Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of. Mick Hume
as it pleases – including either implementing or delaying Brexit – not in the name of the people, but of the Crown.
Neither side measures up to the standard of meaningful democratic politics. But however we see these problems, the solution to the ‘democratic deficit’ in the UK cannot be even less democracy. That is what it would mean if we were to allow the elites to undermine or ignore the clearly expressed will of the majority who voted in the EU referendum. (If politicians now claim that 52 per cent of those who voted is not a legitimate mandate, by the way, then the UK has not had a legitimate government in living memory, since no party since the Second World War has ever achieved as many as 50 per cent of the votes cast.)
We need to find new ways to bring British democracy to life and make it mean more. Instead we are faced with a situation where democracy means so little that the Left can join with Tories in looking to the House of Lords to thwart the popular Brexit vote.
The unelected, unaccountable character of the upper chamber ought to be a problem for anybody who believes in democracy, making the Lords prime candidates to be voted into the dustbin of history. Yet that, it seems, is precisely why the unelected peers are considered so well qualified to ‘defend democracy’ against the referendum mob! As Baroness Wheatcroft spelled it out, the House of Lords was better placed to lead a ‘rebellion’ against Brexit because it is unrepresentative and unelected. (The Conservatives, despite winning a majority in the House of Commons in the 2015 general election, had only a minority of 254 peers out of an inflated total of 798 in the Lords, while the openly pro-EU Liberal Democrats, then reduced to a rump of just seven elected MPs, could still boast 105 unelected members swanning about in the House of Lords.)
Baroness Wheatcroft gave the game away when she boasted that, ‘with no constituents to fear’, the Lords would be freer than the Commons to vote against the wishes of the electorate. It is fear of the mass of constituents that drives anti-democrats of every political stripe to seek refuge in the Lords, while claiming to be upholding parliamentary democracy.61
After the American election, the reaction against Trump voters also adopted the bogus language of democracy to disguise its anti-democratic intent.
Almost as soon as the overall result of the 8 November elections became clear, the cry went up that Trump would not be a legitimate occupant of the White House. Film-maker Michael Moore spoke for many top Democrats when he denounced the Donald as ‘an illegitimate president’ who ‘does not have the vote of the people’.62
Anti-Trump protesters angrily pointed out that, while the Republican candidate had won a majority in the electoral college – the system the US uses to elect its president indirectly – Democratic Party candidate Clinton had won a larger share of the popular vote. By the end of November, with late votes still being counted, Clinton had some two million more votes than Trump – about 2 per cent of the total – but the way these votes were distributed between states meant the Republican had easily carried the electoral college by 306 votes to 232.
Within days of the election, a Washington Post-ABC poll found that one in three Democrat voters believed Trump’s win was ‘illegitimate’, with 27 per cent of them feeling ‘strongly’ about it.63 Those feelings appeared strongest within the metropolitan strongholds of the Democratic elite, where both their votes and media-focused protests against the result were concentrated.
Those modern tools of passive political activism, the online petitions, quickly began gathering support, calling on the 538 members of the electoral college to go rogue – or act as ‘faithless electors’ – and refuse to endorse president-elect Trump when they congregated on 19 December, even if voters in their state had supported him. The largest petition of this sort on Change.org quickly gathered more than 4.5 million signatures, demanding that the electoral college make Hillary Clinton president because ‘SHE WON THE POPULAR VOTE’. Meanwhile college electors reported being ‘bombarded’ with phone, email and social-media messages calling on them to ignore their electorates’ wishes and vote against Trump. Some Democrat electors themselves admitted to lobbying for their counterparts in the college to vote for ‘Anybody But Trump’ and switch support to a more ‘respectable’ Republican such as Mitt Romney.
As with the anti-Brexit forces in the UK, the anti-Trump protesters were using the language of representative democracy in an instrumental way, to justify their attempt to overturn a result they did not like.
The US electoral college does indeed represent a strange, distorted and undemocratic brand of representative democracy. That is precisely why it was established in the first place – to provide a potential brake on popular sentiments of which the US elites do not approve.
The Founding Fathers who led the American revolution against British rule from 1776 and established the US as an independent republic were fearful of ‘too much’ popular democracy. They created a system of ‘checks and balances’ that could, if necessary, restrain the people in the name of representation. As James Madison wrote, the US system was founded to give the political elite powers to stymie the electorate when people were ‘stimulated by some irregular passion’ to ‘call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn’.
The constitutional checks and balances were put in place to check the power of the people and to counterbalance the will of the majority. The powerful Supreme Court is one arm of this system. Another is the Senate, the upper chamber of Congress which gives two seats to every US state, regardless of population size, and thus enables smaller, rural and generally more conservative states to outvote the big urban centres.
And another elitist arm is the electoral college, through which electors, nominated from each state on the basis of the election result, cast the final vote for the next president. This likewise favours conservative smaller states and also gives a few hundred electors – members of the political establishment appointed by the major parties – the potential to overturn the election result.
The electoral college has never done that, although there have now been five elections where the new president lost the popular vote. The most recent one pre-Trump was in 2000, when Republican George W. Bush became president despite winning fewer votes than Democratic challenger Al Gore. Some researchers claim there was also a sixth occasion, in 1960, when Republican Richard Nixon might have won more votes than iconic Democratic president John F. Kennedy, but the close-run result was left ambiguous by the confusing electoral system in the state of Alabama.
Despite the electoral college’s evident democratic shortcomings, however, there have been few serious attempts to reform it. America’s powerful elites still prefer a system with inbuilt brakes that can prevent popular sentiment running riot.
Yet there was little that was democratic about the sudden upsurge of protests about the US system after the 2016 election. Those happy enough with the electoral college when it delivers results they want were simply furious because it allowed for the election of the despised Donald. Indeed, their demand for 538 members of the electoral college to overturn the votes of 62 million ‘ill-informed’ Trump voters represents a new face of anti-democratic politics in the US and the West.
The sudden outburst against the ‘illegitimate’ election result was really no more democratic than the electoral college itself. Few of those protesting or signing petitions were concerned about the system until it enabled Trump to win. We might recall how, before election day, these were the people outraged by Trump’s suggestion that he might not recognise the result if he did not win.
Yet overnight, leading Democrats would have us believe they were genuine democrats who just wanted to uphold the popular vote. How? By using the undemocratic electoral college to overturn the election result. Their loud talk of Trump being an ‘illegitimate’ president was really a coded attack on the millions of deplorable Americans who cast their ‘illegitimate’ votes for him, rather than being any principled defence of American democracy.
Bill de Blasio, the Democrat