Socialism Elected Trump!

There are people like Michael Moore who are taking consolation in the fact that Hillary won the popular vote. For one, this isn’t exactly true. The only winner of the popular vote was the usual, perennial winner: the apolitical protest non-vote of the disaffected masses, who always don’t vote at rates of 40 to 60 percent. Of the 50 percent or so who did vote, Hillary pulled a marginal majority.

This uninspiring majority has led a number of internet geniuses to advocate abolishing the electoral college, reducing the electoral system to something more like a public referendum or direct democracy. This is extremely stupid, especially since their partisan reaction is against a populist movement. Think about it.

Furthermore, there is something ironic and beautiful about the fact that electoral college elected Trump. After all, the electoral college exists, in part, to ensure that populated states and urban centres do not quantitatively overrepresent the rest of the union. It was built for this purpose from the outset, especially on account of the lower voting population in the slave-owning South as opposed to the North. The electoral college exists primarily to protect disenfranchised constituencies from a tyranny of the majority. Of course it does this in a a way that does not reduce things to a single vote per state, which preserves some of the strength of the larger voting blocs.

On an analogy to economics, the electoral college is essentially socialistic in its intent. It redistributes votes according to a principle of qualitative fairness as opposed to raw anarcho capitalist, quantitative results. That such a system elected Trump is significant, especially since he would have lost on the flat capitalist calculus.

In this sense, to claim that “socialism elected Trump” is true and meaningful.