on that? Because I think that’s an important part, of getting us to be able to discuss effectively, is looking at the process. And also that leads us to looking at the unexpected effects of the law or a ruling.
Elgin: Yes. Yeah. In any court case, you’ve got a whole bunch of things going on, particularly when the Supreme Court is making constitutional ruling and when they make a constitutional ruling, they are looking at sort of the broader issue, but they’re also looking at the case, the case directly in front of them.
And so then they have their reasoning and their judgment. Their judgment is what people focus on. Roe was overturned. Roe was, you know, Roe was passed initially, and was overturned later. Basically the people directly involved when the judges ruled, they fundamentally just wanted to know, did they win or did they lose? However, what’s actually more important for the country is why did they rule the way they did?
Because, what they ruled you may agree with what they ruled, but if they ruled for the wrong reasons, they may put some precedents and reasoning into constitutional jurisprudence that will then affect later rulings down the road. And I have an example of that in Everson vs Board of Education, where the court made a ruling that was pretty much in line with all the rulings on religion that had been done up until that point.
But their reasoning undermined the, the foundations of what people had believed. And so they effectively rewrote the First Amendment when they did that. And so if you like the outcome here, you think, oh, ‘Everson was a great decision’, but it also resulted in a lot of other decisions down the road, which fundamentally changed how we view the First Amendment, which, you know, we’re not supposed to be changing constitution through the courts.
We should change the Constitution through the constitutional amendment process. When the Court does a constitutional change, it’s basically a dictatorial way of making a change. It’s not a democratic way of making a change. So when the court rules on the Constitution, if they’re not sticking to the Constitution, but they’re imposing a view on the Constitution, then that’s a problem.
EP: We’vebeen talking about your chapter on Law and Justice, you argue that the growing trend of citizen lawsuits is a problem.
What are they? And that’s a key question, because I don’t think a lot of people understand what you’re talking about here. And how do they threaten democracy?
Elgin: Well, citizen lawsuits are lawsuits that allow individuals to sue on behalf of the American people or on behalf of other groups. You know, if you’re if you’re wronged in some action, what legally is called a tort, you can always sue, or almost always sue, for damages.
But if you’re not involved in the case, then you’re not allowed to sue. This goes back, it goes back a long time and that power is transferred to the the government. Do you have to have a prosecutor? You have to have a government agency bring that suit. And so what was happening is the federal government wouldn’t bring suits in certain cases.
And so they began to allow what are called, “citizen lawsuits”. And so, for example, you own a piece of property in Wyoming and you want to build a house, or you want to put up some structure on it. Well, somebody in New York who doesn’t want the environment touched can now sue you and stop what you’re doing and
that causes all kinds of problems. The biggest problem for democracy is that it transfers the decision-making process, in such cases, away from the legislatures and away from people who are, you know, putting off power to enforce laws, and transfers it to judges. And really, what’s happening now is you’re actually having laws being written deliberately, somewhat vague, because if you write them vague, then it’s hard for people to really get, you know, excited about them and you can get them passed.
And you can also deny that you’re doing. And then once they’re in place, citizen lawsuits can be filed and suddenly a judge has this case brought before him. He’s got to make a decision. Is this covered by the law or not? And so when he, the judge, makes a ruling, that’s not a democratic process.
That’s a court making a ruling. It’s more like akin to a king than it is to a legislature. And suddenly that’s setting precedent that’s used elsewhere. So you’re having what should be political debates, that should take place in the public square — you’re having them take place in courtrooms, and you’re having judges making decisions even, you know, we’ve talked about starry decisis in the previous question.
Judges maybe taking on a role they don’t really want to take on or they do want to take on. They’re inserting their views where their views shouldn’t be allowed with citizen lawsuits. The judge doesn’t really have a choice. Judge can’t really say, “Well, this, I’m just not going to rule because I think this is a democratic process.”
He’s got to make a ruling. He’s got the case before him. and therefore you’re taking things out of the democratic process. You’re putting them into the legal process and in the legal process, you know, it’s very difficult to get a democratic response. And even even if the public disagrees with it, there’s not much they can do about it.
EP: Okay. So, particularly vague laws would tend toward this. Are there laws being passed, do you think, where the legislature is actually just opening the door to that? [Oh, yeah.] So there’s an intention there to get something legislated that you could not have got legislated democratically?
