Prominent Journalist Heather Digby Parton On the Real Meaning of Trump's Electoral Victory and the Hegemonic Role Of the National MAGA Antidemocratic Coalition in American Politics Today

AMERICA IS A FASCIST STATE

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.

 

AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE

A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations. 

  

https://www.salon.com/2024/11/06/donald-won-the-vibes-now-americas-anti-democratic-coalition-seeks-vengeance/
 

COMMENTARY 

Donald Trump won the vibes. Now America's anti-democratic coalition seeks vengeance

Will the Resistance have the energy to fight back all over again?

by Heather Digby Parton
November 6, 2024
Salon

PHOTO: Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Atrium Health Amphitheater on November 3, 2024 in Macon, Georgia. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Donald Trump has once more won the presidency. It's as shocking as it was the first time and even more terrifying. We should have seen this coming from all the polling which showed that the race was tied nationally and in the swing states. Of course it was possible. But I think a lot of us, myself included, once again fell for the illusion that America is too fundamentally decent to elect someone like Trump. We were wrong.

In 2016 that starry-eyed naivete led to the deep despair that we all felt when Trump eked out a win over Hillary Clinton. And in 2020 we believed that dream was vindicated when Joe Biden turned the tables and eked out a win over Trump. And here we are again, caught in a swirling vortex from which we can't seem to escape.

This anti-democratic coalition has a deep, entrenched grievance with the modern world and they use politics to express it.

The funny thing is that until recently I had assumed that the contest was going to be political trench warfare again and the result would be very close. It has seemed to me for a while that we're in an ongoing war between two coalitions that can be defined as pro-democracy and anti-democracy and they have roughly equal political strength. The razor-thin margins in Congress and these incredibly tight presidential races bear that out.

Yes, Donald Trump is the leading figure in this fight as the man who best articulates the anti-democratic coalition's impulses but he also hinders them with his crudeness and lack of discipline. Meanwhile, the pro-democracy coalition is diffuse and leaderless but is helped by the fact that it's less crazy. Joe Biden managed to pull it out in 2020 in the middle of a global pandemic when there were just enough people in the right states to recognize that Trump wasn't up to dealing with it. He was also a white man, which clearly makes that choice easier for some people. (It cannot be a coincidence that the rank misogynist brute, Donald Trump, beat the two highly qualified Democratic women he ran against.)

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Election 2024: In a shocking victory, Donald Trump has once again been elected president

I knew all this. And I assumed 2024 would be a tough race for Biden to win although I thought he would probably be able to do it because he managed to "deliver" on so many of his promises, particularly on the economy, which many smart people assured me was the key to winning over voters. Surely, the people would start to see that inflation had abated, the job market was great and that interest rates were coming down, right? All that new manufacturing in the swing states had to count for something. But when it became clear that he could not campaign effectively and he turned it over to his vice president, who seemed to electrify the pro-democracy coalition, I began to believe that this time it would win decisively. I was fooling myself.

Donald Trump bungled the worst health crisis in a century, was found guilty of fraud and civilly liable for defamation and sexual assault. He is currently under indictment for stealing classified documents and attempting a coup in 2020. He acted deranged and demented on the campaign trail and it changed nothing. When he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes, he was right. There is literally nothing he can do to make his faithful followers move away. And that's because it's really not about him — it's about them.

Trump has solidified his grip on nearly half the voters in this country because, as journalist Lindsay Beyerstein tweeted last night, "he created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore or deny all the facts and focus on hate." Our modern information ecosystem, the social media and cable news silos have allowed him to construct an alternate reality for the Republican Party and they eagerly accept it because it feeds their sense of fear and loathing of the other. And it isn't just the kooky QAnon conspiracy types — Trump managed through sheer repetition to convince otherwise normal people that his first term was a golden age of peace and prosperity and that the country today is a dystopian hellscape because the price of eggs is higher than it was five years ago.

On some level, these people know that's all nonsense and Trump knows it too. This anti-democratic coalition has a deep, entrenched grievance with the modern world and they use politics to express it. "This is happening all over the world," The Atlantic's Tom Nichols wrote of the anti-incumbent wave elections, "among people who think that others are *unjustly* living better than they are - even while they themselves are living well."

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Live updates: Salon's latest 2024 elections news

Nichols added, "resentment and false nostalgia (and affluence and boredom) are deadly threats to democracy, as we're about to learn."

