MATH AGAINST TYRANNY

By Will Hively

The following article is taken from the 1996 November issue of Discover Magazine. We would like to thank Discover for the great research and writing that went into this article. To read more great articles from Discover, visit them on the web at www.discover.com.

I CAN’T ENCOURAGE YOU ENOUGH TO TAKE THE TIME TO READ THIS ARTICLE AND REALLY UNDERSTAND THE NECESSITY AND LIBERTY GUARDING EFFECT OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE.

When you cast your vote this month, you’re not directly electing the president—you’re electing members of the electoral college. They elect the president. An archaic, unnecessary system? Mathematics shows, says one concerned American, that by giving your vote to another, you’re ensuring the future of our democracy.

“One morning at two o’clock,” Alan Natapoff recalls, “I realized that I was the only person willing to see this problem through to the end.” The morning in question was back in the late 1970s. Then as now, Natapoff, a physicist, was spending his days doing research at MIT’s Man-Vehicle Laboratory, investigating how the human brain responds to acceleration, weightless floating, and other vexations of contemporary transport. But the problem he was working on so late involved larger and grander issues. He was contemplating the survival of our nation as we know it.

Not long before Natapoff’s epiphany, Congress had teetered on the verge of wrecking the electoral college, an institution that has no equal anywhere in the world. This group of ordinary citizens, elected by all who vote, elects, in turn, the nation’s president and vice president. Though the college still stood, Natapoff worried that sometime soon, well-meaning reformers might try again to destroy it. The only way to prevent such a tragedy, he thought, would be to get people to understand the real but hidden value of our peculiar, roundabout voting procedure. He’d have to dig down to basic principles. He’d have to give them a mathematical explanation of why we need the electoral college.

Natapoff’s self-chosen labor has taken him more than two decades. But now that the journal Public Choice is about to publish his groundbreaking article, he can finally relax a bit; he might even take a vacation. In addition to this nontechnical article, which skimps on the math, he’s worked out a formal theorem that demonstrates, he claims, why our complex electoral system is “provably” better than a simple, direct election. Furthermore, he adds, without this quirky glitch in the system, our democracy might well have fallen apart long ago into warring factions.

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This month many of us are playing our allotted role in the drama that’s haunted Natapoff for so long. Ostensibly, by voting on November 5, we are choosing the next president of the United States. Nine weeks after the apparent winner celebrates victory, however, Congress will count not our votes but those of 538 “electors,” distributed proportionally among the states. Each state gets as many electoral votes as it has seats in Congress–California has 54, New York has 33, the seven least populated states have 3 each; the District of Columbia also has 3. These 538 votes actually elect the president. And the electors who cast them don’t always choose the popular-vote winner. In 1888, the classic example, Grover Cleveland got 48.6 percent of the popular vote versus Benjamin Harrison’s 47.9 percent. Cleveland won by 100,456 votes. But the electors chose Harrison, overwhelmingly (233 to 168). They were not acting perversely. According to the rules laid out in the Constitution, Harrison was the winner.

Some reversals have been more complicated. In 1824, Andrew Jackson beat his rival, John Quincy Adams, by more popular and then more electoral votes–99 versus 84– but still lost the election because he didn’t win a majority of electoral votes (78 went to other candidates). When that happens, the House of Representatives picks the winner. In 1876, Samuel J. Tilden lost to Rutherford B. Hayes by one electoral vote, though he received 50.9 percent of the popular vote to Hayes’s 47.9 percent; an extraordinary commission awarded 20 disputed electoral votes to Hayes. We’ve also had some famous close calls. In 1960, John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard Nixon in the popular voting, 49.7 percent to 49.5 percent, a smaller margin than Cleveland had over Harrison. But wait: Nixon won more states (Nixon 26, Kennedy and others 24). But no: Kennedy, who won bigger states, went on to win the electoral balloting, 303 to 219. This time we, the people, did not strike out. The popular-vote winner became president.

Clearly, in U.S. presidential elections, it ain’t over till it’s over. A popular-vote loser in the big national contest can still win by scoring more points in the smaller electoral college. But isn’t this undemocratic? Isn’t it somehow wrong that a few hundred obscure electors, foisted on a new republic by men of property in powdered wigs, should be allowed to reverse the people’s choice?

By 1969, Congress was beginning to think so. After Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey with a popular margin, again, of less than 1 percent, the possibility of a modern-day winner’s being denied the presidency had become so obnoxious to the House of Representatives that it approved a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college. The American Bar Association supported the move, calling our current electoral system “archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and

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dangerous.” In the Senate, too, the amendment had broad support. What could be simpler or fairer than electing the president by direct popular vote? Over the next few years the issue lost momentum, but Jimmy Carter’s narrow victory over Gerald Ford in 1976 brought it back to life. The League of Women Voters, a host of political scientists, and a large majority of American citizens, according to various polls, all agreed that the electoral college should be abolished. In 1977, though, among those testifying against the amendment was a self-described political nobody from Massachusetts: Alan Natapoff.