Elgin: Yes, that that definitely does happen on occasions.
And so what’s what’s happening now is you’re getting these citizen lawsuits, but then you’re also getting counter citizen lawsuits. So you may have groups on one side of an issue suing to get the judge to impose their views on a situation, but then you get counter citizen lawsuits to counter sue. And again, the judge ends up having to make decisions.
It’s not a democratic process. It’s a legal process. And so if you want democracy, if you want the people to have a say in the rules that govern their lives, then you really need to have this worked out in the legislature. And everyone complains about the legislature. Yeah, I do my fair share of complaining.
You know, but not a lot of people who don’t do their fair share complaining that, well, there’s a quote. I’ve used it a couple of times from, you know, Churchill. So, you know that “many people complain that in this world of sin and woe about democracy and it’s the worst of all forms of government, — except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.”
EP: Yeah, but we’ve got the complaint without being able to propose a good alternative. And I use that quote all the time. I sometimes use it on myself. I really hate this, but…okay, well,
Elgin: It’s a key aspect in terms of democracy. It’s a key aspect. Everybody loves democracy. You know, they love the democratic process. They love elections… when they win. The question is, what do you do when you lose? And if your response is to go to the courts…that’s a problem. Because the democratic process requires us to talk to one another. It requires us to to listen, because you can’t just talk one-sidedly and view talk as explaining why the other side is wrong.
You’ve got to listen. You’ve got to work for a compromise. It’s hard. In my book on the Constitution, I talk about the Constitutional convention, and it was, it was very hard. I mean, there were some of the delegates who just got up and left. Never came back. There were days where they were in debate and they basically said, “Okay, we’re going to put this topic off to the side.
We’re going to go to something else for a while to give people a chance to cool down, reconsider their positions.” It was — it was hard fought. I mean, sometimes, you know, when I talk about consensus, I like that word much more than compromise. And when people hear the word compromise, they often think about, ‘oh, well, we’re just going to give in to the other side.’
No. Consensus is really a give and take where you have to to work together and you have to, to listen and look for common ground and look for ways. You know, if you go into the idea, I want all or nothing, there’s a good chance you’re going to end up with nothing. And so even if you get all, you may only get all temporarily.
So you need to have a consensus. And that’s something you need to strive for. It is not easy. It’s very difficult. But that’s the heart of democracy.
EP: Let me ask you a question here on, similar to citizens lawsuits, but actually done officially. Have you, seen, any of, how should I say prosecutorial overreach? That is a prosecutor inventing laws in order to be basically trying, through the court, to extend a law in a way that the legislature, legislature would never have intended it to be used?
Elgin: Well, yeah, you see that both ways. You see prosecutors selectively prosecuting. And I want to stay away from, you know, political trials, political candidates. Well, but you see this in, you know for example, in New York City. This is a current case, but you had, Alvin Bragg, and he’s basically going after Daniel Penny for as a citizen who stepped in and, you know, subdued a violent person who was threatening people on the subway.
Unfortunately, you know, that person died. And yet, on the other hand, the cops that or the illegal aliens that beat up the cop, he’s doing plea deals with them and they’re out on bail, and one of them was just brought back in on another charge. And the judge was very upset saying, “You know, you can’t, …keep letting you out if you go back and commit more crimes!”
Which actually kind of struck me as very strange for a judge to say, because why didn’t the judge just put them in jail, you know. Illegal aliens here without bail, attacked a police officer, or is accused of attacking a police officer, now is accused of committing other crimes? Some of them have already tried to flee the state! You think they might be a flight risk and need bail?!
But this idea where you can receive bail depending on the crime you commit, and whether you will get charged or not, oftentimes depends on whether the prosecutor likes you or not. And if you’re doing something the prosecutor doesn’t mind, then they’re not going to charge you. If, you know, that’s not justice. That’s really onerous in terms of the rule of law because there’s no consistency there.
And, I quote Justice Jackson from back in the 40s, warning about this, and it’s basically the subject of that book I talked about earlier, Three Felonies a Day where, you know, you look at the the massive growth of regulations and how much regulations, you know, think about the size of the tax code just in and of itself?
Not much. All the other regulations. Right. Tax officials can’t keep it all straight. If you give three dead people have done this, you give three different tax returns to three different people to prepare experts in the field, and they’ll come back with different figures because it’s just too complex. And so then to have a prosecutor be able to look at that and say, “Okay, I’m going to see if I can get you on something.”
