Nation Needs Return to Republicanism

The preliminary election results, which raised the possibility that the next president might not have garnered the popular vote, have borne witness to the impact of dumbing down by our schools. One prominent manifestation has been the cries for a constitutional amendment to eliminate the electoral college.

One misconception is that we are a democracy. That word appears in neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution of the United States. We are a republic.

The founders understood the differences between a democracy and a republic. They gave us the latter to protect us against a tyranny by the majority. Further, they encouraged an education of the public so that we could understand why they had done as they did.

The founders’ purposes for an educated public were very different from those of today’s “educrats.” Education was not to teach yesterday’s menial job skills and to advocate statism and socialism, as has become its mission today.

The importance the founders placed upon republicanism appeared in the first days of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. After having adopted its rules for order on May 28, Virginian Edmund Randolph submitted his 15 propositions the next morning. His seventh one proposed the national executive be chosen by the national legislature.

Less than two months later, on July 25, the halfway point of the convention, the method of selecting the president by electors was decided. During the remaining seven weeks of the convention there were many heated debates about the powers of the president, but none about the selection process.

In “Origins of the Electoral College,” Randall G. Holcombe describes the importance of the electoral college and how the shift toward majoritarianism started. Many of today’s political and social ills are the result of that shift.

The founders never expected runaway winners of the presidency. In fact, they anticipated the winner might have less than half the electoral votes. That’s why they empowered Congress to choose among the top five electoral vote-getters. The 12th Amendment later reduced that number to three.

Majoritarianism brings a relentless leftward drift because it increases political pandering.

Students who graduate from public schools today are impaired doubly by their meager understanding of the founding principles and a lack of respect for the wisdom of our founding fathers. Thus they have been left vulnerable to the guile of pandering politicians, who will trade our freedom for their vote.

To get our country back on track, we need to do at least two things.

First, we need to increase republicanism. We can do this by rejecting talk of eliminating the electoral college and instead initiating talk about repealing the 17th Amendment, which provided for direct election of U.S. senators.

Second, we need to restore teaching of the founding principles to our classrooms, along with increased respect for the founding fathers. For as Thomas Jefferson also suggested, to be free and ignorant is to ask for what can never be.