Leafing now through the Congressional Record, Natapoff laughs. “The impact of my testimony,” he says, “was negligible.” He hadn’t yet proved his theorem, and the mathematical argument he did present was edited to a “blunted” paraphrase, leaving out some of his most important arguments. The electoral college survived, of course, but not because of anything Natapoff said. After a decade of sporadic debate and 4,395 pages of testimony, the bill died in the Senate. It had majority support, but not the two-thirds majority required to pass it.

The issue will likely catch fire again, though, the moment another popular winner fails to muster the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch victory. “Raw voting, having the president elected by a popular vote, is deep in the American psyche,” Natapoff says. It’s been around since Andrew Jackson finally won the presidency–four years later than he should have, according to 153,544 raw, frustrated voters. “My theorem,” Natapoff admits, “contradicts the common wisdom of our time. Everybody gets this wrong. Everybody. Because we were taught incorrectly.”

Natapoff included. How could a boy who grew up in the Bronx, played ball in the streets, and attended public schools in New York City not have absorbed the common wisdom? Natapoff went on to study particle physics at Berkeley. Later, at mit, he changed his field of research but not his belief in raw, popular democracy. Then one day in the 1960s, he saw an article in Life that changed his mind. It quoted political experts who said the electoral college robs voters of their power. But the mathematics these experts were using seemed too simple to support their conclusion. Natapoff looked into the math, and pretty soon he reached the opposite conclusion. Almost always, he convinced himself, our electoral systemincreasesvoters’ power. The experts had not considered enough cases; they looked only at unbelievably close elections with two candidates running neck and neck everywhere in the country. Real elections are almost never that closely contested. Some states tilt sharply toward one candidate or another, and the voting power of individuals in each state changes in ways the reformers’ arguments ignored.

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The more Natapoff looked into the nitty-gritty of real elections, the more parallels he found with another American institution that stirs up wild passions in the populace. The same logic that governs our electoral system, he saw, also applies to many sports– which Americans do, intuitively, understand. In baseball’s World Series, for example, the team that scores the most runs overall is like a candidate who gets the most votes. But to become champion, that team must win the most games. In 1960, during a World Series as nail-bitingly close as that year’s presidential battle between Kennedy and Nixon, the New York Yankees, with the awesome slugging combination of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Bill “Moose” Skowron, scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the series, four games to three. Even Natapoff, who grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, conceded that Pittsburgh deserved to win. “Nobody walked away saying it was unfair,” he says.

Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. The Yankees won three blowouts (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but they couldn’t come up with the runs they needed in the other four games, which were close. “And that’s exactly how Cleveland lost the series of 1888,” Natapoff continues. “Grover Cleveland. He lost the five largest states by a close margin, though he carried Texas, which was a thinly populated state then, by a large margin. So he scored more runs, but he lost the five biggies.” And that was fair, too. In sports, we accept that a true champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A champion should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by every means available– bunting, stealing, brilliant pitching, dazzling plays in the field–and not just smack home runs against second-best pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.

“Experts, scholars, deep thinkers could make errors on electoral reform,” Natapoff decided, “but nine-year-olds could explain to a Martian why the Yankees lost in 1960, and why it was right. And both have the same underlying abstract principle.”

These insights came quickly, but it was many years before Natapoff devised his formal mathematical proof. His starting point was the concept of voting power. In a fair election, he saw, each voter’s power boils down to this: What is the probability that one person’s vote will be able to turn a national election? The higher the probability, the more power each voter commands. To figure out these probabilities, Natapoff devised his own model of a national electorate–a more realistic model, he thought, than the ones the quoted experts were always using. Almost always, he found, individual voting power is higher when funneled through districts–such as states–than when pooled in

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one large, direct election. It is more likely, in other words, that your one vote will determine the outcome in your state and your state will then turn the outcome of the electoral college, than that your vote will turn the outcome of a direct national election. A voter therefore, Natapoff found, has more power under the current electoral system.

Why worry how easily one vote can turn an election, so long as each voter has equal power? One person, one vote–that’s all the math anyone needs to know in a simple, direct election. Natapoff agrees that voters should have equal power. “The idea,” he says, “is to give every voter the largest equal share of national voting power possible.” Here’s a classic example of equal voting power: under a tyranny, everyone’s power is equal to zero. Clearly, equality alone is not enough. In a democracy, individuals become less vulnerable to tyranny as their voting power increases.

James Madison, chief architect of our nation’s electoral college, wanted to protect each citizen against the most insidious tyranny that arises in democracies: the massed power of fellow citizens banded together in a dominant bloc. As Madison explained in The Federalist Papers (Number X), “a well-constructed Union” must, above all else, “break and control the violence of faction,” especially “the superior force of an . . . overbearing majority.” In any democracy, a majority’s power threatens minorities. It threatens their rights, their property, and sometimes their lives.

A well-designed electoral system might include obstacles to thwart an overbearing majority. But direct, national voting has none. Under raw voting, a candidate has every incentive to woo only the largest bloc– say, Serbs in Yugoslavia. If a Serb party wins national power, minorities have no prospect of throwing them out; 49 percent will never beat 51 percent. Knowing this, the majority can do as it pleases (lacking other effective checks and balances). But in a districted election, no one becomes president without winning a large number of districts, or “states”- -say, two of the following three: Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. Candidates thus have an incentive to campaign for non- Serb votes in at least some of those states and to tone down extreme positions–in short, to make elections less risky events for the losers. The result, as George Wallace used to say, may often be a race without “a dime’s worth of difference” between two main candidates, which he viewed as a weakness but others view as a strength of our system.