That’s where you get ‘three felonies a day’. And what really alarms me is the growth of what I would call process crimes, where they’re going to investigate you and when they can’t find something, they will then charge you with perjury or something, because you can get into a ‘he said — she said’, I mean, our memories are not that good!
Very few people can remember, can accurately remember, everything precisely from two years ago, probably even two weeks ago. So, you know, if you get asked about it, you will probably give a slightly different statement than somebody else. But if the prosecutor wants to get you, they can say, ‘Well, that’s it. Somebody else must obviously be telling the truth, and you must obviously be lying.
And you lied to keep me from finding the crime that I was never able to find. And therefore, I’m going to prosecute you on perjury.’ You know that. That’s the sort of thing we’re running into increasingly. And that’s the sort of thing that is most damaging. I mean, I start off the book with a history of Rome, and if you look at what was happening from about 100 BC to about 44, when, you know, Julius Caesar came in, one of the things that was going on was the increasing use of the legal system for political purposes.
And we’re beginning to see the same thing in this country. And that’s a very bad trend. The reason Julius Caesar, basically became a dictator is because his political opponents had accused him as being an enemy of the state, and he had no choice either, going to exile or come to Rome and be convicted because he couldn’t trust the justice system or basically come into Rome with his army and set himself up as dictator, which is what he did.
So these we’ve seen these things before, and they don’t turn out well.
EP: Okay. there’s about 15 questions that could follow up on that. But most of the answers, would take us far afield from the topic. So I’m going to go on and ask you about another chapter in your book.
Which is an interesting choice of, of how to open a chapter when you talk about American values. You start out with the story of a deserter and, what happened? [Jenkins?] Yes. go ahead. We actually had somebody recently who went across the border for strange reasons. We don’t know the end of that story.
Elgin: Yeah. this is a story of a guy who grew up in the 40s and 50s. He joined the National Guard because he liked how the women flocked to them and their uniforms, you know, good patriotic stuff. And he, eventually joined the army at a fairly good time. however, in the mid 60s, he found himself on his second tour in Korea.
He wasn’t happy. He wanted to go home. And he concocted a scheme that basically, he’s going to walk across the border, be picked up by the North Koreans. He had this vision of getting exchanged as a political prisoner and coming back. He figured he’d get court martial. But as far as he looked at it, at least he’s home. Long story short, he basically spent 40 years in North Korea because once the North Koreans got ahold of him, they wouldn’t let him go because he was a great propaganda trophy for them.
And so he spent 40 years in North Korea. And when he finally was allowed to leave and come back to the States, the Army did court martial him and basically gave him 30 days sentence and then suspended the sentence because they figured he’d already more than paid for his crimes. But when he came back, he started looking around.
e couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He was overwhelmed by something like Walmarts with the size and selection. And the reason I opened up the chapter with that is because we, most people today, like college, — people have no clue of how special this country is. Like Jenkins, they just think it’s just another country.
And they, you know, there’s nothing really going on here. When he walked across the border, he had no clue what he was giving up. And you see this occasionally with, you know, news stories of tourists in foreign countries getting picked up by the police and say, “Well, this wouldn’t have caused me a problem in the States!”
Yeah. It would not have caused you a problem in the States. There’s a reason so many people have wanted to come to this country and are continuing to come to this country. And there’s a reason that so many people have joined the military and fought and died for this country to preserve what we have. And most people don’t understand what that is, particularly the college students and stuff that I would teach.
And so that’s that’s why I have that chapter. Yeah. that’s why I, I get it because if you don’t know what you have, you basically won’t know — until you’ve lost it, what you’ve lost.
EP: There’s a whole chapter on that so people can read that up and, and get, some more information on that in the book.
Let’s get to the next question. Really, I think illuminates partly the title, because one of the things I’ve heard, as soon as I say, it’s about preserving democracy. And they see the Statue of Liberty, oh, this is America. And they’ll say, “We’re not a democracy. We’re a republic.” [Yes, we are.]
Yeah. The answer being yes. But this should give you a chance to focus in on, you know, exactly what all of that means when we say you’re critical of state initiatives. There’s going to be a number of them here in the state of Florida this,year. So we won’t talk about those.
