In defence of the Electoral College: follow-up

Some timely links regarding my points made earlier about the effect of the winner-take-all method of awarding states’ electoral votes:

#1: conservative commentator Rich Lowry passes on an email from a Republican activist complaining about the winner-take-all system (which the writer erroneously claims was implemented by fin-de-siècle progressives). He goes on to whinge that a) Bush-43 had to promise steel tariffs to win West Virginia in 2000 (but surely that was more for Pennsylvanian consumption); b) Obama could close West Virginian coal mines because it had become a safe GOP state; c) Obama ignored the Gulf oil spill because Louisiana wasn’t a swing state; d) having elections contested in fewer states makes it easier for Big Gummint Librulz to “buy off a few select voters”; and e) rural voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania are “dictate[d]” to by Detroit and Philly. This litany of complaints has been rehashed on the American right ever since FDR and Truman began carrying large northern states by winning over racial minorities and union members.

#2: after failing yet again to carry Pennsylvania, Republicans there are again pushing to move the state away from the winner-take-all system. Last year they floated the idea of changing to the Maine/Nebraska method (one vote per congressional district plus two to the statewide winner); this time they want to allocate eighteen votes proportionally and the bonus two to the statewide winner.

Musings on electoral systems: geometric means in Bern

One of the challenges in designing any political system is the question of how to ensure proportionate representation and influence for racial and ethnic minorities. Two of the world’s best-known political scientists have offered different solutions. Arend Lijphart (in works such as Patterns of Democracy) has painted a picture of ‘consociational democracy’: proportional representation, parliamentary government, grand coalitions, and policy consensuses forged by bargaining between group elites. (Think the Netherlands, Belgium, or post-1998 Northern Ireland.) Donald Horowitz focuses on pre-electoral coalition-building, and boosts the alternative vote as a means of forcing candidates to reach out to other groups. (Unfortunately for him, his preferred example – Fiji – has never implemented the system fully and has never found a political modus vivendi between its Fijian and Indian populations.) Across the world, the push for minority representation yields a variety of arrangements – India’s reserved seats for scheduled castes and tribes, New Zealand’s Maori seats, and the United States’ racially-gerrymandered electoral districts to name just a few.

Being cleaved many ways by its linguistic (German-French-Italian) and religious (Protestant-Catholic) divisions, Switzerland is fertile ground for experiments in minority representation. One of its largest cantons, Bern, is something of a microcosm of the nation as a whole, with a small French-speaking minority in the north dominated by German-speakers elsewhere. After the Catholic French parts of the canton seceded in 1979 to form the canton of Jura, Bern realised it needed to meet the aspirations of the remaining (Protestant French) areas. It does this in two ways: guaranteed seats in the legislature and executive (like all Swiss cantons, Bern has a popularly-elected plural executive), and the creation of a 24-member quasi-legislative body for the region (the Conseil du Jura bernois) with power over certain culturally-sensitive matters.

Every four years, the Bernese people elect 160 members of the legislature (Grand conseil) and seven members of the executive (Conseil exécutif). The former has 160 seats, elected by proportional representation in large multi-member districts (see here for a previous post on Switzerland’s unique twist on PR). The Bernese Jura elects twelve of these, while the French-speaking community of Bienne-Seeland elects another three. At the same time, and using the same electoral system, the Bernese Jura elects the twenty-four members of the Conseil du Jura bernois. The executive election, however, is the most interesting, and uses a method to ensure fair representation unique in the democratic world.

Bern’s executive is elected by a two-round majoritarian system, common among Swiss cantons (some use a one-round majoritarian system, and two use proportional representation). One of the seven seats is reserved for a candidate from the Bernese Jura. If such a candidate obtains a first-round majority, they are elected, provided that among all candidates from the region, they had the highest ‘geometric mean’; otherwise, the candidate from the region with the best geometric mean in the second round is elected. The figure in question is the square root of the product of the candidate’s votes in the Bernese Jura and their votes across the canton (eg. a candidate obtaining 1000 votes in the region and 20,000 canton-wide would have a geometric mean equivalent to the square root of 20,000,000).

The use of the geometric means ensures that if two French-speaking candidates run equally well across the canton, the one who polled better in the Bernese Jura is elected, while if two candidates poll equally well in the Bernese Jura, the one with more votes in the rest of the canton is elected. In this way, candidates are given incentives to appeal to voters outside their region, but the preferences of the people of the Bernese Jura cannot be denied by the election of a French-speaking candidate whose support comes disproportionately from German-speaking areas. In recent years, a campaign for the popular election of the federal multi-member executive has proposed this method for ensuring that French- and Italian-speaking regions of Switzerland continue receiving their usual two seats should their proposal be adopted.

The ‘geometric mean’ method allows for the entire electorate of Bern to vote for its executive (as opposed to, say, having the German-speaking majority elect six and the Bernese Jura elect one) while deviating slightly from the one-man-one-vote ideal to give a geographically concentrated minority the opportunity to elect the candidate of its choice. One can imagine it being adapted for geographically dispersed minorities, provided there were some means of segregating their ballots from the rest of the population. It is designed for a multi-member majoritarian election, and might not be adaptable to proportional elections. Nevertheless, the constitutional protections for the Bernese Jura are an interesting mesh of Lijphartian ideas (proportional representation in the legislature) and Horowitzian ones (an executive electoral system which incentivises cross-ethnic coalition-forming).

In defence of the Electoral College 3

Part Three: Why the Electoral College is Good for America

In the preceding two posts of this series, I have shown how the focus of the 1948 and 1960 presidential campaigns on large northern states produced better outcomes for those Americans whose power was diluted in other organs of governmental power at the time – city-dwellers, racial and ethnic minorities, and unionised workers. In this part, I will make the case for the Electoral College, and recommend a few small changes which would improve its operation.

*Direct election would punish states with lower turnout (which is usually caused by having proportionally more poor and minorities – Hawaii, California, and Texas currently have the lowest rates of turnout in presidential polls). Under the current system, 436 of the 538 votes are distributed according to states’ total population, which includes non-citizens, those under 18, those not registered to vote, and those disenfranchised by various state laws – all of these groups are poorer and/or less white than the American people at large. The other 102 electoral votes do tilt the scales back to small, majority-white states, but this effect is outweighed by the effect of large states casting their entire electoral votes en bloc. The Electoral College thus ensures that a state’s influence on the presidential contest is not decreased by having a large minority population, or by random events which lower election-day turnout (such as hurricanes or uncompetitive down-ballot races).

*The Electoral College allows historically oppressed and marginalised groups the chance to be the swing voters: from Irish-Americans punishing the Democrats for Woodrow Wilson’s anglophilia in 1920, to Harry Truman’s appeals to African-Americans and Jews in 1948, to Kennedy’s success among Catholics in 1960, to non-whites providing the margin of victory in a few states for Obama in 2008, minorities concentrated in large states have benefited from being able to shift sizable blocs of electoral votes. Although diverse states such as New York, California, and Illinois are no longer swing states, Florida’s Cuban-Americans were pivotal in 2012, and Texas’ Latino population may be crucial in future election cycles.

