Abrhaham Lincoln and "majority rule"

Sandy Levinson

William Safie has an interesting review of a spate of books on the occasion of Lincoln's 200th birthday. What is most interesting to me is Safire's almost literally thoughtless description of Lincoln's "overriding purpose: to establish the principle of majority rule in the world's most daring experiment in self-government by insisting that the whole country abide by the results of its national election." He repeats at least two more times the notion that Lincoln's primary comitment was to "majority rule." It literally never seems to have occurred to Safire that Lincoln's election is in almost no sense a vindication of "majority rule"; he received, after all, only 39.8% of the popular vote. Rather, he received a majority of the electoral vote because of the thorough-going regionalization of the two primary parties.

Perhaps the electoral college is defensible, though I think not, but whatever its merits may be, recognition of what most of the world or any competent 21st century "democratic theorist" would call "the principle of majority rule" is not one of them. Recall, for example, that among modern presidents both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton reached the White House with 43% of the popular vote. It is absolutely dismaying to me that even somone so generally able as Safire, whose work I generally admire even when I disagree with it, is unable to engage in the elemental distinction between "majority rule" and the particular system of electing presidents from which Lincoln benefitted. Lincoln did, of course, contrast "ballots" and "bullets" as ways of resolving political disputes, but if he ever once commented on the pecuuliar way that Americans aggregate their ballots, I am unfamiliar with it.

We will literally never know who might have come out on top if Americans in 1860 had been able to vote either in a runoff election between the two top candidates or cast an alternative transferrable vote. He probably would have beat the Southern Democrat John Breckenridge, who received 72 electoral votes but less than half of Lincoln's popular vote, though Mark Graber, in his essential book on Dred Scott, suggests that an alternative transferrable vote might have made John Bell, the Constitutional Unionist candidate, president instead of Lincoln (and thus forestalled war). I put to one side, though many might not, the fact that the electorate in 1860 included only white males, largely because it would be anachronistic to expect Lincoln to share our modern sensibilities about the prerequisites of "majority rule."

It may be, of course, that Lincoln's election was a good thing precisely BECAUSE it precipitated the slaughter of 2% of the American population and the concomitant formal ending of slavery, just as there are those who defend the war in Iraq and its slaughter, in spite of its rank irrelevance to defending American national interests in any standard-model sense, on the grounds that it is worth paying any price to displace a tyrant like Saddam Hussein. Ditto, for that matter, defense of the Afghan War on the grounds that it is worth paying any price to prevent the fall of Afghanistan's women back into the rule of a truly dreadful bunch of Islamic fanatics who otherwise seem to present little direct threat to American security interests. These are all, matters for entirely separate debates.

Posted 3:36 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]