Aren’t they the closest we get to direct democracy?
Elgin: Well, they’re the closer we get to direct. Let me let me make the statement that when I say preserving democracy, I’m talking about democracy as a generalized form of government as opposed to tyranny or monarchy or some of the other types of governments that are out there.
So inside of democracy, there’s a bunch of different categories of democratic forms of government, and one of those is direct democracy like they had in Athens or something. Another is a republic. And in my chapter on that, I very clearly show that one, the Founding Fathers did not like direct democracy. And for reasons that I specify in the book, they wanted a republic. They wanted the government to be the way it is.
And I talk about why they did, and I think they made some pretty wise decisions. And I basically go through their reasoning and their justifications for it. So, yeah, we are not a direct democracy. We are Republic and I think very deliberately so. I wouldn’t personally want it. I would not want a direct democracy. I don’t like the initiative process.
I have a long discussion of an initiative and, California Prop 72 and, it’s for me, it’s a great example because even some of its supporters, once it got passed, began looking at the fine print and realized they had no idea what they had just done, and they were trying to fix it. It was it basically, it set up a new institute and it exempted the institute from, the normal ethics and disclosure laws.
It gave them a huge pot of money, $3 billion and basically said they actually wrote into the Constitution of California that this law cannot be changed for three years, which has now passed and then it can only be changed with a vote of 70%, which it only passed with 59%. So, you know, they basically lock themselves into, being exempt from the laws, the normal ethics and, disclosure laws of the state of California with a big pot of money to hand out.
So, yeah, I’m not too, too keen. And things I point out is like, what are you supposed to do? In a democracy, and if someone puts forth the law, you’d be able to to propose an amendment to the law. Well, when we get a proposition, it’s a take it or leave it. You either have to vote up or down.
So let’s say you support A and you’ve got an, an initiative that’s going to support A. But buried in that initiative is a whole bunch of stuff you don’t like at all. Do you vote against your A because you, you know, that’s voting against what you want to do or do you vote for this initiative that you consider really bad?
It puts voters in a very awkward position. And when you have, you know, initiatives going into the, you know, in the Constitution or, like that was a constitutional amendment, the state of California, if you have amendments going in like that, that then make it very difficult to change, you know, how in any sense is that a good expression of democracy?
EP: Yeah. I face that every election.
Elgin: Well, that’s why we got representatives, because if your representative doesn’t represent you, and that’s something I talk about in the book as well, you can at least get rid of them. You can vote somebody out. If you get an initiative passed, it’s really tough to deal with.
EP: Even with all the process that we have here in the state of Florida for approving the summary of an initiative that goes on the ballot, I have yet to see an initiative that did not shock me at some point after reading the summary.
And then when I go to read the full text of the initiative, which of course, the majority of voters won’t, they won’t actually do that. And this is another case that I bring up. I wonder if you’d agree it’s another case where we very often, support or oppose based on whether we like the particular outcomes. If you want taxes reduced and the initiative reduces taxes, you like it.
Now, the next initiative may cause a whole bunch of additional taxes and you don’t like that one, but you don’t realize that the process has allowed a process that brought A, has allowed B to come in and and harm and do harm.
Elgin: Well, if you look at the prop 72, it was for stem cell research broadly, but it was 11,000 words long.
Right. How many people took the time to read all 11,000 words? And I remember one of the campaigns banned cloning. Right. Okay, great. It banned cloning people. And likely they wanted stem cell research, but they didn’t want cloning. Well, buried down in the in the law was a new constitutional right for somatic cell nuclear transfer.
When you go to the definition of what that is, that’s a form of cloning. So people voted for it because it banned cloning. And yet it actually, made a constitutional right for cloning in the state of California.
So it was the exact opposite of what some people were expecting. And that’s the sort of generalization you have. What if you support, stem cell research but you oppose cloning? What are you supposed to do with this bill?
Well, and then you get a citizen lawsuit based on it, and that should multiply the whole thing, because if it’s hard to read and determine what it means, that illustrates the problem.
We had an earlier question. Okay. Let’s get on, with this because I think we could discuss this for a while. I like this one. I want to ask I want to hear the answer to it. You defend the Electoral College. Why do you do that? Well, the Founding Fathers are trying to address a particular issue, which is how do you actually involve the entire country in the election without the Electoral College? What would happen is the large population centers would choose the president. Small population centers would have virtually no say. With the Electoral College, what that does is it forces the presidential candidates to essentially run a 50 state campaign. They can’t ignore small states that vote reliably one way or the other. But for the most part, they’re going to battle it out in areas that require them to address the nation as a whole.