*The Electoral College punishes candidates who attain large margins in a few states (which usually results from voter suppression or a lack of two-party competition). Historically, the Democratic lock on the South (itself due to Jim Crow) meant that scores of southern votes were wasted, giving the party the freedom to pursue swing voters in large northern states without risking many southern electoral votes. Direct election would have forced Democratic nominees to pander to segregationism, lest they risk a decrease in their popular vote totals in Dixie. Moreover, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 (with 39% of the popular vote) was made possible by his winning of narrow pluralities or majorities in almost all northern states.

*‘Faithless electors’ could prevent constitutional crises. There are two advantages to having 538 warm bodies, instead of relying on an automatic tally of electoral votes. In the case of a presidential or vice-presidential candidate dying (as happened with Horace Greeley in 1872 and John Sherman in 1912), the electors could switch their votes to the party’s new nominee. In the case of a 1968-style situation, in which an extremist third party candidate holds the balance of power, the major parties could trade electoral votes to put one of them over the top, thereby forming an analogue to the ‘grand coalitions’ used by European parties to keep the far-right out of power.

The Electoral College could do with a few changes, however:

*End the malapportionment of electoral votes, either by eliminating the 102 votes and having a 436-member College, or by increasing the size of the House so as to overwhelm the effect of the 102 ‘Senatorial’ votes.

*Bring back the ‘long ballot’. Between 1940 and 1980, all states adopted the ‘short ballot’, under which voters vote for a ticket and are considered to have cast one vote for each elector pledged to that ticket – in most states, the electors don’t even appear on the ballot. A return to voting for individual electors would allow voters to split their votes between two or more presidential candidates, and increase awareness of the electors’ role.

*Repeal state laws punishing ‘faithless electors’. In twenty-four states, electors could be fined or jailed for failing to vote for a dead candidate or for voting for another candidate in order to thwart an extremist third party candidate holding the balance of power.

*Bring back electoral fusion. Imagine if Al Gore had been able to offer spots on Democratic slates to electors pledged to Ralph Nader, and to have those slates appear on both the Democratic and Green ballot lines. The Nader electors could vote for their candidate, but could switch to Gore if needed to give him 270. (Fusion slates were used by the Greenbackers and Populists, and also by Oklahoma Republicans in 1912, who slated pro-Roosevelt electors in an attempt to fend off the Bull Moose threat.)

*Bring back unpledged electors. Although unpledged electors are most associated with the defence of Jim Crow in the 1944, 1956, 1960, and 1964 elections, they could be used by any ideological group. Instead of backing Ron Paul or Gary Johnson, for example, the libertarian movement could nominate unpledged slates; if victorious, their votes could be traded to one of the major-party nominees in return for an end to the War on Drugs or an end to drone strikes.

The Electoral College is part of what made America great. I can only hope that when that glorious day comes when Australia becomes a republic, we see fit to copy this magnificent institution.

In defence of the Electoral College 2

Part Two: 1960 and 1968

In 1960, both major parties structured their campaigns around the need to win the large northern states, which just as in 1948, would decide the election. The Democrats nominated Kennedy, whose ability to attract Catholic votes in those states would prove invaluable (and any backlash from Protestants would be concentrated in safe, one-party states). Kennedy’s appeal to Catholics, Jews, African-Americans, and workers helped him win New York (45 EVs), Pennsylvania (38), Illinois (27), Michigan (20), and Massachusetts (16). His Republican opponent Richard Nixon, then considered to be on the GOP’s liberal wing, carried California (32) and Ohio (25), and was competitive enough in New York that the electors pledged to him on the Republican ballot line defeated those on the Democratic one (Kennedy won the Empire State thanks to its unique system of electoral fusion; his votes on the Liberal Party line provided the margin of victory).

Like Truman, Kennedy faced the prospect of being denied a majority in the Electoral College by the defection of southern Democrats. A slate of unpledged electors defeated the regular Democratic slate in Mississippi, while Alabama’s Democratic Party nominated a slate of eleven electors including six unpledged and five pledged to Kennedy. (The dispute over how to count Alabama’s popular vote is at the heart of the controversy over who won the national popular vote in 1960.) Those fourteen unpledged electors had hoped to be joined by others from the Solid South to form a third bloc, which would bargain with Kennedy or Nixon for changes to federal enforcement of civil rights laws – in the end, only one other elector joined them, a Republican from Oklahoma who had earlier tried to unite the GOP and Dixiecrats against the “labor-socialist nominee” Kennedy; the fifteen cast their votes for Senator Harry Byrd (D-VA). The strategy was unsuccessful, as Kennedy gained more electoral votes from small swings in large northern states than he lost from defections in the South.

The tenor of the 1960 campaign was decidedly northern and urban. Kennedy called for the release of Martin Luther King from jail, while Nixon’s running mate (and proportional electoral-vote proponent) Henry Cabot Lodge promised to appoint an African-American cabinet secretary; evidently, neither ticket was pursuing a ‘southern strategy’. When Protestant groups circulated vicious anti-Catholic pamphlets attacking Kennedy, Nixon distanced himself immediately – any gain among nativist voters in one-party states would be useless if he alienated Catholic ‘Eisenhower Democrats’ in large northern ones. The ‘unit rule’ once again ensured that those Americans whose political clout was diluted by malapportionment in Congress and state capitols would be those who would choose the President.

There was little formal effort to reform the Electoral College for a while after 1960. President Johnson endorsed the abolition of the electors themselves (leaving the voting system in place) and the Dixiecrats ended their flirtation with unpledged electors when they found a GOP nominee to their liking in 1964. The election of 1968, however, produced a number of nightmare scenarios which caused people to question the merits of the College. A few more states won by George Wallace or a shift of a few thousand votes here and there from Nixon to Humphrey, and the two major party candidates would have had to bargain with Wallace to obtain an electoral vote majority, or with southern congressional delegations to win a contingent vote in the House.

The threat of Wallace playing kingmaker could have easily been dealt with. Nixon could have accepted Humphrey’s proposal to have the runner-up major party cede enough electoral votes to give the other 270. Democrats and Republicans could have run combined slates of electors in the South to deny Wallace victories (ironically, this was the tactic used against Lincoln in some northern states in 1860). Or they could have fought it out in the Electoral College and forged a compromise solution in the contingent election. The events of 1968 were enough to spook America into ditching the Electoral College. Rep. Emmanuel Celler (D-NY) and Sen. Birch Bayh (D-IN) almost got an amendment passed which would have instituted a direct popular vote, and polls showed that they had overwhelming public support. It passed the House easily, but in an ironic twist, the body which had dealt such blows to southern segregationist power in 1948 and 1960 was saved by the threat of a Strom Thurmond filibuster.