The founding fathers were not experts on voting power. Many wanted an electoral college simply because they distrusted the mob. A large electorate, they believed, falls prey to passions, rumors, and “tumult.” Electors were supposed to consider each candidate’s merits more judiciously, not blindly follow the popular will. Nowadays, of course, whoever wins the popular vote in any state wins all the electoral votes in that

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state automatically (except in Maine, which divides its electoral votes). We no longer need human bodies to cast electoral ballots, Natapoff says. That part of the system is indeed archaic. But it has worked beautifully, he insists, as a formula for converting one large national contest into 51 smaller elections in which individual voters have more clout. The Madisonian system, by requiring candidates to win states on the way to winning the nation, has forced majorities to win the consent of minorities, checked the violence of factions, and held the country together. “We have stumbled onto something that not everyone appreciates,” Natapoff says. “People should understand it before they decide to change it.”

Which is why, late one night a couple of decades back, with a minimum of fanfare, Natapoff appointed himself unofficial mathematician for one of the least popular institutions in America.

Two variables, Natapoff realized, profoundly affect each citizen’s voting power. One is the size of the electorate, a factor that political scientists already recognized. The other is the closeness of the contest, which most experts hadn’t taken into account.

It’s easy to see the effect of size. Your vote matters less in a larger pool of votes: it’s the same drop in a bigger bucket and less likely to change the outcome of an election. However, in a ridiculously small nation of, say, three voters, your vote would carry immense power. An election would turn on your ballot 50 percent of the time. For a simple example, let’s assume that only two candidates are running, A versus B, and each vote is like a random coin toss, with a 50 percent chance of going either way. In your nation of three, there’s a 50 percent chance that the other two voters will split, one for A and the other for B, and thus a 50 percent chance that your single vote will determine the election. There’s also, of course, a 25 percent chance both will vote for A and a 25 percent chance both will vote for B, making your vote unimportant. But that potential tie-splitting power puts all voters in a powerful position; candidates will give each of you a lot of respect.

As a nation gets larger, each citizen’s voting power shrinks. When Natapoff computes voting power–the probability that one vote will turn the election–he is really computing the probability that the rest of the nation will deadlock. If you are part of a five-voter nation, the other four voters would have to split–two for A and two for B–for your vote to turn the election. The probability of that happening is 3 in 8, or 37.5 percent. (The other possibilities are three votes for A and one for B, a 25 percent probability; three for B and one for A, also 25 percent; four for A, 6.25 percent; and four for B, 6.25 percent.) As the nation’s size goes up, individual voting power continues to drop, roughly as the square root of size. Among 135 citizens, for instance,

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there are so many ways the others can divide and make your vote meaningless–say, 66 for A and 68 for B–that the probability of deadlock drops to 6.9 percent. In the 1960 presidential race, one of the closest ever, more than 68 million voters went to the polls. A deadlock would have been 34,167,371 votes for Kennedy and the same for Nixon (also-rans not included). Instead, Kennedy squeaked past Nixon 34,227,096 to 34,107,646. You might as well try to balance a pencil on its point as try to swing a modern U.S. election with one vote. In a typical large election, individuals or small groups of voters have little chance of being critical to a raw-vote victory, and they therefore have little bargaining power with a prospective president.

So, does this historic example demonstrate how the electoral college compensates for our individual insignificance? Wasn’t each vote for Kennedy or Nixon actually more important than the raw vote count suggests, being funneled through the electoral college? If a couple thousand votes had changed in a key state or two. . . ? Actually, no- –if the experts’ assumptions are true. If each vote really is like a toss of those perfectly balanced coins so beloved by theorists, then districting never boosts voting power. It’s actually a useless complication; it slightly reduces individual power. You can see this in a small electorate. If you district a nation of nine into three states with three voters each, with each vote a perfect toss-up, the probability of a deadlock in your state is 50 percent. Your vote would then decide the outcome in your state. Beyond that, the other two states must also deadlock, one going for A and one for B, to make your state’s outcome decisive for the nation. The probability of that is also 50 percent. So the compound probability of the whole election hinging on your vote is 25 percent. In a simple, direct election, on the other hand, the national pool of eight other voters would have to split four against four to make your vote decisive. The probability of that happening is 27.3 percent (35/128), giving you more power in a direct election. Districting doesn’t help this nation of nine, and it doesn’t help any electorate of any size when the contest is perfectly even.

Thus the experts who wanted to reform our system were right, but only if you grant them one large assumption. An electoral college does rob voters of power if everyone, in effect, walks into a voting booth and flips a coin to decide between two equally appealing candidates, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. “But this is an inaccurate model,” Natapoff counters. “They were going to change the Constitution based on a narrow finding.”

