So if you're pro-civilian resistance to tyranny, I suppose you supported the Oregonian federal occupation, the civil disruptions caused by Black Lives Matter, and the Alcatraz occupation?
Forgive me, but lately I've run into a lot of people who talk about the importance of enabling civil resistance until they actually see civil resistance and suddenly they're the living embodiment of law and order.
A president-elect exists having soundly lost the popular vote. Over half the voting population is begging the electoral college to be faithless. The very first acts pledged by the presidents staff are to immediately challenge long-standing civil rights issues only pressed by a relatively small minority of those polled.
What is your metric for tyranny, zepto? When, exactly, is the civil disobedience part of the founders intent? Do people need to shoot a gun to invoke the intent of the 2nd? Is having a gun with them not enough?
I think it's relevant to any discussion of the 2nd amendment to ask what it's actually for. I think the intent of the 2nd was to enable political expediency, but maybe you imagine something grander.
A president-elect exists having soundly lost the popular vote.
Soundly? A plurality, yes. Soundly seems like an exaggeration. What to you justifies the use of soundly?
Over half the voting population is begging the electoral college to be faithless.
Are you saying all (or nearly) who voted against Trump are in support of faithless electors?
I agree the voting population is split and there's a lot of dissatisfaction (to put it mildly). This sounds like hyperbole to me, which makes you sound like you're misrepresenting the facts, which plays right into the narrative that those against Trump are out of touch.
I'm not sure what your threshold of "soundly" is, but it's not a margin of 10000 people were talking about. It's an odd word to take exception to.
It's a genuine question Americans need to ask though: if presidents can win while losing the popular vote, does the current electoral college system exist only to enable that? Or can/should it do more in exceptional cases?
I'd argue that if the only reason the current system exists is to allow the Republican party to win on a popular loss (which is what it enables, Democrats only take the presidency with huge popular vote margins) then it should be no surprise that we are seeing widespread protests and civil disobedience.
I suppose were lucky that Democrats as a whole are less likely to own a gun.
My threshold for "soundly" would be at least 2 percent of popular vote. I agree that an actual threshold would be subjective. What's yours?
That we can have disagreement between the electoral college and the popular vote is also an issue that we need to look at very seriously. I'm not contesting that. I'm contesting your contention that Over half the voting population is begging the electoral college to be faithless. To my reading, there are two interpretations:
- "begging the electoral college to be faithless" is a colorful rephrasing of "voted for the candidate that did not win the electoral college"
- over half of those who voted are now asking electors to be faithless
Is there another interpretation that I'm just missing? I'm open to correction.
I guess it depends on what message you're trying to send and who you're trying to send the message to.
If you're addressing those who already agree or are likely to agree with you, the language doesn't matter as much, as it's clear what side you favor. Exaggeration, hyperbole, misrepresentation will generally go unnoticed or be forgiven. Your message is effectively "I'm on your side" and serves to energize those you agree with.
If you're looking for a wider audience, the language matters more, especially in a political environment as polarized as the one we're currently in, where both sides are hypersensitive to language and how it's used. Also, people respond emotionally: it takes active effort to parse messages rationally, particularly if they're messages you're not already inclined to agree with. This is why I'm paying attention to words like "soundly". Those who agree with you don't really care. Those who don't are going to respond emotionally, put off by the language and no longer listen to the content of the message.
Given the attention I've paid to this, you're not going to be surprised that it's something I think is really important. I'm not ready to accept that the divide in America is insurmountable, but to close it we need to be engaging each other across the divide.
If the Electoral College votes for Trump, there needs to be cross-party support in government to fight the efforts Trump you oppose, which means working with people who don't already agree with you.
> My threshold for "soundly" would be at least 2 percent of popular vote. I agree that an actual threshold would be subjective. What's yours?
The counts are not in, but it appears that >2% is indeed the number we're settling at. Historically the democrats need to win by 4% to reliably take the white house. I'd say that it is relative between the average statewide absolute margins and the popular vote's margin. This election was "close" for Trump in many districts, but is not close for Trump in the popular vote.
> "voted for the candidate that did not win the electoral college"
You do not "win" EC votes in most states. EC voters are installed to reflect the will of their states, but it's an explicit feature that they can override popular votes if they feel exceptional circumstances have been enacted. Ostensibly, this is why the system is the way it is. Over the last few decades, we've seen this system cleverly modified to strongly favor very specific states in the union.
Wisconsin, for example, has enormous political power over the entire nation. Not because it has more people, provides more resources, seats government, etc. No, the system has been carefully centered around areas where voting margins are narrowest.
In a simple popular vote, Clinton soundly defeated Trump. In our system, less than a quarter million votes decided an election with a margin million_s_ of votes on the popular. The truth is that this engineering takes place because those Republican politics are not remarkably popular or competitive outside of specific regions where a sort of slanted ideological arena has been constructed. The Republicans can't really outspend the Democrats effectively over time, so they limit the field to these battleground states with clever politicking.
> I'm not ready to accept that the divide in America is insurmountable, but to close it we need to be engaging each other across the divide.
I'm not sure exactly what you'd like me to say. Several people in Trump's proposed cabinet think I am a sub-human who needs to be re-educated to be less queer. I find it very difficult to be "centrist" about fundamentally asking me to accept that.
And that's just my personal axe. People of color have a whole another thing going on. A thing that certainly has roots in the actions of the Obama administration, but that Trump's new cabinet is promising to promote.