It's not about policy no matter how much people insist that it is. We know this because in places like Missouri voters just passed initiatives for abortion rights, an increase in the minimum wage, and paid sick leave, all Democratic policies, while overwhelmingly voting for a Republican senator and president who both strongly oppose these things. This is about aesthetics and attitudes. A majority of Americans want an autocratic strongman show and Trump and the Republicans are happy to give it to them.

The anti-democracy coalition under Trump is on the verge of fascism. He and many in his party are already there. We know this because we know their plans. We've all been discussing Project 2025 and Agenda 47 and Schedule F for months now. Trump's mass deportation policy may never come to full fruition but they will certainly make an example of some people if only to entertain the base. Recall how much they loved those migrant flights to Martha's Vineyard and the like a year or so ago. Some televised knocking down of doors and throwing crying women and children onto buses ought to give them a thrill (a double thrill when the Democrats get hysterical about it.)

Here's Trump promising RFK Jr. "a good time" messing around with the public health system:

We know about Trump's plans for the economy and since his tariff obsession is his only economic and foreign policy idea, it's unlikely that even his business buddies will be able to talk him out of it. Foreign allies are no doubt meeting with their national security people as we speak, implementing plans to distance themselves from the United States, knowing Trump's affinity for autocrats like Russia's Putin and Hungary's Orbán. America's adversaries are licking their chops. They know Trump is a pushover.

But the vengeance policy is what's going to animate Trump the most. His enemies list is long and he will make sure they pay. It's what he lives for:

Here's a message from one of the people mentioned as a possible attorney general or White House counsel in a second Trump term:

We survived Trump's first term, (although his erratic rhetoric and policies during COVID did result in many unnecessary deaths.) But everyone knows by now that this second term is not going to be the same. The Republican establishment has been purged of dissenters and Trump will have only MAGA loyalists in his inner circle. Trump's new "government gfficiency" czar Elon Musk is already promising that there will be "hardship" (not for him, of course) as they slash the government safety net that so many Americans depend upon. Everything from environmental regulations to abortion rights to free speech is on the chopping block. And who will stop them?

Can we survive it again? Probably. But it's going to be much harder. The question is whether the Resistance has the energy to do it all again or will it pull back and just watch it all burn out of sheer exhaustion? After all, they tried their best. They ground out many wins between 2016 and today. But in the end they lost it all again. What's next? 

Ta-Nehisi Coates On What Constitutes Truth and What Determines Lies in Palestine Today From the Standpoint of the United States And Its Central Role in the Perpetuation Of The Deadly Genocide Taking Place There Today

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I Was Told Palestine Was Complicated. Visiting Revealed a Simple, Brutal Truth 



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November 28, 2024 

 

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Prominent Constitutional and Civil Rights Attorney, Scholar, Activist, Public Intellectual, Labor Organizer, Teacher, and Author Sherrilyn Ifill On How and Why Crucial Questions of Race and Gender Have Yet Again Been Stupidly and Arbitrarily Separated From Those of Class in American Society in the 2024 Presidential election

https://sherrilyn.substack.com/p/why-have-race-and-gender-been-erased

 
Sherrilyn’s Newsletter

 
Why Have Race & Gender Been Erased from Analysis of the Presidential Election? Part 1

 
by Sherrilyn Ifill
December 1, 2024

 

How should we analyze the meaning of the re-election of Donald Trump? What factors about this election can help us navigate the very dangerous and challenging time we face in our nation? It’s complicated of course. Many factors bear on the outcome of any election, and this one was no different. Most of us rely on the analysis provided by those whose job it is to analyze difficult political moments to make sense of what we don’t understand. We listen (sometimes incessantly) to the conclusions reached by political pundits - those who have covered national elections, run campaigns and been deeply engaged in observing and analyzing politics for years, sometimes decades. Most who are part of this cohort of political experts have very particular knowledge and expertise born of this experience.

But they also have very particular blind-spots.

That may be why we have been subjected to the most tortuous post-election analysis of the most consequential election of the modern era. Think pieces began dropping the day after Trump soundly defeated Vice President Harris, and led the Republicans to recover the House and Senate. Armed with (notoriously tricky) exit polls and vibes, we learned that Trump had won because “ Women Didn’t Let Trump Down, Men Did.” That Democrats have yet to learn how to talk to the working class. That Democratic elites had misjudged the significance of the economy. That Harris had talked too much about trans people and used the term “Latinx” (she hadn’t) That Harris, the Vice President of the United States as well as a candidate, made a fatal error in not bending her schedule to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast. That Harris didn’t distance herself enough from Biden. That the Democratic party must stop relying on “identity politics.” That Bernie Sanders would have won.