In defence of the Electoral College 1

It seems that no American political institution has fewer defenders than the Electoral College. Its critics charge that it is malapportioned in favour of small states, wastes the votes cast for losing candidates, allows ‘faithless electors’ to substitute their own judgement for the will of the people, depresses voter turnout, and threatens a chaotic contingent vote in the House if it can’t reach a majority. In the run-up to its quadrennial ‘meeting’ on December 17, the New York Times has editorialised that it “remains a deeply defective political mechanism” and was “born in appeasement to slave states”. To see why the College persists, it might be instructive to look at the ways in which some key elections were shaped by its imperatives, and why reformers sought to abolish it.

Part One: Electoral College Defeats Dewey

In the 1948 presidential election, Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey both stood a chance of carrying the biggest electoral prize of the day – New York’s 47 electoral votes. Truman also had to defend his left flank against renegade former VP Henry Wallace, who threatened to act as a spoiler. Needing to counter Wallace’s and Dewey’s appeal to African-American and Jewish voters, Truman desegregated the military, created the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and went against Britain by recognising Israel’s independence. Truman did lose the Empire State, but carried enough of the other large northern states to win the election handily.

The Electoral College shaped the election in a number of ways. The fact that most of the large northern states were also swing states meant that both parties had to nominate a candidate from the liberal wing of their parties – no Dixiecrat could challenge Truman, and a Dewey was preferable to a Taft or a Macarthur. The fact that those states cast their electoral votes en bloc meant that discrete minorities within them were lavished with attention – hence both candidates’ focus on African-Americans, Jews, and union members. Crucially, the fact that seven ex-Confederate states were safe for Truman (the other four supported Strom Thurmond, but their combined strength was less than New York’s) ensured that he could safely ignore southern pressure and forge ahead with civil rights initiatives. The concentration of African-Americans in electoral vote-rich northern states presented the candidates with too great a prize to ignore, and Truman, Dewey, and Wallace all courted their votes.

With minorities playing such a key role in re-electing Truman, it was no wonder that conservative interests blamed the Electoral College. In 1949, a proposal championed by liberal Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) for allocating states’ electoral votes proportionally was taken up in the House by race-baiting Congressman Ed Gossett (D-TX). The practice of states casting their votes en bloc, Gossett claimed, assisted African-Americans, “the radical wing of organized labor”, and those who “support the Zionist position on Palestine”. Another southern Congressman lamented in 1952 that presidential candidates chased after New York’s black- and communist-dominated 45 electoral votes (it had lost two seats after the 1950 census). The Lodge-Gossett Amendment would have made little difference to one-party states (Democratic fiefdoms in the South and GOP strongholds in the Midwest and Plains) while ensuring that New York’s votes would be split, making the state a much less enticing prize. The obvious consequence of this would be a shift in control within each party from metropolitan liberals to Dixiecrats and Taft Republicans, as presidential elections could be won by ignoring large, urbanised northern states.

Similar constitutional amendments were proposed in Congress during the 1950s, including some which provided for electoral votes to be awarded by congressional district (as is done today by Maine and Nebraska). (Note that prior to the early-1960s SCOTUS cases on malapportionment, rural congressional districts usually contained fewer people than urban ones.) Speaking against such changes in a 1956 speech, Senator John F. Kennedy (D-MA) noted that while congressional and state legislative districts were malapportioned in favour of the countryside, and the Senate was malapportioned in favour of small states, presidential elections gave the nation’s urban centres their moment in the sun due to the ability of city-dwellers to shift dozens of electoral votes to either party’s column. “It is not only the unit vote for the presidency we are talking about”, he explained, “but a whole solar system of governmental power. If it is proposed to change the balance of power of one of the elements of the solar system, it is necessary to consider the others”. Kennedy knew that the ‘district plan’ and the ‘proportional plan’ would dilute the influence of urban, non-white, and non-Protestant America.

Don’t Redistrict with Texas

Following the 2010 Census, Texas’ representation in the House increased from thirty-two to thirty-six seats, thanks to population growth driven almost entirely by racial minorities. Faced with an influx of (mostly) Democratic voters, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature proposed a redistricting plan which aimed at reducing their influence. That map was recently struck down by a federal court, and the Supreme Court has forced the Lone Star State to use an interim, judge-drawn congressional map in this year’s election (downloadable from here). The fight over where and how to draw the four new districts illustrates the advantages, as well as the shortcomings, of the Voting Rights Act.

Like most southern states, Texas must have its statewide redistricting plans precleared with either the Justice Department or the federal district court in the District of Columbia. In 1992 and 2002, Republican Attorneys-General were able to shape state maps to their liking; this year, the Democrats are able to block attempts at diluting the voting strength of their supporters. In a state in which racial minorities now form thirty-nine percent of the population, the Texas map, which retained only ten majority-minority districts from last decade and created no new ones, was never likely to be approved. Echoing the language of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s majority opinion in the landmark 1992 redistricting case of Shaw v. Reno, the court determined that the shape and composition of Texas’ districts could not be explained without reference to race, and that the map violated the Voting Rights Act.

Passed in 1965, the VRA was intended to end the disenfranchisement and under-registration of African-American voters in the South. Over the decades, federal courts have interpreted it as granting a geographically compact minority population the right to have a district drawn for them. The result has been the packing of African-Americans and Latinos into safe urban Democratic seats, leaving the suburban and rural South covered with safe Republican ones, and allowing the GOP to paint minority office-holders as beneficiaries of the electoral equivalent of affirmative action. The increase in minority office-holding that has resulted has been balanced by a ‘bleaching’ of most districts, so that most white politicians no longer need to appeal to a significant share of minority voters.

The Texas controversy demonstrates the ways in which state legislatures would dilute the votes of minorities if left to their own devices. As noted by Robert Draper in the Atlantic, the new map preserved the five-way split of Fort Worth, in which heavily-growing minority communities are ‘cracked’ into parts of Anglo-majority districts, until the judge-drawn plan granted the city a sixth, majority-minority, seat. Elsewhere in the state, Democratic-leaning groups such as liberal whites in Austin and Mexican-Americans in the state’s rural south are split over multiple districts. Without the constraints imposed by the VRA, Texas Republicans would have been able to gerrymander the state without limits in order to stave off the partisan effects of the state’s changing demographics.

On the other hand, the shortcomings of the VRA are numerous. While electoral reformers in the rest of the world try to move away from single-member districts and first-past-the-post, both features are seen by American litigants as the best way to protect minorities from vote dilution. By equating minority office-holding with racial progress, the VRA channelled the energies of the civil rights movement into re-electing minority members of Congress. By limiting its provisions to racial and linguistic minorities, it fails to protect other types of minority (such as San Francisco’s gay population, who were undoubtedly victims of hostile gerrymandering in the 1970s and 1980s). Worst of all, the focus on racially-gerrymandered districts has diverted attention from the more widespread phenomenon of less-race-conscious partisan gerrymandering.