What exactly are the centrist terms of discussion for de-militarizing a police that recklessly endangers people of color and then refuses to prosecute police officers who violate new laws?
> there needs to be cross-party support in government to fight the efforts Trump you oppose, which means working with people who don't already agree with you.
I think we should do this from a civil side. But I also think civil disobedience is entirely appropriate at this juncture. People begging for order are the people with the least to lose.
So yeah, it's misdirected insomuch as we can simultaneously agree to work to keep the country running, but if it's used as a baffle to stifle unrest and upset, it's wrong. I maintain a professional relationship with people in my organization who voted one way or another, but I am very clear that I think this is a disaster. This is not a contradictory position; it's a quintessentially American one.
And for the record, I am all for modifying the system such that the popular and district votes come back in line. I am also very much in favor of runoff voting being mandated at a national level so that idiots like Stein and Johnson can run and not risk destroying close elections.
"The counts are not in, but it appears that >2% is indeed the number we're settling at."
Great! The numbers I've seen show it closer to .5%. For example:
"The most comprehensive vote-tracking analysis is published by David Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. As of 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 14, according to Wasserman’s calculations, Clinton led Trump by 784,748 votes -- specifically, 61,422,098 for Clinton, 60,637,350 for Trump, and 6,691,311 for other candidates."
Clinton 61,422,098 47.7%
Trump 60,637,350 47.1%
other 6,691,311
total 128,750,759
With the total vote not yet counted, different sources, sourcing the data at different times, I'm open to other sources for this data. I think one of the problems with the Electoral College is that it changes voting behavior, particularly in states that have a strong bias towards one candidate or the other, affecting the popular vote. This makes it more difficult to assess what the actual popular vote would be if there were no Electoral College. Publicizing exit poll results can have a similar effect, as can time zones. I also haven't looked closely enough to see what the estimates are that these different effects would have on the actual outcome.
"You do not "win" EC votes in most states."
Perhaps a poor choice of words. It was only an attempt to express how a state's votes get allocated to a candidate. (Btw, do you think that choice of words was important to what I'm trying to say? Or that it's a reflection of me in general, that I'm ignorant and to cast doubt on everything else I'm saying? I don't think I'm even arguing that the EC is a good thing! Am I giving you the impression I am?)
Regarding "engaging each other across the divide", I'm not implying some kind of centrist agenda. I do think there needs to be compromise of some variety if we're trying to address the issues of the population in general. Two buckets don't describe the population, yet the presidential election is effectively a binary choice. Yet we seem to be making it such when we not only stop listening and talking to the people who voted differently than we did, but actively work against them? I'm all for fighting for issues you believe in. I also want to make sure that I'm working to make sure I'm not alienating people who agree with me on a particular issue (or may, with some constructive discussion) by refusing to listen to what they have to say. Listening doesn't mean agreement, nor does attempting to understand constitute support. I also want to make sure I'm doing what I can to make what I want to say as effective as possible at reaching the people who don't necessarily agree with me.
Am I confused here? I'm honestly asking if there's a useful distinction between engagement (which I'm trying to argue for) and centrism (which I disagree with).
But I also think civil disobedience is entirely appropriate at this juncture.
Completely agree. I also know there are people who may want to support the same issues in other ways. I also hope it's clear that I'm not trying to silence or stifle any unrest and upset. I want it to be constructive. If you have suggestions for me on how to be more effective in conveying that message, I'd appreciate it, especially as I haven't necessarily been very effective here :)
I've been trying to make clear that I'm discussing language that's useful in making change. I'm not arguing about the Electoral College, or Trump's choices for cabinet positions. I think both of those are discussions very much worth having, and ones I am having. Just not here. I also want those discussions to bring people together, not further polarize society. Something I try to keep in mind is that if Clinton had won the Electoral college, there'd be a huge segment of the population very upset right now as well. Whether or not you think one side's feelings are justified doesn't deny the fact that they're having them.
If you don't want to talk about tactics for constructive discussion, that's fine. I certainly can understand that, too. The reason I entered the discussion is that I think you can be more effective at making your case by taking into account the words you're using to do so. So it's on me for entering a discussion about the Electoral College without explicitly wanting to argue one way or the other. I also take it upon myself to have not been able to do so here, given that was my goal.
Thanks for taking the time to engage with me. I've found it useful. I've appreciated it.
So... We are at 2% now with millions of votes still uncounted, and canvassing is giving back votes to HRC.
We've seen beginnings of evidence of strange vote count issues in some counties in Wisconsin that gave more votes counted for Trump than ballots cast in total, and as these are corrected Trump's lead in that state lowers noticeably and even threatened to flip some districts.
I'm curious if, upon this information, you're still in favor of the EC not being faithless.
Keep refreshing those numbers. They're changing rapidly, and the ones you used were at least a day old when you posted them.
We're almost at the point where even conservative counts put us at a point where no president has ever lost the election while winning the popular vote by this much.
If we cross that threshold we need to think long and hard about how the system can structurally provide that big a bias towards a specific candidate.
I'm incredibly frustrated by my inability to express clearly enough that whether or not the electors should be faithless was not why I initially commented. Hopefully I'll do better in the future. I wish you the best. Be well.
The point at which the 2nd amendment becomes relevant is the point at which a sufficiently large part of the population becomes motivated to act together to overcome an oppressive regime.
Being armed and yet not acting collectively to overthrow the government is the essence of government by consent.
Forgive me, but lately I've run into a lot of people who talk about the importance of enabling civil resistance until they actually see civil resistance and suddenly they're the living embodiment of law and order.