Direct Danger

If you advocate direct elections for the U.S., take a second look at France's Le Pen mess.

The results of the first stage of the French presidential election in April have been widely decried. In that election the anti-immigrant demagogue Jean le Pen scored an upset, beating out Socialist leader Lionel Jospin to enter the runoff against Gaullist candidate Jacques Chirac. Given the widespread loathing for Le Pen, he has essentially no chance to defeat Chirac and become France's next president. But the election result does provide an important lesson for would-be reformers of the American electoral system.

In the wake of the Bush-Gore election controversy in Florida, numerous voices made themselves heard, as they periodically do, urging us to scrap the Electoral College and replace it with a system in which the president is directly elected on the basis of having to earn a majority of the national vote, without regard to its distribution among the states. Such a system, it is argued, would be more truly democratic. (After all, Gore partisans lament, their candidate received more votes than Bush did.)

What advocates of a system of direct election rarely confront are the potentially undemocratic consequences of the runoff system that their proposal would entail. Without the need to accrue a nationally dispersed voter base, a greater number of parties and candidates would be encouraged to run. The consequence would be an increased likelihood that no candidate would receive an absolute majority of the popular vote - with votes being divided instead among a number of minor as well as major parties, as just happened in France.

Given the need to insure that whoever is chosen as president is in some sense the choice of a true majority of voters, the necessary consequence would be the need of a runoff between the top two candidates. But as the French election demonstrates, there is no guarantee that the top two finishers in the initial election would be those most acceptable to the large majority of the electorate. (None of the three leaders in the election won as much as 20 percent of the vote.) Hence the likely possibility that the runoff election would either pit one major-party candidate against a rival representing a relatively small, extremist group (as just happened in France) - making a mockery of the notion of an election as a genuine competition for popular support - or else, even worse, the possibility that two extremist groups, in a field of a dozen or more parties, could manage to capture the top two spots and thus be the only contenders left in the runoff.

By favoring the two-party system through the need for presidential candidates to attract geographically dispersed support (as well as the "winner-take-all" system for allocating the electoral vote that most states have adopted), the American electoral system has generally served to ensure competitive elections in which the winner, whichever party he belongs to, holds reasonably moderate views and is broadly acceptable or at least tolerable to the vast majority of the electorate. Anyone who believes that direct election of the president would be preferable should take a second look at the results in France.

- David Lewis Schaefer is a professor of political science at the College of the Holy Cross College.

I agree. I have never felt that the electoral college was a past it's time system. In fact what it allows for is that states like California don't get the chance to run the country. If it wasn't for the electoral college we would have New York, Miami, and Los Angeles telling the nation how it should be run. Middle America would be running amuck in other issues like state right's.. "Why are three area's of the country that have no idea with the issues we face electing our national gov't." I think that really says it all.

What I mean is that the Le Pen election will be a potent weapon with which to fight the Left when it tries to abolish the Electoral College. The Left has had kittens over the Le Pen election: when it tries to abolish the Electoral College, we need to point out that the alternative worked to the benefit of a fringe candidate they hate. My point is solely a tactical one--one that does not depend on whether you like Le Pen or not (I don't) or whether you applaud the defeat of the Socialists or not (I do).

I hate this dilemma. Particularly in the case of the French result, there is a disturbing amount of clucking by the cultural elites to the effect that "there need to be systems in place to prevent The People from wandering too far off the reservation. They can vote and stuff, but only for people we approve of." On the other hand, Hitler really did happen. That's why it's a dilemma.

there is a disturbing amount of clucking by the cultural elites to the effect that "there need to be systems in place to prevent The People from wandering too far off the reservation. They can vote and stuff, but only for people we approve of." On the other hand, Hitler really did happen. That's why it's a dilemma.

The dilemma could very easily be avoided if the elites would stop punishing the common people for the sins of the elite. For instance, Hitler would have never have happened if the winners of WWI hadn't insisted on raping the economy of Germany after the war, sending that country into a depression all its own during a time of world wide prosperity. Hell, there were no good guys in that war. The French deserved not one red cent from Germany. And it was the forerunners of Blair, Chirac, Jospin, etc. that demanded this from Germany. When people are in desperate straights not of their own making they will resort to desperate measures like elect Hitler.

Same goes for the former Confederate states. If the likes of Thad Stevens, Charles Sumner, etc. hadn't tried to just totally obliterate the South and its culture during reconstruction I doubt Jim Crow would have happened.

Today, the attempt by mainly elite white males to destroy common white males and replace them with more docile third world serfs is creating the Le Pens of the world (Frankly, I like Le Pen, but that is for later). We won't go away very easily BTW.

If some system of electing office holders is put in place to keep the desires of the commons in the background, then I can assure you that very bad things will happen.

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