Natapoff decided to push the analysis further, even though the math got harder as he shed convenient, simplifying assumptions. He wanted to know what happens when voters stop acting like ideal, perfect coins and begin to favor one candidate over the

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other. He could see right away that everyone’s voting power shrinks, because the probability goes down that the electorate will deadlock. The national tally is more likely to be lopsided, just as a tail-heavy coin is more likely to come up, say, 60 heads and 40 tails than 50-50.

A general preference for one candidate over the other is like a house advantage in gambling. “If candidate A has a 1 percent edge on every vote,” Natapoff says, “in 100,000 votes he’s almost sure to win. And that’s bad for the individual voter, whose vote then doesn’t make any difference in the outcome. The leading candidate becomes the house.”

Of course, you might object, voters aren’t really roulette wheels. When you walk into the voting booth, you’ve probably already made up your mind which candidate you’ll vote for. If it’s A, the probability that you’ll pull the lever for B instead isn’t 45 percent, it’s more like 0 percent. Similarly, if your brother-in-law is a strong supporter of B, the probability that he’ll actually vote for B is close to 100 percent, not 45 percent. Although many people get hung up on this part of Natapoff’s argument, it’s not really that hard to understand. Imagine for a moment that you’re not a person at all, but a voting booth. When someone steps in to cast a vote, you have no idea whether that vote will be for A or for B. The voter may have made up her mind long ago, but until she actually pulls the lever, you won’t know whom she’s chosen. All you know is that of the people whose votes you count today, about 55 percent will vote for A and about 45 percent for B. Similarly, a spin of the roulette wheel isn’t really random. The laws of physics, the shape of the ball, the currents in the air, and other factors will all determine where the ball lands. But a gambler can’t calculate those factors any more than a voting booth can know which candidate an individual voter will choose.

In a nation of 135 citizens, says Natapoff, one person’s probability of turning an election is 6.9 percent in a dead-even contest. But if voter preference for candidate A jumps to, say, 55 percent, the probability of deadlock, and of your one vote turning the election, falls below .4 percent, a huge drop. If candidate A goes out in front by 61 percent, the probability that one vote will matter whooshes down to .024 percent. And it keeps on dropping, faster and faster, as candidate A keeps pulling ahead.

The next step is the kicker. The effect of lopsided preferences, Natapoff discovered, is far more important than the size effect. In a dead- even contest, remember, voting power shrinks as the electorate becomes larger. But a 1 or 2 percent change in electorate size, by itself, doesn’t matter much to the individual voter. When one candidate gains an edge over another, however, a 1 or 2 percent change can make a huge difference to everyone’s voting power, giving candidates less of a motive to keep

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the losers happy. And the larger the electorate, the more telling a candidate’s lead becomes, like a house advantage.

Some people know this from ordinary experience. If you’re gambling in a casino, for instance, you had better keep your session as short as possible; the longer you play, the less likely you are to beat the house odds and break even (let alone win). By the same principle, if you’re flipping a lopsided coin yet looking for an equal number of heads and tails (a deadlock), you had better keep the number of coin flips low; the longer you try with lopsided coins, the more the law of averages works against a 50-50 outcome. And if you’re voting in an uneven election, you had better keep the electorate’s size as small as possible. “If the law of averages has got an edge,” Natapoff says, “it’s going to tell in the long run. And so the idea is not to allow any very large elections if you are a voter. Unless the contest is perfectly even, you want to keep the size of elections small.” The founding fathers unwittingly did this when they divided the national election into smaller, state-size contests.

So even though districting doesn’t help in an ideal, dead-even contest, with voters acting the same all over the country, it does help, Natapoff saw, in a realistic, uneven contest. Sports fans, again, vaguely understand the underlying principle. In a championship series, the contest becomes more equal, and the underdog has a better chance, when a team has to win more games, not just score more points. Similarly, when contesting 50 states, the leading candidate has more ways to lose than when running in a large, raw national election–there are more ways for votes to cluster in harmless blowouts, just as there are more ways for runs or goals to cluster in the seven games of the World Series or the Stanley Cup play-offs. In a big, raw national contest, those clusters wouldn’t matter.

The degree to which districting helps, Natapoff found, depends on just how close a contest is. Take as an illustration our model nation of 135, divided into, say, three states of 45 citizens each. When the race is dead even, of course, no districting scheme helps: voting power starts off at 6.9 percent in a direct election versus 6.0 percent in a districted election. But when candidate A jumps ahead with a lead of 54.5 percent, individual voting power is roughly the same whether the nation uses districts or not. And as the contest becomes more lopsided, voting power shrinks faster in the direct- voting nation than it does in the districted nation. If candidate A grabs a 61.1 percent share of voter preference, voters in the districted nation have twice as much power as those in the direct-voting nation. If A’s share reaches 64.8 percent, voters in the districted nation have four times as much power, and so on. The advantage of

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districting over direct voting keeps growing quickly as the contest becomes more lopsided.

Natapoff now had a two-part result. A districted voting scheme can either decrease individual voting power or boost it, depending on how lopsided the coin being tossed for each voter becomes. He found the crossover point interesting. For a nation of 135, that point is right around a 55-45 percent split in voter preference between two candidates. In any contest closer than this, voters would have more power in a simple, direct election. In any contest more lopsided than this, they would be better off voting by districts. How does that crossover point shift, Natapoff wondered, as electorate size changes?

