OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
OUR VIEW
There’s no reason
to get rid of the
Electoral College
or the second time in the past five presidential elections,
the candidate who won the most votes will not win the
election.
This has turned the Electoral College — the mechanism by
which this country chooses its leader — into the punching bag
of the moment. It appears especially detrimental to democ-
racy right now, after it enabled a candidate widely agreed to
be unqualified for the job to land it. Acting on that feeling last
week, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., filed a long-shot bill
to abolish the college and have elections decided solely by a
popular vote.
We’re taking a step back and the long view. Despite the
results of 2016, we remain in favor of the Electoral College
and think it is an appropriate way to choose the nation’s leader.
F
Founding Fathers
First, a quick history lesson: Detailed in Article II of the
Constitution, our means of electing a president – not called the
Electoral College until roughly a century later – was designed
by the Founding Fathers. It mixed the power of electing a pres-
ident between states and individual voters.
Back in 1787, the country was dealing with the difficult
issues of states, regional populations and slavery. The South
had lots of people living there, but many of them were not cit-
izens and not allowed to vote. That meant more individual bal-
lots could be cast in the Northeast, overwhelming what those in
the South wanted. The Electoral College was a compromise —
individual votes mattered, but those votes were slotted by state.
The system roughly evened out the electoral power between
regions.
It does much the same today, though thankfully the scourge
of slavery is long overturned.
Campaigning
The system requires that a man or woman convince a wide
swath of this country of their fitness for the job, to campaign
in out-of-the-way places and
to listen and be aware of the
It’s not
issues, needs and beliefs of
perfect, but
many disparate Americans.
on the whole,
It does make things a bit
unfair — swing state voters
the college
get more attention and more
is a way to
helpful policies. It also means
balance the
that rural and suburban vot-
ers have a larger voice, when needs of the
compared to the packed pop-
entire country,
ulation centers of the east
avoid an
and west coasts. But it also
means that flyover states have overwhelming
their say and that geographi- and ensconced
cally limited majorities cannot
dominate the country at large. political
President-elect Trump is a majority and
proponent of the current sys- make our
tem. He tweeted last Tuesday:
elections
“The Electoral College is
actually genius in that it
legitimately
brings all states, including
competitive.
the smaller ones, into play.
Campaigning is much different!”
That’s what he thinks right now, because the college was
vital to his victory. Trump had a completely opposite opinion
just four years ago after Barack Obama’s win. Trump tweeted:
“The electoral college is a disaster for democracy.”
That flip-flop only goes to show that our president-elect is
a man all about himself, one who espouses what is good for
Trump is good for all and what is bad for Trump is bad for
everyone.
For those of us with a more nuanced and less self-centered
view of our democracy, we see the pros and cons of our elec-
tion process, and Oregon Republicans have every right to dis-
like the system. In solidly blue states and even regions within
those states, GOP presidential votes haven’t meant much for
decades, but galvanizing issues can change that in any given
election.
It’s not perfect, but on the whole, the college is a way to bal-
ance the needs of the entire country, avoid an overwhelming
and ensconced political majority and make our elections legit-
imately competitive. The Electoral College remains, just as the
founders intended, a great evener. No person or party has an
inherent advantage.
The danger of a dominant identity
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times News Service
O
ver the past few days we’ve
seen what happens when
you assign someone a single
identity. Pollsters assumed that most
Latinos would vote
only as Latinos, and
therefore against
Donald Trump. But
a surprising per-
centage voted for
him.
Pollsters assumed women would
vote primarily as women, and go
for Hillary Clinton. But a surpris-
ing number voted against her. They
assumed African-Americans would
vote along straight Democratic lines,
but a surprising number left the top
line of the ballot blank.
The pollsters reduced complex
individuals to a single identity, and
are now embarrassed. But pollsters
are not the only people guilty of
reductionist solitarism. This mode of
thinking is one of the biggest prob-
lems facing this country today.
Generalization
Trump spent the entire cam-
paign reducing people to one iden-
tity and then generalizing. Muslims
are only one thing, and they are dan-
gerous. Mexicans are only one thing,
and that is alien. When Trump talked
about African-Americans he always
talked about inner-city poverty, as if
that was the sum total of the black
experience in America.
Bigots turn multidimensional
human beings into one-dimensional
creatures. Anti-Semites define Jew-
ishness in a certain crude minia-
turizing way. Racists define both
blackness and whiteness in just that
manner. Populists dehumanize com-
plex people into the moronic catego-
ries of “the people” and “the elites.”
But it’s not only racists who
reduce people to a single identity.
These days it’s the anti-racists, too.
To raise money and mobilize people,
advocates play up ethnic categories
to an extreme degree.
Large parts of popular culture —
and pretty much all of stand-up com-
edy — consist of reducing people to
one or another identity and then mak-
ing jokes about that generalization.
The people who worry about cultural
appropriation reduce people to an
ethnic category and argue that those
outside can never understand it. A
single identity walls off empathy and
the imagination.
We’re even seeing a wave of vol-
untary reductionism. People feel
besieged, or they’re intellectually
lazy, so they reduce themselves to
one category. Being an evangeli-
cal used to mean practicing a cer-
tain form of faith. But “evangelical”
has gone from being an adjective to a
noun, a simplistic tribal identity that
commands Republican affiliation.
Clueless
Unfortunately, if you reduce com-
plex individuals to one thing you’ll
go through life clueless about the
world around you. People’s classifi-
cations now shape how they see the
world.