Others described the significance of the election as a Damascus Road moment for the Democratic Party, suggesting that the Party should be torn down and rebuilt. We are also learning more about the outsized role of Elon Musk - his money, his social media platform, and his advisor’s funding of false flag ads to turns voters away from Harris. 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/15/republican-ads-false-flag/

 

But with shockingly few exceptions, two glaringly obvious factors have been virtually ignored by writers of post-election think-pieces in the nation’s leading journals. Understanding the reason for this omission tells us as much about the significance of this election for the future of this country, as the outcome of the election itself.

For the first time in our nation’s history a Black and Indian woman was the major party candidate for President of the United States. She was the graduate of an Historically Black College. She had served as the Attorney General of the largest state in the country. She had served in the United States Senate where, in addition to serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she put on a blistering a cross-examination of Attorney General nominees Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, and SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh. She served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, where she had access to critical and classified documents and intel about America’s enemies and allies. She was the first Black and Indian woman Vice President. She represented the country at international conferences and meetings in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Drawing on her bona fides as a prosecutor, she famously declared Vladimir Putin “a war criminal”at a security conference in Munich. She endured a rocky first year of public appearances and interviews in the States. But Harris caught fire in rallying women after the Supreme Court’s decision striking down Roe v. Wade. She barnstormed across the country and encouraging women to believe that “we will not go back.” And finally, with no advance notice and a runway of only 3 months until Election Day, she took up the campaign for the presidency, after President Joe Biden was pressured by his party to leave the race.

Her campaign was impressive. Tireless, upbeat, joyful, and buoyed early-on by a fundraising juggernaut that began with a grassroots Zoom fundraising campaign by Black women, and by elite donors Harris corralled in the first 24 hours after Biden’s withdrawal. Outfoxing Leader Nancy Pelosi, former President Barack Obama, and a legion of Democratic leaders who hoped for an “open primary” in August to decide on a nominee to face Trump, Harris showed grit, strategy, and that she was what Pelosi in an interview with Ezra Klein described archly as politically “astute.”

She delivered a debate knock-out performance that left Trump running from a scheduled follow-up meeting. Harris seemed to have found Trump’s Achilles’ heel, mocking his rallies, besting him on policy, confronting him with the reality of women harmed by the Dobbs decision, and reminding voters that Trump would remain focused on only one thing: himself.

Harris knew she would have to address race. She has identified as Black and Indian her entire life. In her primary campaign debate against Joe Biden in 2016, she famously floored him by describing her experience as a school girl desegregating an elementary school in Berkley California. She was almost obsessively loyal to her alma mater, Howard University – the nation’s premier historically Black college which was founded during Reconstruction to educate Black students. There were a never-ending supply of memes showing her dancing with Black marching bands, getting’ down at the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop celebration at the White House, strolling with members of her Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. She was unapologetically Black and had no intention of down-playing it.

She leaned also into being a woman. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision remained her core rally cry, and many hoped that this would finally shake loose the support that a majority of white women had given Trump in 2016 and 2020.

But she knew in this era of anti-affirmative action and anti-DEI zeal, she would need to reassure the white electorate that she was not running solely on her dual identities as a woman of color. She was asked often about it. And she was firm in repeatedly saying that she was not asking voters to support her because of her race and gender. She insisted instead that she would have to “make the case” to voters in seeking their support.

She didn’t lead with race, but it was always there. We could no more ignore that Harris is a Black and Indian woman, than we could ignore her beauty (which raised its own issues). As art historian and Harvard Professor Sarah Lewis powerfully explores in her new book The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, Americans can’t “not see” race precisely because we have been trained to see race almost everywhere.  

 

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/09/unseen-truth-shows-the-real-picture-behind-caucasian-ideals/

Moreover, Harris’ opponent, former President Trump, wanted you to see her race. He questioned her racial identity – suggesting, during an interview at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists - that she had only recently identified as Black (all evidence to the contrary). He insulted her with the particular insults he has long used to denigrate Black women - “low i.q.,” “dumb as a rock,” “lazy as hell,”

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/23/trump-kamala-harris-attacks-00170601 - and asked the crowd at one rally in North Carolina “does she drink? Is she on drugs?” 

