Mandates, Democratic Theory, and President Trump

It is common for a national leader who wins election by a large margin to claim a mandate from the voters and a right and duty to make sweeping policy changes. It is also not uncommon for a candidate who barely squeaks by in an election to be cautious, proposing a less bold program, and seeking common ground with other parties. The current US president exhibits the opposite conduct.

Trump was soundly beaten in the popular vote and elected only through the anachronism of the Electoral College.  Had the historical accident of state lines been drawn so as to relocate two or three counties now in the panhandle of Florida into Georgia or Alabama, with a similar switch from northern Illinois to Wisconsin, Trump would not be President.  Yet Trump seems bent on carrying through an extraordinarily radical program, changing, where he can, by 180 degrees the policies of a president twice elected by substantial majorities.

If one sought to make this behavior fit, as best it can be made to, within democratic theory and the usual understanding of mandates, what lines of argument would there be? 

 

I.  Trump’s Electoral College “Landslide”.

Trump declared that his Electoral College victory was a landslide, and spokespeople added that it was one of “historic” proportions, a “blowout.”  In fact his victory margin percentage is 46^th of our 58 elections, was only 39% of that of Obama’s first election,  and 34% of Clinton’s second. Roosevelt’s 1936 margin was seven times greater. 

Had Trump really an Electoral College victory of impressive proportions, then one could argue that he truly had a mandate, the popular vote to the contrary notwithstanding, by emphasizing the supposed values of the Electoral College.  The first step of the argument would establish that the College works an improvement upon majoritarian democracy. The second would argue that this virtue of the College would be lost or diminished if the President made any policy compromises under influence of the popular vote numbers. For example, not to act as if one had a mandate would dilute the wisdom of the small state voter, or rural voter or swing state voter, so much advantaged by the College. If my post of 12/12/2016 is right, however, any such argument from the Electoral College must fail. (Electoral College Democracy http://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2016/12/electoral-college-democracy.html.)

The pro-Electoral College argument that comes closest to making some headway is based on the claim that people identify really closely with the state of their residence, more closely than with the nation. This proposition has surely been true of fewer and fewer each year at least since the end of Reconstruction. I was recently at a gathering of about 30 in which it was polled how many had lived in fewer than 5 states. None had. There are, however, some people who do identify strongly with their states. Texas memes spring to mind. Even for the strongest state-identifiers, however, it seems unlikely that many would like to see policies of which they disapprove put into effect merely because doing so would, in an indirect fashion, redound to the dignity of their state.

II.    A Counterfactual of the Vote Count

Acting as if you have a mandate when the votes don’t show it might also be justified counterfactually: the vote tally would have been mandating if only the state of reality had been as it should have been rather than as it was. 

 

Trump has promised an investigation, and I believe went so far as to name some investigators, to support his contention that approximately the number of votes by which Clinton won the popular count were fraudulent, and, apparently all such fraudulent votes were cast for Clinton. It seems likely that no investigation will be seriously undertaken. (It may well not be undertaken because it might turn up additional evidence of Russian interference very close to mechanisms and processes of vote tallying and reporting.)   

Even if there were three million fraudulent Clinton votes, however, that would mean the election was in the vicinity of a dead heat, not a Trump landslide. The idea that Trump won a popular vote landslide of mandate proportions just cannot go anywhere empirically.

III.  A Media Counterfactual

This leaves the possibility of more exotic counterfactuals, not based on votes actually cast but on votes as they should have been cast. No one ever believes that her or his own politics is treated quite fairly by the media. Trump has stated publicly that the media are “the enemy,” and that seems to include all the media that do not openly display an allegiance to conservatism, the Republican Party, and Donald Trump. News unfavorable to Trump, whatever its sourcing, is “fake news.” So perhaps if the entire population had access only to unfake news, Fox, Breitbart, Limbaugh, . . ., then Trump would have one the election in a landslide. 

 

Those whose understanding of politics comes mostly from radio talk shows would be a pretty good test case of this proposition as that particular branch of the media is already effectively a conservative monopoly – in line with the politics of the owners of large collections of radio outlets. Having driven across the country a couple of times recently, I never found a spot, however desolate, where I could not pick up at least one right wing talk show, and usually there were several. I don’t think there is any data, but I expect that the voters who rely on radio talk probably did vote for Trump in mandate percentages.

The problem with the counterfactual “if voters had been properly informed” is that every politician believes that she or he would have won had this particular counterfact been fact. Everyone would always have a mandate, not as a matter of sound democratic theory, but in the mind of the elected official, even of elected officials not usually given to narcissism.

IV.  A Hyper-Counterfactual Mandate

A yet more extreme variant of the counterfactual mandate looks not to the epistemic matter of the well-informed or ill-informed nature of the electorate, but to the ontological facts about the real merits of the official and the value of what he or she does. It is what is done in acting as if there were a mandate that justifies acting as if there were a mandate.

“I will do wonderful things, much better things than any prior president.”  If true, then certainly the voters should have voted for this official at mandate levels. Indeed, it should have been unanimous. The wee problem is that this “should” requires of the voter, not merely sound judgment on the actually available evidence or even on the evidence that would be available with better news sources; it requires omniscience.  

In terms of guiding the official this take on the mandate principle leads away from democratic political theory of any sort and into pure consequentialism. The end, as perceived by the official, justifies the means. This is the theoretical heart of every allegedly benevolent dictatorship.

Where we end up only differs in theoretical nuance from how Machiavelli might have regarded acting as if one had a mandate when one lacked a mandate.“To hell with democratic scruples, you have the power; do what you want.”