If you want a president who’s the president of big cities and only the president of big cities, then you don’t need it. But if you want the president to be the president of the country, then you need the president to have a whole country focus. And he’s the only elected official that is national.
Your senators, they’re representing states.Yyour representatives, they’re representing their districts. Only the president represents the country. And the Electoral College requires them to basically run a national campaign.
EP: Okay. And that would all probably also add, Democratic in basic form does not always mean that not every vote counts equally.
Elgin: No, because the Electoral College is one of those areas it shifts the weight of some voters.
It attempts to balance the Constitutional convention and this is one of those compromises. One of the compromises that allowed the Constitutional Convention to exist was that the smaller states were deathly afraid of the larger states.
If you did not have the Electoral College, then essentially New York and Virginia would have pretty much elected the president, and the other states would have had little, to no, say. And that’s not what they wanted. They wanted all the states to have an impact, which is why in the Electoral College, they basically get a vote for each senator and a vote for each representative, which, divides the country out.
Now people say, yeah, well, that ends up in anomalies where the person that wins may not be the person that won the popular vote. That’s technically true. I’m not sure that would be the case. And I’m not sure how much would change, because you know, if you’re in California in a big Blue state, or if you’re in Texas in a big Red state, and you want to vote for the other candidate, your candidate is not going to win, right?
You can you can go vote. But then there’s a lot of people that don’t even bother to vote because they know their vote is not going to count. It’s extremely unlikely that Trump would win California or that Biden would win Texas. So, you know, if you’re if you’re a conservative, a Trump supporter who lives in California,
it really is that important, you know, to go to the polls and vote. You can say, oh, I’ve got to vote for my senator. Well, now it’s going to be a Democrat, or I’m going to vote for my representative. That’s probably also going to be a Democrat. So, you know, why bother? And there, you know, I would say you should go vote, personally.
But I know there are people who don’t bother. I’ve talked to them. Right. So. You know, if we suddenly had to run a nationwide campaign where you’re going after every single vote you can get in every single district, that’s going to be a vastly different campaign. And, you know, there’s you’re going to have a much more media focused.
It’s going to be much more, detached because you one of the things about campaigns. Yeah, it’s it’s how we get to choose our politicians. But it also is a feedback mechanism for the politician because they’ve got to go out and they got to shake hands and kiss babies and listen listen to constituents complain. And, you know, they’re only going to the big population centers because that’s where they get the most bang for their buck.
That’s going to have an effect. They’re not going to represent the country as a whole.
EP: Okay. There’s a lot of things that we could discuss about that whole process, but, we won’t.
Elgin: Well, it’s one of those things that there is no perfect answer, you know? Are there pros and cons?
Yes, there are pros and cons to each of these. I talk about political parties in a section of the book and the political parties versus all the multiple parties. You find it in a parliamentary system. They both have strengths and weaknesses. The big difference is that eventually when you’re trying to prove something like a president or a prime minister, eventually you’ve got to get down to a single person.
Everybody’s got to get divided into two groups: those who support the person who won and those who didn’t. Right. That requires building a coalition, right? In a parliamentary system, you vote for the parties. The parties then form the form the coalitions. And who can form the winning coalition becomes the prime minister. So it’s a two step process.
You first vote for a party, you then vote for the coalition. And the person who becomes prime minister, may be part of the your party, may be part of that coalition and you may not support them. So in our system with two parties, we still have coalitions. The difference is that coalitions get formed prior to the election.
And so, you know, you get the situations where you can vote for the Republicans, or you can vote for the Democrats because you know the group of people, neither party is monolithic. But there are lots of different groups with lots of different positions. And they come together in the party, and then you can either join that coalition because you like the person they got at the top or because the person on the other side is even worse.
However, whatever you do, your reasoning, you know what you’re voting for up front. The coalitions gets formed beforehand. As opposed to the multi-party system, in which the coalitions are formed after you vote. So you don’t really know. You may have a good idea, but you don’t really know. The other thing is multi-party systems, because they have so many parties, they tend to be more unstable.