 

He insisted that Harris had “played the race card on a level you rarely see” in the 2020 primaries.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/republican-attacks-kamala-harris-center-race-gender-dumb-dei-candidate-rcna162570

Trump posted a photo of Harris with her mother’s family, dressed in Indian attire to his Truth Social account.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-posts-photo-kamala-harris-174900438.html

guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAF5kCIkq1u0pUCgWgXGMj57TEx5XVmeRI9W2r45szwCndy30l7ZmOcrLugcf85ar-9_DGrxQUdjT0KruC68PtWwK6yc3EI3YSUdc9kiyr3MQ_JudyZlDxTRNHoeIaPphoI2BV80Gv-0My7CxtAnNk4DP8HTBkTb8DhqlpFDcYjcA

His inclination to use curse words was often unleashed when speaking about Harris, calling her at one point late in the campaign “a shit Vice President.” 

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-unleashes-torrent-personal-attacks-harris-calling-worst-lazy-hel-rcna176599 .

When an attendee at one his rallies shouted out that Harris was, in essence, a prostitute, Trump laughed and said, “this place is amazing.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/03/trump-insult-worked-corner-rally-harris/

He shared a tweet grotesquely suggesting that Harris committed sex acts to advance her career (rather than by attending law school, passing the bar, and winning a citywide election for District Attorney, and a statewide election, twice to serve as Attorney General and U.S. Senator, before becoming Vice President). https://www.yahoo.com/news/crude-sexist-misogynistic-trump-shares-143322052.html

Trump’s supporters also wanted voters to see Harris’ race. Multiple Republican members of Congress called Harris “a DEI Vice President.”

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/republicans-attack-kamala-harris-dei-hire/

Right wing influencer Charlie Kirk, who manages the Turning Point juggernaut of organizations that mobilize young Republicans across college campuses, and who is largely credited with securing Trump’s win, called her a “DEI pick.” Sebastian Gorka, the right wing figure recently nominated by Trump to serve as a counter terrorism expert in the National Security Administration called Harris a “DEI hire.” In an appearance on CNN he made it even more plain, calling Harris “a disaster whose only qualifications are having a vagina and the right skin color. She’s a DEI hire, right?” “She’s a woman! She’s colored! Therefore, she’s got to be good.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/02/trump-attacks-harris-race-gender/


And despite all of this, race and gender have figured almost nowhere in the major stories in national news outlets where the outcome of the election has been dissected.

The stupefying choice of a majority of white voters to support Trump again – despite his 34 felony convictions, his liability for sexual assault, his attempt to intimidate the judge in his New York defamation trial, his attacks on the Judge’s clerk, the televised revelations by election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman about how Trump targeted and endangered them, the publicly released recording of Trump demanding 11,000 votes from the Georgia Secretary of State in 2020, and the refusal of 44 members of Trump’s former senior White House team including his Vice President to endorse him, is the story of American democracy at a crossroads. It is the story of this election.

Frankly, Trump’s performance during the final three weeks of the campaign alone was disqualifying. Clearly out of gas, he took to “time outs” during his rallies – asking his aides to play music from his personal playlist, while he swayed to the music for more than 30 minutes. As his performances grew even more embarrassing, and his rallies smaller, Trump became even more vicious. He called former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi “sick and crazy.” He mouthed calling Pelosi the “b-word,” to the howling delight of his supporters, and insisted that Pelosi could “go to jail” for ripping up the copy of his address at the end of the 2019 State of the Union address. He said that people could be jailed for criticizing the Supreme Court. He insisted that members of the media should be jailed for their unflattering coverage of him. Trump insisted that his opponents, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and “radical left lunatics” are the “enemy within,” who should be “handled by the National Guard or even the military.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/20/politics/trump-enemy-from-within-schiff-pelosi/index.html

Of the January 6th rally and attack on the Capitol, Trump said, it was a “day of love,” adding, “there was a beauty and love to it that I’ve never seen before.”

In what should have been a nail-in-the-coffin set of collective revelations, Bob Woodward’s latest book revived interest in earlier interviews in which Trump’s senior defense team deemed him unfit to serve. Gen. Mattis, Trump’s former chair of the Joint Chiefs described Trump as “the most dangerous man he’d ever met.” His former Chief of Staff General John Kelly confirmed that Trump spoke admiringly of Hitler and “fit the definition” of a fascist.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/us/politics/john-kelly-trump-fitness-character.html

His former Defense Secretary Mike Esper said that Trump was “unfit” to serve, and “a threat to democracy.”