It’s time to recognise that no system of single-member districts can make the House live up to John Adams’ wish that it would be “in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large” by adequately reflecting America’s ideological and demographic diversity. Larger, multi-member seats choosing members of Congress by open-list proportional representation or by the Single Transferable Vote would better achieve the goals of the VRA without leaving voters at the mercy of computer-assisted legislative gerrymandering. It would also allow any minority, whether racial or otherwise and whether geographically compact or dispersed, the chance to achieve its fair share of representation.

Presidential debate review: Obama v. Romney at Hempstead, N.Y.

Hempstead, a town in eastern Long Island which is home to the New York Islanders, hosted the second presidential debate on Wednesday afternoon (AEST) at Hofstra University, using the ‘town hall’ format. I dread these events – the format is designed to produce mushy, pandering sentiments from candidates, who are forced to nod their heads and look sympathetic while some random tells them their life story and asks them some soft-ball question. The 1992 town hall debate, in which Bill Clinton told an audience member: “I feel your pain”, marked one of the low points in the Oprah-fication of American politics. Obama and Romney continued the sordid history, but also provided some entertaining policy arguments, styles of walking around the room, and mispronunciations of voters’ names.

1) Obama and Biden have spent more time talking than Romney and Ryan in all three debates so far. Somewhere, some right-wing blog will use this to claim that ‘omg teh lamestream mediaz is librulz!!!11!’ But seriously, one wonders whether the moderators take note of this and allow Romney to use more time in the third debate.

2) Moneybags Mitt likes him some black gold. He wants to drill for it on federal land, he wants to pipe it down from Soviet Canuckistan, and he wants lots of tax credits for Big Oil. He claims that the Obama administration hasn’t drilled enough oil on federal land, and gets rather stroppy when Obama disputes those claims. This issue seems to get Mittens fired up more than anything else.

3) Here’s three Romney lines from the debate: “I was a missionary for my church”; “I was a pastor for my congregation”; and “I went over there to help them with the Olympics” (‘there’ being Salt Lake City). He goes to a lot of trouble to avoid mentioning the M-word; not only in the context of religious matters, but on at least two occasions he buttressed his business credentials by referencing his work on the ‘Olympics’ without mentioning whether they were the summer or winter Games, and WHAT CITY THEY WERE HELD IN. Also not mentioned are the country he missionary’d in (France) and the nature of his position in the Mormon church (the freaking equivalent of a freaking archbishop).

4) One thing Mittens doesn’t have trouble with is launching into discussions of things that largely remain inside the conservative bubble. Over the two debates, he’s mentioned Solyndra, the Keystone Pipeline, the Fast and the Furious, the ‘Apology Tour’, the ‘reset’ with Russia not working, and the Benghazi embassy attack as result of anti-YouTube video protest thesis. All have been met with the worm flatlining as low-information undecided voters emit a collective ‘WTF?’

5) The Great Gender Gap of 2012 didn’t quite manifest itself as clearly. The ‘worm’ (actually the collected spontaneous opinions of thirty-five Ohioan undecideds in a room with the lovely Erin Burnett) didn’t diverge as it did in the first debate, and indeed the female ‘worm’ was hidden behind the male one for much of the night. When Obama waffled on about the finer details of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, it flatlined like a West Coast Eagles player on Mad Monday. None of this, of course, will stop the establishment media from continuing it’s anointing of middle-class suburban white women as the Official Swing Demographic of 2012.

6) There were some more weird questions. ‘Governor Romney, how are you different from George W. Bush?’ ‘What’s your position on assault weapons?’ ‘President Obama, why should I vote for you again this time?’ And some forgetting of names: “Lorraine… Lorena… is it Lorena?... hi, Lorena… no, it’s Lorraine… hi, Lorraine.” Apparently, Obama was the winner (it’s hard to tell with these things), and this should stem the Romney ‘bounce’ in the polls.

World Cup qualifier review: Iraq v. Socceroos at Doha

Wednesday morning (AEST), the Socceroos played their fourth match (of eight) in the second group stage of the Asian qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup. Due to Iraq being, you know, war-torn, the Iraqis played their ‘home’ match in front of a far-from-capacity crowd at the Grand Hamad Stadium in Doha. Going into the match, the two teams (as well as Oman) were tied for third place in the five-team group, with Japan and Jordan ahead of them; a finish in the top two is needed to go straight to Brazil, with the third-placed team needing to win two playoffs to get there.

Iraq have qualified for only one World Cup – Mexico ’86, where they lost all three matches (and were tortured by Uday and Qusay Hussain upon returning home). They have enjoyed some success in recent years, including a famous victory at the 2007 Asian Cup, and are coached by Brazilian legend Zico. However, unlike certain Gulf countries given to dishing out citizenship to fresh-off-the-plane Brazilian imports, Iraq’s footballing talent is home-grown; the Kurds, like the Azeris across the border in Iran, provide more than their proportionate share of the national team. Its clubs, heavily concentrated in a Baghdad, have never featured in the knockout phase of the Asian Champions League, and its overseas-based players tend to play in Europe or in the Gulf.

The match took a while to heat up; Iraq could marshal four defenders to the six-yard box to stop any Australian attack, but their sloppy finishing, as well as Mark Schwarzer’s capable hands, made it hard for them to create chances of their own. The Socceroos were forced to try from outside the area, and neither side could seem to convert set pieces into anything approaching a goal. An evenly-fought half (Australia led in the possession stakes 52% to 48%) ended goalless, with both teams earning a yellow card from the steady but restrained argy-bargy which the Korean referee was generally unable to keep a lid on.

The Iraqis came out of the blocks hard in the second half, conceding two free kicks in the first thirty seconds. A series of Australian barrages of the Iraqi goal was halted in the fifty-seventh minute, when Lucas Neill was cautioned for holding a counter-attacking Iraqi forward who would otherwise have had only Schwarzer to beat. Nevertheless, the Lions of Mesopotamia looked rattled, and the few minutes either side of the hour mark were punctuated by two Iraqi substitutions and a nasty foul on Robbie Kruse. From there, the game began to proceed at a staccato rhythm, as Iraq resorted to cynical fouls, usually targeted at Kruse, and always rewarded by the referee’s reluctance to pull out the yellow card. When the ‘Iraqi Kaka’ Alaa Abdul-Zahra scored from a length-of-the-field counter-attack in the seventy-second minute, and Kruse had to be substituted in the seventy-ninth after being hacked to pieces, it looked as if the Iraqis had mastered the tempo of the match and would emerge victorious.

