The current and convenient conservative affection for the elitist electoral college--which surely would be different if Donald Trump had received nearly 3 million more votes and yet been declared the loser--amounts to the right-wing version of the liberals' participation trophy.
The oft-ridiculed liberal notion is to honor everyone for participating in a contest so that no one gets psychologically inconvenienced with the destructive label of loser. But the electoral college goes one better, or worse: It lifts the loser and declares him the winner, and rejects the real winner.
Some Hillary Clinton loyalists are saying the founders' institution known as the electoral college should be abolished because time has passed it by, considering that individual states are no longer remote from, nor independent from, each other. And that's not to mention that this electoral college has now managed to afflict the United States with a preposterous, distant-second-place president.
Clinton beat Trump on votes of the people by 2.1 percent. Her margin of popular-vote victory exceeded that of 10 elected presidents. Yet we get this preposterous minority president.
Trump, that fading place horse, won the decisive electoral college because its anti-democratic premise bestows extra value on largely uninhabited states rather than places where American human beings live. Like California.
Clinton won the people in their clumps; Trump won the areas where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play. And the buffalo, deer and antelope prevailed.
Conservatives are saying it's only right that Californians don't count for presidential balloting purposes as much as, say, Montanans do. That's because they don't like Californians, but they are fine with Montanans.
They say we must keep California in check because ... you know, too many people live there, and they're unwieldy, with all those ethnicities and independent attitudes and open-mindedness and show-business people and Silicon Valley nerds and gay people and elite universities and Nobel Prize winners.
They say that, if you let Americans in California hold equal voting rights with Americans in Montana, then California would run everything because it has ... you know, more Americans.
They say, as if it matters, that Trump won the popular vote if not for California. So what? California is America, like it or not.
You could as fairly make the point that Clinton won the electoral college if not for the states of the old Confederacy, which, unlike California, seceded from and waged a war against the United States.
But let's face it: We're not going to do anything to change the electoral college. It helps Republicans and hurts Democrats, and Republicans are in charge and Democrats aren't, even when they are.
Republicans play for keeps, as in North Carolina, where the Republican legislature stripped the governor's office of power because a Democrat had the audacity to get the voters to elect him to it.
They don't have an in-state electoral college stifling the Democratic gubernatorial candidate getting the most votes in North Carolina.
They don't need one. They have a Republican legislature to abuse lawmaking for that.
Still, I argue that we need to do something about the electoral college--either abolish it and let the 14th Amendment's one-man, one-vote principle apply to presidential elections as well as congressional districts, or enhance its powers in advancement of broader application of the premise that losers should and could be declared winners, and vice versa.
On the premise that fewer votes should count more than a greater number, and on the broader notion that winners should be losers and losers should be winners, the electoral college ought to be empowered forthwith additionally to:
• Declare the Soviet Union the winner of the Cold War, which, hmmm, now that you think about it ...
• Install Tony Romo as the starting quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys.
• Award an Emmy to Celebrity Apprentice.
• Elect the Green Party's Jill Stein president, because she barely got any votes at all.
• Rephrase the Pledge of Allegiance from "one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" to "50 states, under God, wholly divisible, with liberty and justice for everybody except Californians."
• Disallow any electoral votes from Arkansas until the state changes its official motto form "regnat populus," meaning the people rule, to "regnat populous not."
• Proclaim the Arkansas Razorbacks the winners over the Missouri Tigers in that game the day after Thanksgiving and send the Hogs into the Belk Bowl with a more respectable-sounding 8-4 record.
• Rename the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette the Arkansas Gazette-Democrat.
• Award this column a Pulitzer Prize.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/22/2016