Plus, as philosopher Amartya Sen
has argued, this mentality makes the
world more flammable. Crude tribal
dividing lines inevitably arouse a
besieged, victimized us/them men-
tality. This mentality assumes that
the relations between groups are zero
sum and antagonistic. People with
this mentality tolerate dishonesty,
misogyny and terrorism on their own
side because all morality lays down
before the tribal imperative.
Only way out
The only way out of this mess is
to continually remind ourselves that
each human is a conglomeration of
identities: ethnic, racial, professional,
geographic, religious and so on.
Even each identity itself is not one
thing but a tradition of debate about
the meaning of that identity. Further-
more, the dignity of each person is
not found in the racial or ethnic cat-
egory that each has inherited, but in
the moral commitments that each
individual has chosen and lived out.
Getting out of this mess also
means accepting the limits of social
science. The judgments of actual vot-
ers are better captured in the nar-
ratives of journalism and historical
analysis than in the brutalizing cor-
relations of big data.
Rebinding the nation means find-
ing shared identities, not just con-
trasting ones. If we want to improve
race relations, it’s not enough to have
a conversation about race. We also
have to emphasize identities peo-
ple have in common across the color
line. If you can engage different peo-
ple together as Marines or teachers,
then you will have built an empa-
thetic relationship, and people can
learn one another’s racial experi-
ences naturally.
Finally, we have to revive the
American identity. For much of the
20th century, America had a rough
consensus about the American idea.
Historians congregated around a
common narrative. People put great
stock in civic rituals like the pledge.
But that consensus is now in tatters,
stretched by globalization, increasing
diversity as well as failures of civic
education.
Now many Americans don’t rec-
ognize one another or their coun-
try. The line I heard most on election
night was, “This is not my Amer-
ica.” We will have to construct a new
national idea that binds and embraces
all our particular identities.
The good news is that there
wasn’t mass violence last week. That
could have happened amid a civic
clash this ugly and passionate. That’s
a sign that for all the fear and anger
of this season, there’s still mutual
attachment among us, something to
build on.
But there has to be a rejection of
single-identity thinking and a contin-
ual embrace of the reality that each
of us is a mansion with many rooms.
The Medicare killers are on the hunt
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times News Service
D
uring the campaign, Don-
ald Trump often promised to
be a different kind of Repub-
lican, one who would represent the
interests of work-
ing-class voters.
“I’m not going to
cut Social Secu-
rity like every
other Republican
and I’m not going
to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” he
declared, under the headline “Why
Donald Trump Won’t Touch Your
Entitlements.”
It was, of course, a lie. The tran-
sition team’s point man on Social
Security is a longtime advocate of
privatization, and all indications
are that the incoming administra-
tion is getting ready to kill Medicare,
replacing it with vouchers that can
be applied to the purchase of private
insurance. Oh, and it’s also likely to
raise the age of Medicare eligibility.
So it’s important not to let this
bait-and-switch happen before the
public realizes what’s going on.
Three points in particular need to
be made as loudly as possible.
Violating the promise
First, the attack on Medicare will
be one of the most blatant violations
of a campaign promise in history.
Some readers may recall George
W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social
Security, in which he claimed a
“mandate” from voters despite hav-
ing run a campaign entirely focused
on other issues. That was bad, but
this is much worse — and not just
because Trump lost the popular vote
by a significant margin, making any
claim of a mandate bizarre.
Candidate Trump ran on exactly
the opposite position from the one
President-elect Trump seems to be
embracing, claiming to be defending
the (white) working class. Now he’s
going to destroy a program that is
crucial to that class?
Which brings me to the second
point: While Medicare is an essen-
tial program for a great majority of
Americans, it’s especially important
for the white working-class voters
who supported Trump most strongly.
Partly that’s because Medicare bene-
ficiaries are considerably whiter than
the country as a whole, precisely
because they’re older and reflect the
demography of an earlier era.
Beyond that, think of what would
happen if Medicare didn’t exist.
Some older Americans would prob-
ably be able to retain health cov-
erage by staying at jobs that come
with such coverage. But this option
would by and large be available only
to those with extensive education: .
Working-class seniors would be left
stranded.
Doesn’t something have to be
done about Medicare? No — which
is my third point. People like Speaker
Paul Ryan, have often managed to
bamboozle the media into believing
that their efforts to dismantle Medi-
care and other programs are driven
by economic concerns. They aren’t.
It has been obvious for a long
time that Medicare is actually more
efficient than private insurance,
mainly because it doesn’t spend large
sums on overhead and marketing,
and, of course, it needn’t make room
for profits.
What’s not widely known is that
the cost-saving measures included in
the Affordable Care Act have been
remarkably successful in their efforts
to rein in the long-term rise in Medi-
care expenses. Since 2010 Medicare
outlays per beneficiary have risen
only 1.4 percent a year, less than the
inflation rate. This success is one
main reason long-term budget pro-
jections have dramatically improved.
So why try to destroy this suc-
cessful program, which is than ever?
The main answer, from the point of
view of people like Ryan, is prob-
ably that Medicare is in the cross
hairs precisely because of its success:
It would be very helpful for oppo-
nents of government to do away with
a program that clearly demonstrates
the power of government to improve
people’s lives.
In summary, privatizing Medicare
would betray a central promise of
the Trump campaign, would betray
the interests of the voter bloc that
thought it had found a champion, and
would be terrible policy.
What’s crucial now is to make
sure that voters do, in fact, realize
what’s going on. And this isn’t just a
job for politicians. It’s also a chance
for the news media, which failed so
badly during the campaign, to start
doing its job.