A Socceroos eleven refreshed from two substitutions (Archie Thompson on for Alex Brosque and Tommy Oar on for Robbie Kruse) hit its stride in the final ten minutes. Seemingly out of nowhere, Tim Cahill headed a corner past a statue-like Iraqi goalkeeper and toward the far post in the eightieth minute. Four minutes later, from exactly the same position (ten metres from goal, a 50-55 degree angle to the goalkeeper’s left side), Archie Thompson headed a Tommy Oar cross into the same place. After trying everything else, they had finally found a way through the Iraqi defence – through the air, splitting the Iraqi keeper from his back four. From there, the Aussies cruised to victory, with their only hiccup being a caution for Tim Cahill one minute from the end of regulation time as part of the referee’s belated attempt to assert control.

The Socceroos looked lost at times, unable to capitalise on their technical superiority over the unpolished Mesopotamians. Corners and free kicks went unconverted, and on a few occasions the Iraqi catenaccio strategy resulted in Abdul-Zahra facing Schwarzer one-on-one; Australia were lucky that only one such situation ended in an Iraqi goal. On the other hand, the match reassured the nation that the ‘Roos can indeed win competitive matches, and swept away the irritation of last month’s 2-1 loss in Amman. Iraq relies heavily on its back four and on Abdul-Zahra, and its players are poor finishers and messy tacklers. It seems evident that a Socceroos team firing on all cylinders will have no trouble against Oman or Jordan, and your humble correspondent went to bed confident that the boys in verde y oro will wrap up qualification for Brazil in a clinical fashion next winter.

The Socceroos benefit from Oman’s 2-1 win over Jordan in Muscat, which halted a potential Hashemite charge up the Group B table. After four matches each, Japan lead the group with 10 points, Australia and Oman 5 apiece, Jordan 4, and Iraq 2. Australia has a bye in the next matchday, in November, so the next qualifier will be against Oman in Sydney next March, followed by a three-game stand in June – Japan at Saitama, Jordan at Melbourne, and Iraq at Sydney.

Iraq 1 (Alaa Abdul-Zahra 72’) – Australia 2 (Tim Cahill 80’; Archie Thompson 84’)

Cautions: Carl Valeri (AU) 19’; Salam Shaker (IQ) 42’; Khaldoon Ibrahim Mohammad (IQ) 61’; Tim Cahill (AU) 89’.

Vice-Presidential debate review: Biden v. Ryan at Danville, Ky.

Friday afternoon (Australian Eastern Summer Time), the vice-presidential debate between incumbent Joe Biden (D-Del.) and challenger Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) was held in the middle of nowhere, a.k.a. Center College in Danville, Kentucky. Biden was hoping to halt the Romney-Ryan ticket’s momentum after the Republican ticket’s uptick in the polls since the first debate, while Ryan needed to demonstrate that he was ready for the big time. In some measure, both probably achieved their goals, and both sides are desperately trying to spin it to make it look as if they won.

1) Biden was constantly frustrated by what he saw as Ryan’s dissembling and evasiveness. On occasions, he was amusing in his ribbing of his opponent; at other times, he brought back memories of Al Gore’s sighs against George W. Bush in 2000. He also had moments of extreme frustration, where he would talk down to the moderator and demand that he be given equal time (in fact, he spoke for longer than Ryan in total). How he is perceived to have performed will be determined by whichever one of these modes the media portray him in.

2) Ryan came across as knowledgeable and personable when talking about domestic policy, but his foreign policy talking points sounded as if they were taken verbatim from neocon propaganda (eg. the ‘reset’ with Russia not working, Obama going on an ‘apology tour’). Oddly, when asked about when he believed the U.S. should intervene in a foreign country, he gave a rather Kissingerian answer, that is, that it should do so only when doing so would be in its national interest. He also has a bit of a tendency to disguise his lack of foreign policy knowledge by name-dropping generals he’s met or places in Afghanistan he’s visited.

3) The second-last segment of the nine was a weird one. The moderator said something to the effect of: ‘you’re both Catholics. Whaddya reckon about abortion?’ Not sure what the point of this was, other than to make Ryan look the better Catholic for adhering to the Church’s position on abortion, or to provide the media with more talking points about ‘TEH GENDER GAP!!!11!’ Speaking of which, it wasn’t as pronounced in this debate as the last one – Biden spent at least half of his talking time more favoured by men than by women, and the two ‘worms’ converged more than they did last week.

4) There wasn’t much in the debate that will serve as a ‘game-changer’. The most exciting part was when Ryan compared his tax plan to John F. Kennedy’s tax cut/stimulus, causing Biden to ask “Oh, so you’re Jack Kennedy now?” For a second I thought Biden was going to do a Lloyd Bentsen on him, but it wasn’t to be.

Presidential debate review: Obama v. Romney at Denver

Thursday morning (Australian Eastern Standard Time), Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) went mano a mano in the first of three presidential debates, held at the University of Denver’s Magness Arena. My thoughts:

1) Obama sometimes stumbled with his words and looked ordinary, but he did much better in split-screen mode than Romney. When Romney is speaking, Obama looks down respectfully, whereas when Obama speaks, Romney gives him a slightly contemptuous look. But I agree with most commentators, who say that Romney was the winner on the basis that he exceeded expectations.

2) The gender gap was very noticeable on CNN’s ‘worm’ graphic; I don’t think I saw Romney leading among women or Obama leading among men for the entire (one-and-a-half-hour) debate. This fits into the whole ‘Republican War on Women’ narrative that the Democrats have been using this year.

3) What a pair of un-ideological technocrats the candidates are! ‘An independent study says my economic policies will reduce the budget deficit’. ‘I’ve got another independent study that says your independent study is wrong’. Whatever happened to this ideological rancour that the Very Serious People say is paralysing Washington?

4) The debate won’t be any sort of ‘game changer’ that wins the election for one of the candidates – it probably won’t shift the polls more than one percentage point either way. Romney’s slipperiness regarding which tax loopholes he plans to abolish to help balance the budget, however, is something which could spiral out of control for him. Without providing something resembling a detailed answer, the Obama campaign could keep hitting him and make him look evasive.

Corona the Vote!

My favourite recent bit of political news from across the Pacific comes in the form of this chart at The Monkey Cage, which shows the partisan preference and propensity to vote of drinkers of different types of beer. The key takeaways: Democrats tend to win among full-strength beers and Republicans among light beers, and my own preferred ale, Corona, leans Democratic but its consumers suffer from low turnout (possibly due to them being disproportionately Latino).

America the Unequal

In a recent series of posts at The Monkey Cage, Princeton political science professor Martin Gilens discussed the effects of economic inequality on political outcomes. The key findings of his research are that income levels can predict Americans’ policy preferences on about one-half of the issues he studies, and that elected officials overwhelmingly listen to their higher-income constituents; indeed, they generally only pay attention to lower-income Americans at election time.

