So here we are, more than 100 days into what was promised to be a national transformation, the abandonment of politics as usual and the beginnings of a Return to Greatness. The politics, of course, are exactly the usual gridlocked bullshit on the good days — and worse than usual the rest of the time — and if the Greatness is returning, it hasn't yet come to a theater near me, and probably not one near you either.
If only I could decide if the continued Washington, D.C., gridlock was the good news or the bad news. My consolation is, apparently the United States as a whole can't, either. Polls will bolster the spirits of everyone who hates President Trump by telling them he's got one of the lowest approval ratings at this stage of his presidency than almost all of his predecessors — but polls (and often the same ones) also report that the vast majority of Trump's actual fans love him as much as ever, despite all the reports of presidential misconduct rising, nonstop, toward impeachment-worthy levels. TL;DR: The country is as polarized and divided as ever.
I'm not sure any of us could have expected otherwise, though; just a glance through recent presidential and congressional history is enough to tell a tale of a country that's been at least close to evenly divided among support for those two vague, semi-ideological clusters we call our major parties. Hell, forget recent presidential history: While we like to talk about the "landslide" victories our favorite presidents have won in the past. In the popular votes for president, for as far back as we have records, the best percentage any candidate has ever gotten was a hair over 61 percent (Lyndon Johnson, believe it or not), while by my count 16 people have served as president after getting less than 50 percent of the vote in their favor (i.e., they may have gotten more votes than anyone else, but more people in total still voted for rival candidates). That includes not only Trump but the 2000 win by George W. Bush and both victories by Bill Clinton (in 1992, with upstart-party candidate Ross Perot in the mix, Clinton got a paltry 43 percent of the vote). And except for Ronald Reagan's 58.8 percent in the 1984 race, you won't find anyone's popular-vote percentage getting past the low 50s in any of the past 10 presidential elections.
Does that sound to you as if we've ever had anything close to a true political consensus in this country, when no president since George Fucking Washington has been able to claim the support of more than three out of five fellow Americans at best and "fractionally more than half the voters" as the usual case? That's before we even get into the pissing match over the fact that it's the electoral vote, not the popular one, that actually puts a candidate's ass into the Oval Office's big chair. Thankfully for our historical legacy, a popular-vote loser has only been an electoral winner five times; unfortunately for our contemporary peace of mind, two of those times have been within the past two decades (Bush 2000 and Trump 2016, in case you're really young or just hadn't been paying attention).
Of course, since both of those were Republican victories, Democrats have been really stoked about the idea of abolishing the Electoral College and just electing presidents via the popular vote. With the Dems being into identity-group politics these days, many of them have been trying to taint the electoral system by loudly labeling it as a legacy of slavery. It isn't; it's the legacy of thirteen states that had been separate self-administered colonies for much of their history not wanting to cede power to the central government — especially the smaller states, who were afraid that, say, Virginia or New York would dominate any debate over what the states should do in their "united" configuration. Now hold that thought a second while I digress. (Where slavery did play a part, for a while, was in giving slave states more representatives in the House by adding three-fifths of their numbers of slaves — none of whom, of course, were allowed to vote — to the numbers of their free population. Since each state's allotment of electoral votes is equal to its number of representatives plus its number of senators, that gave the slave states a bonus until first slavery, then Jim Crow voting laws, were abolished.)
OK, back with me? Another, somewhat more cohesive, argument by the Democrats — who are also into the concept of numerical power — is that even now, the number of representatives a state has doesn't necessarily track well with its population relative to other states, since every state is entitled to at least one representative even if its population is less than that of the average congressional district. Add that to the fact that every state gets exactly two senators, and you get a situation where an individual's presidential vote has more impact in a very sparsely populated state than in the really populous ones. Here's where I refer you to my explanation in the previous paragraph that this was seen as a feature, not a bug, by the designers of the U.S. Constitution. And before our urban-vs.-rural division became the dominant element of our current polarization, giving the Republicans an advantage since in the majority of states the rural votes outnumber the urban ones, you'll note Democrats weren't quite so hot for discarding that whole state-oriented Electoral College mishmash.
I'm not picking on the Dems' more vocal members per se. When the Electoral College hasn't been at issue in fights over making the vote for the Head Honcho "more fair," usually the issue is that certain people just shouldn't be allowed to vote in national elections. The political left has generally only had one hobbyhorse here, suggesting that votes should go only to those who have done some (leftist-approved) form of public service, presumably something like a stint in the Peace Corps, or maybe even membership in the kind of activist group where "activist" refers more to noise level than activity level.
The political right, meanwhile, weighed in even before the nation's debut with the notion that only property owners should get the franchise, and that talking point has cropped up repeatedly among rightists since Colonial days. A latter-day counterpart is the insistence that only people who pay taxes should vote, and that one gets hairier as the debate bops around such sticking points as whether to count payroll taxes (which practically everyone with a job pays), or state taxes (which include sales taxes, which, again, practically everyone pays), before settling on federal income taxes, because it pisses rightists off to know that not everyone pays those. (Even that raises questions like "What about nonworking spouses and adult dependents of taxpayers, or no-taxable-income retirees, or families whose mortgage, child and other tax credits wipe out their tax obligation?") And of course there are the counterparts to the "public service" qualification on the right as well, one variation there being the proposition that only military veterans really have the national interest at heart and thus can be trusted with a ballot. (The big question here being "So some schmuck who serves one term of enlistment during peacetime by doing a few years' worth of KP duty at Fort Ass End would count too?")
Two things are noteworthy here: First, no matter what the "more voting fairness" proposal is or who it's from, its intention is always to reduce the number of votes the suggester's political opponents can get. This is not exactly Nobility in Action, is it now? So the rule we've come up with after a hard-fought Constitutional Convention and a couple centuries of amendments — that every citizen at least 18 years old can vote — is probably still the fairest in the sense that it doesn't come with any of the "fergodsakes don't let those people vote" baggage that the other suggestions share.
Second, those constitutional rules about who votes and how, including that electoral-votes-for-president thing, can only be changed with great difficulty. The simple way is to get two-thirds (66.7 percent) of representatives and senators on board to propose an amendment, then get three-quarters (75 percent) of the states' legislatures to ratify it. So, note to all of these angry advocates for "voting fairness": If we can't get more than three-fifths of the voting population to agree on one presidential candidate in the vast majority of elections, how can you possibly even fantasize that you'll be able to change the rules for picking presidents or, for that matter, any other national officeholder?
And if you understand that, as most people at least claim to, why waste so much breath arguing the unwinnable case?
Hell, even if it were winnable, we're still left with the real crux of the 51 percent problem, the one that generates all the animosity: that in any system in which a simple majority is all that's needed to achieve a political goal, and the ideological sides are closely matched in vote-getting abilities, achieving any politically divisive goal is simply a guarantee that just about as many people will be pissed off as pleased.
Solve that conundrum, and they'll probably chisel someone's face right off Mount Rushmore so they can put yours up in its place.
