QUORA: What is the main purpose of the electoral college?
The main purpose of the Electoral College is as part of the checks and balances put into place by the Founders to prevent the rise of tyranny by preventing the concentration of political power—that is, the power of physical coercion—in any one branch or segment of government. The Electoral College serves both as a check on the power of the federal government over the states and on the dominance of large states over the entire nation. The Founders not only feared Kings but also majoritarian tyranny. The Founders studied history. One of the things they found was that democracies historically have given rise to factionalism, which inevitably leads to dominance by the most powerful electoral factions over weaker factions, manifested through elected legislatures or demagogic leaders.
Consequently, the Founders did not create an absolute, or what I call a fundamentalist, democracy. They created a free republic in which democracy is a constitutionally limited part. This is consistent with the fundamental principle of America. Contrary to the distortions of the so-called Progressives, the fundamental principle of America is the primacy of liberty based on individual rights, not the primacy of majoritarian democracy. (The term “democracy,” in fact, appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. That’s no accident.)
For more, see my comments here, here, here, and here.
Related Reading:
Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right
4 comments:
The purpose of checks & balances is to prevent the concentration of physical coercion in any one branch or segment of government? But, physical coercion can be evenly spread throughout all parts of government? It doesn't matter if it's initiatory or responsive?
POWER is delegated, said some Founders. As long as it comes from the bottom up, from 'the people', it's ok. Despite the enumeration of powers, other powers might be reserved to the state. How does that square with the other rights of the people in addition to their enumerated rights? It squares with the blanket concept of physical coercion and the garbage (pseudo-philosophy) in the heads of the people.
In the end there is only one check, and it's a reversal, not a balance: brute responsive physical force as per individual rights and the whole underlying philosophy of reason. We must seize that (details not mentioned here) for our freedom. We can't force the hordes and tons of meat out there to be free, but we can leave them free whether they like it or not. If they, hence, try coming after us, we'll rightly have the full power of law and government (the outline of the details not mentioned here) to respond with. Under individual rights, law and government, democracy and compromise is possible and essential, and checks need be no more than balances, in benign match ups.
While educating the kiddies, we must intellectually steam roll the adults, fiercely, who are beyond education. Politeness must be only window dressing. We must go beyond classrooms, academia, think tanks, panel discussions, etc., and go after them in the real world where it's dirty and no holds barred. That's the only way to retard them long enough, maybe, to allow education of kiddies to take hold.
"We must go beyond classrooms, academia, think tanks, panel discussions, etc., and go after them in the real world where it's dirty and no holds barred."
Mike,
Actually, that's akin to what I do in general conversation. I name exactly what any person who defends the regulatory welfare state is actually doing: engaging in thuggery, with the government as the hired gun and camouflaged only by the superficial cloak of the vote. I don’t let people get away with pretending otherwise.
No, you don't let people get away with pretending otherwise. But, they act on the pretense anyway, knowing it's false, maybe even arbitrary, because they want to make it real whatever the cost to whom. They are Ellsworth Tooheys.
Remember Toohey's pummeling of Peter Keating in Ayn Rand's FOUNTAINHEAD? Truly a horror scene, thus akin to a scene in the Hollywood movie, THE ROBE, where the Emperor Caligua, very privately, tried, unsuccessfully, to seduce a woman, a HORRIBLE scene.
Today, the fictional Toohey is multiplied in reality, 100's of M. of times. The people are all Keatings who have fessed up to Toohey and are 'making the best of it', unlike the woman in THE ROBE. They're all Tooheys, in submission, marching as per democracy unbounded.
Democracy, bounded or unbounded, is mindlessness. It must be bounded by brute physical force as per unalienable individual rights, meaning thus, by law and government vice the semi-criminal regime of today, the crime of which must be physically, forcibly, kicked out, if talk doesn't work, and I don't think talk will work. It must be separation, by brute physical FORCE, if needed.
The bounding of democracy by brute physical force as per unalienable individual rights is responsive or retaliatory force and, thus, an expression of REASON, and thus legitimate, in the face of the initiatory physical force of democracy.
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