Gilens finds that wealthier Americans lean to the left on social issues (especially religiously-charged ones such as abortion) and to the right on economic issues. The issues on which rich and poor Americans agree include defence policy, environmental protection, and social issues less tied to religion (such as drugs, parental leave, and neo-liberal restructuring of welfare policy). The federal government is never as responsive to the policy preferences of lower-income groups as it is to those of higher-income ones, but the gap is lessened during closely-contested presidential election campaigns. (Note that he specifies presidential elections – midterms are decided by an older, whiter, and richer electorate.) Naturally, parties tend to the interests of the core supporters when they can, except when the threat of electoral defeat disciplines them into appealing to a broader base. However, this levelling doesn’t last, and the later years of a president’s term see the policy preferences of the elites rise again in importance.

The most striking part of Gilens’ findings is that the influence of wealthier Americans is not due to their education, civic awareness, work on campaigns, willingness to contact representatives, or more intense preferences about the issues. After controlling for these factors, they still have much more influence; politicians simply heed their concerns because of their money. A person in the ninetieth percentile in terms of income but only the tenth percentile in terms of education has the same influence on their representatives as someone in the fiftieth income percentile and the ninetieth education percentile. Likewise, turnout and work on political campaigns correlate with income levels, but political donations rise rapidly with increased income. All this suggests that efforts to reform American democracy by encouraging such things as voter registration, voter turnout, and fair redistricting are doomed to fail unless the question of money in politics is addressed head-on.

In his third post, Gilens makes perhaps the most important observation: that in modern-day American politics, money is increasingly more effective than other resources. He uses the example of television advertising, which requires more money and fewer warm bodies than, say, door-to-door canvassing. I would add that the decline of patronage has had a similar effect; without the lure of a government job afterwards, there are fewer rewards for participating in a political campaign, with the result that modern campaigns look less plebeian than those of previous eras. (Compare the rustic, backwoods feel of Andrew Jackson’s support with the iPad-using bourgeois hipster demographic which propelled Obama into office.) In both cases, the process has been helped along by the Supreme Court; its conservative wing has been hostile to campaign finance reform (eg. Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United) while its liberal wing dealt the final blows to old-school patronage politics in cases such as Elrod v. Burns (which barred the firing of political appointees for political reasons) and Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois (which prevented officials from denying government contracts to companies which donated to their opponents). It is no wonder, then, that the class of people who fund the television ads and whose Ivy League-educated ‘best and brightest’ staff the campaigns and the permanent bureaucracy are the only Americans who matter to politicians.

Gilens’ work gels with that of Larry Bartels, who shows (in Unequal Democracy) that the votes of members of Congress reflect the policy preferences of the top one-third of income-earners. Another interesting analysis of what drives Americans’ political views is that of Bryan Caplan, a denizen of the über-libertarian economics faculty at George Mason University. Caplan (in his 2006 book The Myth of the Rational Voter) compares economists and non-economists, and after controlling for race, income, and ideology, finds that economists’ support for free market policies are merely a function of their superior knowledge of economics. To that end, he suggests various measures to increase their political influence: extra votes, an economic equivalent of the Supreme Court to strike down anti-free market legislation, and the delegation of fiscal policy decisions to the Fed. Where Caplan goes wrong is evident in his title – even if lower-income Americans support protectionist and welfare-statist economic policies at the ballot box once every four years, it is the policy preferences of their affluent compatriots which politicians heed in the intervening years.

Gilens’ findings paint a disturbing portrait of a nation increasingly in the grip of a narrow, plutocratic elite. But what can be done to make the United States government better reflect the policy preferences of the 99%, instead of those of the elites?

First, as Gilens suggests, sometimes needs to be done about the power of money in American politics. A constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court’s decisions in Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United is necessary, and should be followed up by a federal campaign finance scheme such as the ‘democracy vouchers’ proposed by Bruce Ackerman.

Second, in order to make warm bodies count for as much as cold hard cash, the spoils system should be revived. In the nineteenth century, it allowed ordinary Americans to hold offices that the Federalist/Whig gentry had tried to monopolise and treat as their personal property. At the state and local levels, patronage helped the Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Polish poor of America’s cities to capture a share of power, integrate into American society, and launch themselves into the middle class; its demise has prevented African-Americans and Latino/as from doing the same. The enthusiasm for a meritocratic civil service was historically driven by anglophile northeastern WASPs, who calculated (correctly) that government jobs would come to be dominated by themselves. Apart from positions that are merely clerical or administrative in nature, all civilian federal employees should be political appointees subject to dismissal on political grounds. The proposal advanced in the 1840s and 1850s by future President Andrew Johnson, that they be subject to an eight-year term limit, might also be adopted. Parties should be able to collect a percentage of their appointees’ salaries, lessening the need to go cap-in-hand to hedge fund billionaires for funding.

Third, the structure of the federal government could be reformed to promote a less plutocratic politics. If elections make politicians more responsive to the policy preferences of lower-income Americans, let’s have more elections and more elective offices. Some ideas:

*shorter Senate terms and an end to its malapportionment in favour of sparsely-populated, non-urban, white-dominated states;

*separate elections for the heads of executive departments, as is the case to varying extents in all fifty states (would the 2008 electorate have elected a Wall Street insider like Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary?);

*elections for the federal judiciary (historically, merit selection of judges has been implemented at state level at the behest of corporate interests outraged at the election of pro-labour and minority judges);

*elections for federal regulatory bodies (authorities such as the FTC, FCC, SEC, NLRB, and Federal Reserve are rendered toothless and subject to institutional capture due to the behind-closed-doors appointment process; twelve states elect public utility regulators, and the adoption of the practice at federal level would force the likes of Ben Bernanke to justify their policies to the electorate).

With this package of institutional reforms, the government of the United States could once again be one of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The Kosovo Precedent

(Also posted at the United States Studies Centre blog.)

In the diplomatic negotiations that followed the First World War, Woodrow Wilson ushered in a new era in international relations by committing the United States to supporting the right of national self-determination. That principle still plays some role in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy, but its application has been inconsistent. A more forceful defence of self-determination might win America more respect around the world.

In the 1950s, Eritreans were told by John Foster Dulles to put their national aspirations on hold, as Ethiopia was an American ally whose sovereignty over part of the Red Sea coast was crucial to control of the world’s arterial water routes. A similar situation presented itself in the 1970s, when Washington backed Pakistan’s control of its rebellious eastern region (now Bangladesh). And in August 1991, the elder President Bush delivered the ‘Chicken Kiev speech’, in which he warned the peoples of the Soviet Union, some of whom had spent centuries under Russian domination, to think twice before adding new names to the General Assembly roll call. Even Wilson himself was not immune: his closeness to Britain during Ireland’s struggle for independence had devastating consequences for his party at the 1920 elections. On occasions such as these, realpolitik has made the United States the defender of regimes trying to put down revolts within their borders (and an unsuccessful one – Eritrea, Bangladesh, Ukraine, and Ireland all won their independence in the end).