For very small electorates–nine people, say–he found that the gap between candidates must be very large, at least 66.6 to 33.3 percent, before districting will help. That’s why raw voting works well at town meetings, where electorates are so small. As the number of voters gets larger, the crossover point moves closer to 50-50. For a nation of 135, voters are better off with districting in any race more lopsided than 55- 45. For a nation with millions of voters, the gap between candidates must be razor-thin for districting not to help. In the real world of large nations and uneven contests, voters get more bang for their ballot when they set up a districted, Madisonian electoral system–usually a lot more.

Now, try to imagine a bleary-eyed Natapoff working through the math for case after case. He finds out what happens as the size of the electorate changes, as the contest gets more or less lopsided, or as the method of districting changes (in his most favored nation of 135, you could have 3 states of 45 citizens each, 45 states of 3 citizens each– even 5 states of 20 and 7 states of 5). All these things affect voting power. Natapoff’s theorem now covers all cases. “The theorem,” he sums up, “essentially says that you’re better off districted in any large election, unless every voter in the country is alike and very closely balanced between candidates A and B. In that very extraordinary case, which rarely if ever occurs in our elections, it would be better to have a simple national election.”

Natapoff had finally answered, to his satisfaction, the question that had nagged him for decades. But what size, shape, and composition should our districts have? Like everyone else who delves into electoral politics, Natapoff could see that the actual, historic United States is not a perfectly districted nation. For one thing, states vary enormously in size. Natapoff can solve his equations to find an ideal district size for the purpose of national elections, assuming that each vote, like a coin toss, is statistically independent–but the answer depends on an election’s closeness. The districts could

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all be the same size, but only if the preference for one candidate over another is the same everywhere in the country. In general, the more lopsided the contest, the smaller each district, or state, needs to be to give individual voters the best chance of local deadlock. So in close elections, voters in larger states would have more power; in lopsided elections, voters in smaller states would. Since some campaigns run neck and neck to the wire while others become blowouts, we will probably never have an ideally districted nation for any particular election, even with equal-size states.

Ideally, too, no bloc should dominate any district. This consideration, by itself, probably makes the 50 states a grid that’s closer to ideal for electoral voting than, say, the 435 congressional districts. For example, in heavily black districts, no single white or black person’s vote would be likely to change the outcome, if blacks in that district tend to vote as a bloc. Each of those voters, black and white, would have more national power in a districting scheme more closely balanced between black and white. For this reason, Natapoff says, gerrymandering can be counterproductive even when undertaken with the intention of boosting some national minority’s power. The gerrymandered district might guarantee one seat in Congress to this minority, but those voters might actually wield more national bargaining power with no seat in Congress if representatives from, say, three separate districts viewed their votes as potentially swinging an election. Anyway, Natapoff says, the point of districting is to reduce the death grip of blocs on the outcome. “This is a nonpartisan proposition,” he says. “The idea is to be sure all votes in a district have power.” Ideally no single party, race, ethnic group, or other bloc, nationally large or nationally small, will dominate any of the districts– which for now happen to be the 50 states plus Washington, D.C.

Natapoff concedes that the Madisonian system does contain within it one small, unavoidable paradox. Every once in a while, if we use districting to jack up individual voting power, we’ll have an electoral “anomaly”–a loser like Harrison will nudge out a slightly more popular Cleveland. He sees those anomalies, as well as the more frequent close calls, not as defects but as signs that the system is working. It is protecting individual voting power by preserving the threat that small numbers of votes in this or that district can turn the election. “We were blinded by its minor vices,” he says. “All that happens is someone with fewer votes gets elected,” temporarily. What doesn’t happen may be far more important. In 1888, victorious Republicans didn’t celebrate by jailing or killing Democrats, and Democrats didn’t find Harrison so intolerable that they took up arms. Cleveland came back to win four years later, beating Harrison under the same rules as before. The republic survived.

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One other benefit attributed by Natapoff to our electoral college seems almost aesthetic. As usual, it’s easier to appreciate in sports. In 1960, under simpler rules, the Yankees might have been champions. They might have won, for instance, if there were no World Series but only the scheduled 154-game season, with one large baseball nation of 16 teams instead of two separate leagues. The team winning the most games all year long would simply pick up its prize in October. Instead, here is what happened. By the ninth inning in game seven of the series, the Yankees and Pirates had fought to a standstill–the ultimate deadlock. Each team had won three games. The Yankees had led throughout much of game seven, but Pittsburgh astonished everyone by scoring five runs in the eighth inning, after a Yankee fielding error, to go ahead 9-7. They couldn’t, of course, hold their lead. The Yankees answered with two more runs in the top of the ninth to tie the score at 9-9.

Then, in the bottom of the ninth, Bill Mazeroski, an average hitter without much power, stepped to the plate for Pittsburgh. He seemed a mere placeholder–until his long fly ball just cleared the left-field wall. Rounding second base, halfway home, Mazeroski was leaping for joy, and Pittsburgh fans were pouring from their seats, racing to meet him at the plate. The Yankees had finally toppled. There they were, ahead in the polls, piling up votes like nobody’s business, until one last swing of one player’s bat turned the whole season around. “Everybody regarded it as one of the most glorious World Series ever,” Natapoff says. “To do it any other way would totally destroy the degree of competition and excitement that’s essential to all sports.”