That is not a good thing. And I point out in the book, in the four years before this, before October 7th, Israel had five governments in four years because they could not get a stable coalition together.
EP: Well, I was going to ask you, to defend the two party system, but you just did.
So I’m going to go on and ask you if there’s any changes. And I think that really all leads up to what you just said. Any changes that you would support to the way in which we elect presidents?
Elgin: Well, yeah, they can always improve the system. I’m not arguing that what the Founding Fathers gave us is carved in stone and cannot be changed.
What I do argue for is that if we’re going to make a change, we need to understand what their reasoning for it was, why they did what they did, understand what we’re doing, and is it going to make things really better? The analogy I use is: today when we make a change today, are we streamlining the process to make government run better, or are we knocking out key foundational supports without realizing it?
That’s going to cause the whole thing to come crashing down? And how would we know the difference? That’s that’s kind of the theme of the book. One change I personally would make, if you’re going to make me a dictator for a day, but it’s something I’ve mentioned to politicians, and
no one’s taking me up on it yet, but I’d like to see us change the way we select vice presidents. Currently, vice presidents are picked by the president for personal political reasons. They think it’s going to help them in this state. It’s going to help them in that state. Whatever. Whatever the reasoning is, they pick the vice president.
So when, God forbid, something happens to them and the vice president has to take over, you get somebody who literally was picked by one person, and nobody else had much say in that, at least publicly. The public had no say in it. Even worse, that person, because of incumbency and power structures, they become the de facto leading candidate for the next election.
They will, after the eight years is done or eight years later, that person will probably be the leading contender for that party’s nomination. Not because they’re a good person or anything else. It’s just because they’ve, the power of incumbency. They rack up a lot. I do talk about the power of incumbency and ways we can actually deal with that.
But at the moment it’s a real thing. It exists. And so, you know, we end up getting our presidents too often picked or constrained artificially because of the arbitrary choice of earlier presidential candidates. So I’d like to see that people ran for vice president much the same way they run for lieutenant governor or something. And, you know, obviously there’s there’s some issues there.
You want to make sure that, you know, personally, I think you should make sure that the president and the vice president of the same party, because it’s too you know, I’ve been in states where the governor and the lieutenant governor were not part of the same party. And it’s a problem. I think that’s important but how you would actually do the mechanics of it,
I don’t you know. That’s something I haven’t really thought that much about because it’s not that realistic. But it’s it is a change I’d like to see.
EP: Okay. In your book and in the course of this discussion, you’ve talked about a whole bunch of different problems. I guess that’s one of the, hazards of writing a book about the political system is that, you’re going to be talking about a lot of problems.so if you could wave a wand and fix one, what would you fix?
The biggest thing I would fix is I would, you know, wave a wand and get people to talk to each other in a good open discussion. If you do that and we, you know, and in the process we would have to shift to a more of a focus on building consensus. A lot of the problems we have are we don’t even realize we’re so much demonizing the other side.
We got to defeat the other side that we don’t even talk about why as much. The the country has to make a decision. The country has to decide: Are we going to go down Path A, or are we going to go down Path B?
One of the examples I use is Social Security. Social security is going bankrupt. Everybody admits it’s going bankrupt. They also admit the sooner we do something about it, the easier it will be. So it’s going bankrupt. It gets harder the longer we wait. And yet we don’t do anything. And why? It’s because there are two big paths to what you have to do to fix it.
And there’s not an agreement. And so the people need to basically reach an agreement as to what are we going to do. You know, we voted for people who understood. I mean, one of the problems I talk about, about representatives is they have to be able to represent. If the public doesn’t know what they want, then how can they represent that?!
pushing an agenda. Too much journalism is agenda journalism. And if you’re pursuing an agenda, you’re not pursuing a story. And therefore we’re falling into silos. We only listen to news reports where the people will agree with us.You go on one channel, you only get one party, on another channel, you only get another party.
That’s not a good way.
EP: Okay, well, I appreciate the time here. We’ve covered a lot of subjects. The book is Preserving Democracy. It’s the third edition. and seriously expanded. If you have one of the earlier editions, it’s a good idea to fill yourself in on some additional stuff. And it is going to be released next week.
You’ll be able to get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, a whole bunch of online, outlets, as well as an e-book and audiobook format. So, thanks again.
Elgin: Thank you.