The 2008 decision of the U.S. (and its allies) to recognise the independence of Kosovo, and its support for South Sudan’s separation in 2011, were thus something of a break with the practice of recent decades, whereby the U.S. has leant toward preserving existing national borders (a principle known in international law as uti possidetis juris). The results of these decisions can be seen in the politics of places such as Iraq and Bosnia-Herzegovina, where mélanges of warring of ethnic groups who would undoubtedly be happier living apart are forced into complex power-sharing arrangements. The cases of peaceful secession (such as Slovakia’s ‘velvet divorce’ from the Czechs or Montenegro’s split from Serbia) are overshadowed by the fear of ‘balkanisation’.

The recognition of Kosovo was quickly denounced by Russia, which backs separatist rebels in regions such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia (in Georgia) and Transnistria (in Moldova). In the intervening years, the Kremlin has become more assertive about the issue, and has used its veto on the Security Council to prevent Kosovo’s acceptance into the UN. Its official recognition of the two breakaway Georgian regions explicitly cited the Kosovo precedent, and some have speculated that it will allow for the normalisation of Kosovo’s status only in exchange for the West doing the same for Abkhazia or South Ossetia.

In the early days of the Cold War, American talk of human rights abuses in the Soviet Union was characteristically dismissed with the retort ‘and you are lynching Negroes’. Today, Moscow defends its support for its client states with a similar comeback: ‘and you are recognising Kosovo’ (shamelessly ignoring the hypocrisy of its own stance on Chechnya). Just as the mid-1960s victories of the civil rights movement allowed the U.S. to regain the high moral ground and force the world’s attention onto the human rights records of its enemies, Washington might consider the benefits of granting recognition to more aspirant states: not just in the Caucasus, but places such as Palestine, Somaliland, and Northern Cyprus. The downside of such a shift might be a thaw in relations with countries like Georgia, but the potential upside is worth thinking about: the U.S. would be seen as supporting self-determination everywhere, not just for regions and peoples with whom it is allied; indeed, it would find new allies among the beneficiaries of its neo-Wilsonian stance.

Thoughts on Paul Ryan

1) Romney has done what he needed to do – not choose another Sarah Palin. Most American political observers seem to subscribe to the Game Change narrative of the 2008 election, in which John McCain threw away any chance of winning by an impulsive and desperate choice of running mate. This narrative has its faults (i.e. it overlooks the fact that it wasn’t the Republicans’ year regardless of who was on the ticket, and feeds into the conservative narrative that America is a ‘centre-right country’ and therefore Obama’s election was some sort of temporary aberration), but conventional wisdom is often at variance with the facts. As one of the Very Serious People adored by the professional centrists/bipartisans/post-partisans in Manhattan and D.C., Ryan won’t be treated with the same class- and gender-inflected contempt that Palin was.

2) For those keeping track of the religious and ethnic affiliations of presidential and vice-presidential candidates, Ryan will be the eighth Catholic on a major-party ticket, the second Catholic on the Republican ticket (after Barry Goldwater tapped William E. Miller in 1964), the fifth Catholic vice-presidential nominee (after Miller, Sargent Shriver, Geraldine Ferraro, and Joe Biden), the seventh Irish-American on a major-party ticket, and the third Irish-American running mate (after Miller and Biden). He is also partly of German-American heritage; I believe he is the first to appear on a major-party ticket since Eisenhower’s re-election in 1956 (Walter Mondale was nicknamed ‘Fritz’, but was actually Norwegian-American). Thus, we have the first presidential election ever in which none of the four major-party nominees is a white Protestant.

3) Choosing a sitting member of the House is certainly unusual – apart from the sui generis case of then-Minority Leader Gerald Ford’s double elevation, the last House members to be elected President and Vice-President respectively were James Garfield (R-OH) in 1880 and John Nance Garner (D-TX) in 1932. From the Republicans’ perspective, it makes sense. Ryan can only do so much as Budget Committee chair, there are other young talents (such as Eric Cantor) blocking his path to the Speakership, and Wisconsin doesn’t provide any Senate openings in the near future. By nominating him for V-P, even if the ticket loses, he would have to be pencilled in as the favourite for the presidential nomination in 2016; the intervening four years having been spent developing credentials on foreign policy and social issues to match his economic ones.

Thoughts on the Chick-Fil-A Controversy

1) The cities of Chicago and Boston would not be violating any law or constitutional provision, as far as I am aware, if they were to refuse to grant planning permission to a Chick-Fil-A outlet based on the political beliefs of the company’s President. States and their subdivisions (which include municipalities) have wide latitude under the Tenth Amendment to use their police power (which includes planning and licensing); the only barrier would be an Illinois or Massachusetts state law limiting what actions the city can take.

2) There are plenty of historical precedents for corporations being targeted for special regulation on account of their owners’ political activities. Companies which did business with Nazi Germany had assets seized and fines imposed under the Trading with the Enemy Act, and France’s state-owned rail company, SNCF, can’t bid for a contract to operate on California’s proposed high-speed rail network because its trains were commandeered by the Vichy Regime to transport French Jews to the death camps; California law requires companies doing business with the state to disclose any involvement in the Holocaust. There are also various federal laws governing industrial relations which deny access to arbitration by the NLRB to labour unions led by communists.

3) As a writer at the Nation has noted, the fact that the corporation donates money to anti-gay organisations means that this is not about the First Amendment rights of Chick-Fil-A’s President. Those who defend Chick-Fil-A are defending corporate personhood.

4) Denying planning permission to build an outlet of a fast food chain somewhere is not a violation of anyone’s rights. Glenn Greenwald poses a few hypothetical examples in this Salon piece to illustrate the dangers that would ensue if Congress were to criminalise the spending of money to advocate liberal causes. They aren’t relevant, because no-one is proposing sending the President of Chick-Fil-A to jail (or depriving him of any civil rights) for his views; planning permission to build a chicken franchise is an entitlement, not a right.

(Don't) Hail to the Chief

Of all the constitutions enacted by the thirteen colonies upon their emergence from British rule, the most democratic was that of Pennsylvania. Its features included a unicameral legislature elected annually, a plural executive consisting of one member elected from each county and possessing no powers to veto or initiate laws, a Council of Censors elected every seventh year to investigate corruption and propose constitutional amendments, and an extensive bill of rights. It made no pretensions to establishing a separation of powers – the legislature was clearly dominant over the other branches, a natural reaction to the pre-1776 colonial authorities’ control of the executive and judiciary. Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin helped to create the constitution and vigorously defended it, while the elite classes across the fledgling United States were horrified, preferring the scheme described in John Adams’ Thoughts on Government, which provided for an upper house and a governor to check the will of the lower house.