4th of July

July 4th Celebration Address 2020

On the 4th of July, Monticello College will hold a sunrise service beginning at 5:50am. Following this devotional, the college president will read the short speech below and offer a showing of the David Barton video: Sands of Time.

On this day of celebration, it is customary to recite some moments of historical significance regarding the War of Independence and the break from Great Britain. But today I have chosen to spend a few minutes remembering why the war occurred and what that great struggle was meant to achieve. As I have reflected on this idea, my mind returned over and over to the simplicity and gravity of the 1954 U.S. Pledge of Allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Many would say that our great nation began on July 4, 1776. We had a great struggle for independence, and organized a new nation–that history is abundantly available and part of our curriculum at Monticello College. But the IDEA of a nation like our started much earlier, in fact, a case could be made that it started as early as 1607, with the settlement of Jamestown or 1636 with the establishment of Harvard University.  Or maybe it wasn’t until the appearance of great frontiersmen of the late 1700’s such as Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett. Whatever date you use as a starting point, the Pledge of Allegiance is very instructive as a focal point for what the framers intended for this nation to become.

United States of America

America was, according to the framers, to be a nation of nations, or to use the term of the time, a “federation of sovereign states.” Each state was supreme in its administration within its borders but ceded limited powers to a central government.

Republic

The framers combed through thousands of years of history and through all sorts of forms and philosophies of government reading the writings of great writers such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Cervantes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu, finally settling on a Republic as the best form of government.

One Nation Under God

Without attempting to dictate the future, the framers left a legacy of religious observance in official acts, writings, and art to encourage their progeny to have an expectation of Divine influence if the nation was to remain. From the chambers of the Supreme Court to the Capitol’s Rotunda, religious engravings and art can be seen by all to evince the influence of religion and dependence on a Divine Creator in the forming of our great nation.

Indivisible

As families can have their squabbles and disagreements, so too can a nation of sovereign states find reasons to disagree. In spite of this propensity, the framers envision our nation to be unified and indivisible. A great and terrible war was fought to test this resolve and to date, it has held.

Liberty and Justice for All

The Signing of the Constitution of the United States, with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson at the Constitutional Convention of 1787; oil painting on canvas by Howard Chandler Christy, 1940. The painting is 20 by 30 feet and hangs in the United States Capitol building. (Photo by GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)

The foundation and supreme logic behind the formation of our nation is the establishment and protection of liberty and the administration of justice. In many ways America is a global leader in the protection of human and civil rights. In other areas, it is a continuing struggle, but as obvious as our faults may be, all are free to protest and express their grievances as guaranteed under the 1st amendment and demonstrated over the past few months.

As we celebrate this 4th of July holiday, we can rejoice in the liberties that all Americans enjoy, we should give thanks for the miracle that America is, and we must continue to defend the rights of all Americans through education, public discourse, and the administration of justice.

The framers would have it no other way.

Video: https://www.facebook.com/WallBuilders1776/videos/308907610509835/

Up From Slavery

Booker T. Washington was nine years old when he was freed from slavery. His book “Up From Slavery,” gives great insight into the process of going from the dependence of slavery to the responsibility of freedom. He highlights the human degradation caused by slavery; not only the obvious humiliation of mind and spirit, but also the physical decline of personal hygiene, the lack of family structure (when there was a semblance of family), and the utter absence of hope for the future.

As Washington by his own words, was newly aware of his servitude at the time of emancipation, his book is almost entirely about a people leaving slavery and those who assisted in the process. He spends considerable time relating the importance of personal hygiene as a matter of self respect and that while so many other former slaves understandable shunned physical labor and sought their fortunes in the cities of the north, he vigorously promoted the need to develop skills that would lead to community respect and financial independence in their own communities.

As a tribute to Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Monticello College has modeled our program after his. It is interesting to note, that his solution to what he called the “race issue” was not apologies or reparations, but self respect, economic development, and service to humanity.

Below is his famous address delivered in 1895. We can learn a lot from this man in 2020.

Booker T. Washington Delivers the 1895 Atlanta Compromise Speech

On September 18, 1895, African-American spokesman and leader Booker T. Washington spoke before a predominantly white audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. His “Atlanta Compromise” address, as it came to be called, was one of the most important and influential speeches in American history. Although the organizers of the exposition worried that “public sentiment was not prepared for such an advanced step,” they decided that inviting a black speaker would impress Northern visitors with the evidence of racial progress in the South. Washington soothed his listeners’ concerns about “uppity” blacks by claiming that his race would content itself with living “by the productions of our hands.”


Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Board of Directors and Citizens:

One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success. I but convey to you, Mr. President and Directors, the sentiment of the masses of my race when I say that in no way have the value and manhood of the American Negro been more fittingly and generously recognized than by the managers of this magnificent Exposition at every stage of its progress. It is a recognition that will do more to cement the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom.

Not only this, but the opportunity here afforded will awaken among us a new era of industrial progress. Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden.

