Richard Dawkins does not like the electoral college much, writing,

It’s not that I dislike elections generally. And — praise be — a population of 300 million Americans has managed to raise one presidential candidate who is not a convicted felon awaiting sentence. No, my problem with American elections — and it viscerally distresses me every four years — is the affront to democracy called the Electoral College.

Obviously Professor Dawkins, who wrote “Trump is a mendacious, malevolent, transparently evil man, and stupid with it…”, felt that Trump could not win, like the MSM in the United States confidently proclaiming Trump cannot win. Of course he knows by now “Kamala…la la” lost the popular vote too.

Richard Dawkins is a scientific genius. Assuming Western civilization survives, and that is not how I would bet, long after people remember what he felt about Trump, Dawkins will be hailed as the discoverer of memes. But geniuses do not have any sort of special knowledge or insight beyond their area, and this has been the issue with Dawkins writing about religion too. Indeed Albert Einstein was incredibly politically naive, and an ardent socialist.

The Electoral College exists as a compromise, like so many other things that exist. It evolved in large part because states saw themselves as at least semi-independent countries, and a small state thought itself as important as a large state. It is true that one of the unintended consequences of the Electoral College is that every single vote in a swing state is of great importance, while in New York state, swamped and corrupted by the sewer of woke anti-Americanism that is New York City,  a vote for president is a meaningless symbolic gesture. If the Democrat party ran Yahya Sinwar, he would carry New York State. 

My late father was a wise and sensible man but he never understood why the laws in different states should be so different. “Isn’t this one country?” he would rhetorically ask.

Well, in some ways it is not, but rather, to an extent, a union of countries. True, that view was lost in the Civil War and has been consistently losing ground ever since.

Political scientist Melissa M. Lee writes on “how the linguistic shift from plural to singular demonstrates the evolution of sovereign authority in the US.”  In the distant past it has changed from “the United States are” to “the United States is.” Up until after the Civil War “the United States of America” was used as a descriptive rather than a proper name. The concept of states’ rights wasn’t something the South pulled out of thin air. Even today, states maintain an identity and a level of independence.

New York City is where Stalin is still praised, people are burned alive on the subway, and urination on the streets is common practice. It is where American flags are for burning, Hamas are heroes, and so-called “Christian nationalists” from “barbaric” red states threaten to enslave us. It is where having an air gun means a prison sentence, yet it is still a lootin’ and shootin’ capital.

However, as thankfully the election showed, somewhere there are Americans in red states who stand for the pledge of allegiance, who worship a Christian God, who legally own guns but manage not to shoot one another. That is why the Electoral College exists.

Chesterton’s Fence dictates that you do not destroy something until you understand why it was erected in the first place, and there is a very good reason why the Electoral College evolved into its form.

While under the Electoral College system, large states don’t wield a disproportionate weight as the number of electoral votes is dependent on population, and it gives small states more of a say in the election than they would otherwise have.

Political Correct-Think Is Not Enough

Richard Dawkins suffers the unusual dilemma of being hated by those with whom he identifies. He is a guardian leftist hated by other leftists for the offense of elevating science above woke. Professor Dawkins seems not to have gotten the message that Western science is a toxic white male invention propagated by racist heterosexual cisgender colonialists. He stubbornly clings to the scientific method, not unlike red states that cling to American values. He refuses to spout the required woke religious beliefs that the human brain bears no sign of an evolutionary history and somehow magically evolved to serve Marxism, that “indigenous science” is superior, and that men have periods and can give birth. His politics may be correct-think, yet as he is finding out, that is not enough.

A person in 2024 Islamic Britain can no longer understand Americans. At least parts of the United States are holding on to a belief in American exceptionalism. The American victory in the 2024 election held back the flood waters a little longer. As a neighbor said of the results of the 2024 election, God has given America one last chance. Do not blow it, America. Long may Americans believe in American exceptionalism.

Image: Mike Cornwell, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.