The preference for a weak executive was due to the influence of Country Party political thought in the American colonies. After the mercantile classes took power in England with the Glorious Revolution in 1688, they set about using the public purse to fund the development of capitalism. They established the Bank of England, passed enclosure laws to dispossess poor farmers, and stepped up the colonisation of North America and India. To keep the money flowing, the Crown needed an ally who could command the support of the House of Commons, and thus control its traditional right to initiate supply bills; thus, the informal post of Prime Minister, usually synonymous with that of First Lord of the Treasury, came into existence. Country Party ideology developed in opposition to the domination of the legislature by the executive, which it viewed as a recipe for enriching the Crown and the City of London at the expense of the people. To Americans in 1776, the legislature was synonymous with democracy and economic equality, while a powerful executive meant tyranny and mercantilism.

In the years between 1776 and the Constitutional Convention, colonial legislatures passed laws which threatened the privileges of the elites. Primogeniture was outlawed, preventing the emergence in the United States of a hereditary aristocracy, paper money was issued to redress economic inequalities and assist poor farmers and labourers in paying their debts, and land was confiscated from Loyalists. The Articles of Confederation, which came into force in 1781, replicated Pennsylvania’s preference for legislative supremacy, and lacking a single executive, the Congress divided executive authority among a plethora of committees. The elite backlash against the radical-democratic political culture of post-revolutionary America culminated in Philadelphia in 1787, where a constitution providing for an unelected Senate, President, and federal judiciary was presented to the nation.

Across the Atlantic, the spirit of Pennsylvania in 1776 was keenly felt by the partisans of the French Revolution. A series of constitutional proposals littered the years between 1789 and 1793, providing for constitutional monarchies, upper houses, British-style cabinets, and other anti-democratic devices. The Montagnards rejected all these in favour of making the executive subordinate to the legislature. In practice, they used their control of the National Convention to sideline the ministerialist Executive Council in favour of a Committee of Public Safety. Although this body was dominated, with tragic consequences, by the personality of Robespierre, its purpose was to turn the executive branch into a mere committee of the legislature. In their constitutional theory, the Montagnards designed a model of legislative supremacy – the proposed constitution of 1793, in which the relationship between the legislative and executive branches was modelled on that of Pennsylvania. The preference of French radicals for legislative supremacy (known as the régime d’assmblée or régime conventionnel) was again exhibited in the Paris Commune (famously described by Marx as “a working, not a parliamentary body”) and the first Constituent Assembly of 1946.

The propertied men who drafted the Constitution sometimes let their guard down about the anti-populist intent of their document. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison assures readers that the “rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project” generated by legislative supremacy would be blocked under his design. At the convention, he proposed a ‘Council of Revision’ with the power to veto laws, consisting of the President and a number of Supreme Court justices, the effect of which would be to harness the power of the other two branches to combat the legislature. The undemocratic features of the constitution were mostly ironed out – the Senate, controlled by the Slave Power and then Wall Street throughout the nineteenth century, became elective, and the Supreme Court moved away from its historic role as the protector of Loyalist gentry (Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee), cosy academic elites (Dartmouth v. Woodward), and corporations (Lochner v. New York), to become a champion of individual liberty (Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona, etc.). The presidency, though it has come to be elected on a democratic basis (notwithstanding Electoral College malapportionment), has usurped the democratic legitimacy which should rightfully lie in the legislative branch.

In the early decades of the republic, Americans were in no doubt that the will of the people resided in Congress (particularly in its popularly-elected House of Representatives), and that the President’s role was to merely execute its laws, though he was granted some leeway in conducting foreign policy and using his veto pen to stop pork-barrelling or the passage of clearly unconstitutional laws. Beginning, arguably, with Andrew Jackson, the idea of the presidential mandate began to develop, and the direct election of presidential electors gave Presidents the democratic legitimacy to position themselves as tribunes of the masses, in opposition to the local interests represented in Congress. With the increase in the size and power of the federal government, and the increased media attention on presidential elections, the ‘chief magistrate’ gradually assumed the mantle of ‘Leader of the Free World’. The question posed by John Jay to George Washington during Shay’s Rebellion (‘shall we have a monarchy?’) has been answered in the affirmative.

The modern U.S. President can veto laws duly passed by Congress for whatever reason, declare parts of them inoperable with a signing statement, and impound funds which they require to be spent. He can initiate military action, restrained only by the War Powers Act, whose constitutionality is dubious. Then there’s the abuses of power – Watergate, Iran-Contra, Fast-and-Furious-gate. The counterpoint to the imperial presidency is the personal invective levelled at Presidents. The rise of ‘birtherism’ during the Obama Administration is not a new or unusual phenomenon: Martin van Buren was said by his opponents to engage in orgies in the White House, Lincoln was apparently ‘Abraham Africanus’ whose presidency would lead to miscegenation, and Chester A. Arthur was singled out for his supposed Canadian birth. The personal nature of the office invites critics of its occupant to forgo policy-based criticisms in favour of personal invective.

The existence of a presidency elected separately from the legislature has many adverse consequences for American politics. By strengthening the effects of Duverger’s Law, it inhibits the growth of third parties. The desire of Presidents to be seen to be above the partisan fray retards the growth of strong political parties and encourages the selection of cross-party running mates (which, in turn, leads to unexpected changes in party control of the White House when a John Tyler or an Andrew Johnson succeeds to the nation’s highest office). Most importantly, the presidency encourages Americans to think of themselves as dutiful servants of an elected monarch. MSNBC host Chris Matthews’ recent request that Obama “give us our orders” illustrates perfectly how individual agency is suppressed in favour of deference to the Commander-in-Chief. Americans have come to see the presidency as the focus of all political power – liberals greet every new Democratic administration with dreams of a re-run of FDR’s first hundred days, while conservatives want the Oval Office to be filled by a macho figure who’ll make ‘No Apology’ for torture, the Patriot Act, or American exceptionalism.

Amazingly, some Americans want to replace the imperial presidency with a parliamentary system, which would remove all traces of independence from Congresspeople who would be obliged to support their party’s government (or oppose that of the other party). The prominent advocates of parliamentarism (such as Carter Administration official Lloyd Cutler, blogger Matt Yglesias, or, most famously, Woodrow Wilson) want the legislative branch to surrender more aspects of policy-making to the executive. The increasing presidentialisation of the office of prime minister in parliamentary countries shows that such a change wouldn’t rein in the bonapartiste nature of the presidency, and the reverence for the Westminster system among American parliamentarists (as opposed to the world’s numerous parliamentary republics) suggests that their preferences are grounded in the anglophilia of America’s coastal elites.

The United States would benefit from a rediscovery of the constitutional principles of the post-revolutionary era: the primacy of the legislative branch, short terms of office (Benjamin Franklin: “where annual elections end, tyranny begins”), the undemocratic nature of malapportioned upper houses, and the danger to liberty posed by an executive with a greater popular mandate than individual legislators.