A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal,“Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A second time the signal, “Water, water; send us water!” ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”— cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.

Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world, and in nothing is this Exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.

To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race,“Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen. Effort or means so invested will pay a thousand per cent interest. These efforts will be twice blessed—blessing him that gives and him that takes. There is no escape through law of man or God from the inevitable:

The laws of changeless justice bind Oppressor with oppressed;

And close as sin and suffering joined We march to fate abreast…

Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third [of] its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.

Gentlemen of the Exposition, as we present to you our humble effort at an exhibition of our progress, you must not expect overmuch. Starting thirty years ago with ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkins and chickens (gathered from miscellaneous sources), remember the path that has led from these to the inventions and production of agricultural implements, buggies, steam-engines, newspapers, books, statuary, carving, paintings, the management of drug stores and banks, has not been trodden without contact with thorns and thistles. While we take pride in what we exhibit as a result of our independent efforts, we do not for a moment forget that our part in this exhibition would fall far short of your expectations but for the constant help that has come to our educational life, not only from the Southern states, but especially from Northern philanthropists, who have made their gifts a constant stream of blessing and encouragement.

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.

In conclusion, may I repeat that nothing in thirty years has given us more hope and encouragement, and drawn us so near to you of the white race, as this opportunity offered by the Exposition; and here bending, as it were, over the altar that represents the results of the struggles of your race and mine, both starting practically empty-handed three decades ago, I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race; only let this be constantly in mind, that, while from representations in these buildings of the product of field, of forest, of mine, of factory, letters, and art, much good will come, yet far above and beyond material benefits will be that higher good, that, let us pray God, will come, in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law. This, coupled with our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth.

The Hardest School

The Boomer and Xer Generation’s search for the “quick fix” has done much to cripple the Millennial and Homeland generations, who I fear have weak mooring in the ancient bulwark of principle. The older generations have taught them to desire things from an entitlement perspective, which is always prefaced with an “I deserve” or “you deserve,” without regard for the hard work and sacrifice it takes to achieve them.

No, we will continue to demand today with no effort, that for which our grandparents spent a life time living to acquire, and never securing the knowledge that they possess—that the joy is not in the getting, but in the living towards.

In education (not schooling mind you), we make huge strides in the direction of entering on the path of becoming true liberal artists, only to be sucked out to sea with the tsunami undertow of public opinion and fear of pain. The truth is, unless we can resolve to just be honest with ourselves, our attempts at Liber Education will end up in little more than slightly higher mediocrity. There is a price to pay to get a superb leadership education and in our day everyone seems bent on finding a short cut.

Acquiring a liberal arts education is likely to be the most difficult and painful thing you have ever attempt in your entire existence. It impacts every aspect of your domestic, religious, and professional life. If you are alone in this endeavor, you will be chastised, ridiculed, gossiped about, made fun of, and left out. You will spend hours upon hours in solitude studying books that nobody you know has ever heard of. People will say, “while I admire your effort, what kind of job can you get with that?”

“There is no need to suppose that human beings differ very much one from another: but it is true that the ones who come out on top are the ones who have been trained in the hardest school.”

But it gets worse. First, if you are unfortunate enough to have a group to study with, then the going really gets rough. Whenever two or more people get together to study (without a world class liberal arts mentor) to gain a liberal arts education, it is nearly always a failure before it begins. Immediately they start to make it easier by distributing the workload, dividing the reading up between themselves so they can “share the experience.” This is anathema to true learning in most cases. It is like trying to build muscle mass on your own body by having one person work out their own legs, another doing their own biceps and so on. It might be a great work out, but you gain little from the experience.

Second, it is so tempting to find anything claiming to be connected with Thomas Jefferson Education and just adopt it as the real thing. It often costs less and always requires less. “The easier, the better” seems to be our national motto. And we are tempted to apply it to our education just like every other aspect of modern life. After hearing great mentors promote superb but “gut-wrenching” hard education, we are so relieved when someone comes along with the “quick fixed” short-cut version.

Third, particularly if you are working with youth, you will naturally begin to look for ways to streamline and mainstream the curriculum, easing the youth into the educational process. We do this so we can impact more youth and help them improve their minds. But this is a little like watering down the Kool-Aid so everyone can have some; they all get a drink but nobody ever knows what “Loonie Lime” truly tastes like.

Remember, we do all of this with the best intentions, with vigorous efforts to ensure balance and good feelings all around—at the sacrifice of sound principles of extremely hard work, missed games and parties, nights crying in frustration, and mornings dawning with new and solid realization and resolve. This protected, “take the hardness out” approach to education, especially applied to acquiring a liberal arts education, results in the following natural consequences as summarized by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1840’s:

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they loose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened and complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles it, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.

Aristotle to Augustine, Homer to Shakespeare, Adler to Hutchinson, Barzun to Lewis, Dickens to L’Amour—it is always the same. True Leadership-Statesmanship comes out of none other than pain, struggle with God and self, tenacity and hard, long study. This concept is no where better discussed than by Mortimer Adler in his essay Invitation to the Pain of Learning:

One of the reasons why education given by our schools is so frothy and vapid is that the American people generally—the parent more than the teacher—wish childhood to unspoiled by pain. Childhood must be a period of delight, of [happy] indulgence [of] impulses. It must be given every avenue of unimpeded expression, which of course is pleasant; and it must not be made to suffer the impositions of discipline or the exactions of duty, which of course are painful. . . What lies behind my remark is a distinction between two views of education.