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trumps-former-pentagon-chief-calls-threat-democracy-rcna133014

And yet still, despite these historic and unprecedented warnings, a majority of white voters – men and women – chose Trump to lead this country and to be the leader of the free world. The sheer recklessness of the decision speaks volumes about the priorities of a majority of the white electorate in our country.

This is the 2024 election story. And it is one we had best understand if we ever hope to recover this country from its dangerous embrace of authoritarian leadership. Why have a majority of white voters turned their backs on democracy? Is it because of the cost of bacon and eggs or Bounty paper towels, as former NBC anchor Brian Williams recently insisted in a rant on late night television? Is this what history will recall about the fall of American democracy? This is not 2008 when Americans were losing their homes, or even 2020 when COVID and COVID closures were so powerfully affecting every American family. And weren’t Black voters also paying more for bacon and eggs?

Why were Black voters, a majority of whom are working class, and in whose favor our democracy often does not work, willing to place democracy ahead of economic concerns? Why were Latina voters not led by the price of Bounty? Why did a majority of Jewish voters cast their ballots for democracy, even in the face of Trump’s muscular statements of support for Israel? And why for the last three successive elections have a majority of white voters put their electoral power behind a man so manifestly unqualified in character and experience, and who has openly expressed such anti-democratic intentions for our country?

Why haven’t these questions been the focus of post-election analysis?

Stay tuned for Part 2 (available to paid subscribers only).

The Horrific White Supremacist Legacy of the Electoral College System And Its Ongoing Relentless and Utterly Devastating Impact on What Tragically Passes For 'American Democracy' Today

“What’s Past is Prologue…”

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/electoral-colleges-racist-origins


Analysis

 
The Electoral College’s Racist Origins

More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system continues to do just that.

by Wilfred U. Codrington III
April 1, 2020
Brennan Center For Justice

 

Associated Press

 

Advance Constitutional Change

Electoral College Reform

This piece was originally published by the Atlantic.

Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then.

In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.

For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.

Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost.

Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.

But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:

“There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.”

Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.

Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise. The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar, the third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.

In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute, including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters.

The deal at once marked the end of the brief Reconstruction era, the redemption of the old South, and the birth of the Jim Crow regime. The decision to remove soldiers from the South led to the restoration of white supremacy in voting through the systematic disenfranchisement of black people, virtually accomplishing over the next eight decades what slavery had accomplished in the country’s first eight decades. And so the Electoral College’s misfire in 1876 helped ensure that Reconstruction would not remove the original stain of slavery so much as smear it onto the other parts of the Constitution’s fabric, and countenance the racialized patchwork democracy that endured until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What’s clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged. It’s the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy. It’s precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed.

Among the Electoral College’s supporters, the favorite rationalization is that without the advantage, politicians might disregard a large swath of the country’s voters, particularly those in small or geographically inconvenient states. Even if the claim were true, it’s hardly conceivable that switching to a popular-vote system would lead candidates to ignore more voters than they do under the current one. Three-quarters of Americans live in states where most of the major parties’ presidential candidates do not campaign.

More important, this “voters will be ignored” rationale is morally indefensible. Awarding a numerical few voting “enhancements” to decide for the many amounts to a tyranny of the minority. Under any other circumstances, we would call an electoral system that weights some votes more than others a farce—which the Supreme Court, more or less, did in a series of landmark cases. Can you imagine a world in which the votes of black people were weighted more heavily because presidential candidates would otherwise ignore them, or, for that matter, any other reason? No. That would be a racial entitlement. What’s easier to imagine is the racial burdens the Electoral College continues to wreak on them.

Critics of the Electoral College are right to denounce it for handing victory to the loser of the popular vote twice in the past two decades. They are also correct to point out that it distorts our politics, including by encouraging presidential campaigns to concentrate their efforts in a few states that are not representative of the country at large. But the disempowerment of black voters needs to be added to that list of concerns, because it is core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been.

The race-consciousness establishment—and retention—of the Electoral College has supported an entitlement program that our 21st-century democracy cannot justify. If people truly want ours to be a race-blind politics, they can start by plucking that strange, low-hanging fruit from the Constitution.