In one view, education is something externally added to a person, as his clothing or other accoutrements. We cajole him into standing there willingly while we fit him; and in doing this we must be guided by his likes and dislikes, by his notion of what enhances his appearance. In the other view, education is an interior transformation of a person’s mind and character. He is plastic material to be improved not according to his inclinations, but according to what is good for him. But because he is a living thing, and not dead clay, the transformation can be effected only through his own activity.

Teachers of every sort can help, but they can only help in the process of learning that must be dominated at every moment by the activity of the learner. And the fundamental activity that is involved in every kind of genuine learning is intellectual activity, the activity generally known as thinking. Any learning which takes place without thinking is necessarily of the sort I have called external and additive—learning passively acquired, for which the common name is “information.” Without thinking, the kind of learning which transforms a mind, gives it new insights, enlightens it, deepens understanding, [and] elevates the spirit, simply cannot occur.

Anyone who has done any thinking, even a little bit, knows that it is painful. It is hard work—in fact the very hardest that human beings are ever called upon to do. It is fatiguing, not refreshing. If allowed to follow the path of least resistance, no one would ever think.

We don’t need it easier. We don’t.

My colleagues and I often hear people who are learning about Thomas Jefferson Education saying things like: “that just won’t work,” “we don’t have time,” “you just can’t expect that out of teenagers,” “it’s crazy to study so much,” or my personal favorite: “I liked this other seminar better because the lady giving it made Thomas Jefferson Education so much easier.” Great mentors hate that one—they work so hard getting people to put in the hard work, and then someone with the excited flush from 5 months of reading classics goes around teaching people the “easier road” or the simplified system to a great education. What a waste!

No, what we need in our homes and for all Americans living is for our education to be much, much harder. The strength and fortitude for the completion of a future mission is never developed within the comforts of our “Comfort Zone.” It is incumbent on parents and mentors of the youth to embody the “leadership arts” standard, profoundly articulated by Josiah Bunting:

Mentors must embody the qualities of character we wish to educe in our students. When we say ‘educe,’ we mean draw forth . . . be paragons of the sort of excellence we want our students to learn. And not only learn, but to become . . . . These men and women, these mentors, are themselves unfinished persons. They are to be strivers, searchers, tenaciously engaged in their work.

This is just as true today as it was in the times of great mentors like Moses, Socrates, Christ, and George Wythe. It was Sir Walter Scott who wrote, “All men who have turned out worth anything, have had the chief hand in their own education.”

There are thousands of people in America today just like you who have refused any and all easy roads to education, who have taken the Thomas Jefferson Education challenge to get a world class, superb, Thomas Jefferson level education, no short cuts and no simplifying. I challenge you, if you have not already, to join our ranks, to settle for nothing less than a real Thomas Jefferson Education—the kind you painfully earn.

The easier it is, the less you are learning. The harder it is, the greater chance that you’re earning the kind of education you want. As the great classical historian Thucydides put it:

“There is no need to suppose that human beings differ very much one from another: but it is true that the ones who come out on top are the ones who have been trained in the hardest school.”

America’s Cultural Revolution

Beginning in the late 60’s through 1976, China experienced the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that literally transformed the country, removing the last remnants of traditional Chinese culture and social structure. Mao, the architect of the revolution, working against his own party, declared that “to rebel is justified.” He incited a typical soviet style “class struggle” and all across the nation China’s youth and some urban workers responded by rioting and looting under the guise of the newly formed “Red Guards” and other rebel groups which began holding “struggle sessions”  and grabbing power from local governments and CPC (Communist Party of china) branches as early as 1967.

I bring this up because much of what is happening right now in our country looks eerily like what I have read in history and what is outlined so well in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. The Cultural Revolution was little more than a political power struggle between factions in the communist party. Today in America, the same tactics are being used for the same reasons by the liberals against the conservatives, especially during election cycles.

The problem is that we are not a communist nation, not a monarchy, and not a democracy. We are a Republic of laws, a nation that maintains its order and sanity by holding all citizens to the same standards of conduct.

I am appalled by how quickly elected officials and regular citizens alike have caved under the rhetoric, demands, violence, and looting of the mob. Any and all police brutally, regardless of the skin color of the victim or the officer is unjustified and should be dealt with quickly and to the fullest extent of the law. People have a right to be upset and to peaceably protest, but the second lives are endangered or property damaged, the protest has turned into a riot and that illegal activity should be ended using as much force as required as quickly as possible.

Antifa and BLM are the “Red Guard” of the revolution plaguing our nation, but unlike China, the US is a nation that has a long history of not tolerating the criminal activities of assault, plunder, and destruction of private and government property. Why are these riots, assaults and killings, plundering, and destruction of property being tolerated? Injustice is not limited to one race or group, and has scourged every race or group that now inhabits this county. Regardless the injustice, no group has the “right” to violate the rights of others… for any reason.