The Daily Lobo asked a UNM Sociology professor and a Political Science professor to share their thoughts on Donald Trump’s historical rise to presidency, and the factors which may have been involved in his victory.
Peter Kierst, who teaches constitutional law and theory, said the Constitution is silent about political parties, but this election does raise two constitutional issues: the influence of “factions” and the use of the Electoral College.
A faction is a group of people, part of either a minority or majority, who are animated by a passion which is contrary to the rights of individuals, or contrary to the public interest, Kierst said.
The goal in the structure of the Constitution, he said, was to ensure factions never got control of the machinery of the government.
“Here we have an interesting situation, the same impulse of passion has captured both the executive branch and both branches of Congress,” Kierst said.
This doesn't mean Trump supporters are necessarily a faction -- rather, that is up to the eye of the beholder, he said.
“If you ask him he would say, ‘No, no, I'm doing this to protect the rights of the people.’ But his opponents certainly think he represents a factional impulse contrary to the rights of individuals and contrary to the public interest,” Kierst said.
A single party seizing control of two forms of government at the same time was thought to be difficult to do, Kierst said, but that is exactly what happened this year.
“This brings the question if it has become too easy for a common impulse of passion to control both the legislative and executive branches at the same time,” he said.
What the creators of the Constitution did not anticipate, he said, is that political parties would have put forth a concerted effort to take control of both of those institutions — at the same time.
The branches of government are supposed to keep each other accountable, but when a single party controls them all, those checks and balances could break down, Kierst said.
“If we still care, if it is still a concern of ours that a factional impulse could get control of our government, and if readers and people out there think that is what's happened — then you might want to think about structurally what we do to keep that from happening,” Kierst said.
The Electoral College was created for a reason, and typically whoever wins the popular vote also wins the electoral vote.
But twice now in the last five elections, this has not been the case.
It now appears that Hillary Clinton is going to finish with around 2 million more votes than Trump, despite the Republican candidate running away with the electoral count on Election Night.
Kierst says that this trend is grounds for a necessary discussion.
“I think it's really an important question,” Kierst said. “I think we have to have a serious discussion about whether this is a sensible way to elect a president.”
One reason the Electoral College was created, Kierst said, was because in 1787 the founding fathers couldn't imagine how a presidential candidate could conduct a national election in a country as big as the U.S., when travel was more difficult.
Trump was elected by carrying traditionally Republican states, as well as snatching the relatively blue states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Trump won those states by a total of about 140,000 votes out of about 122 million, Kierst said.
“It is the system, and there is no blame attributable to him. That's the way the game is played and he went out and won the states, so it's sort of foolish to blame him,” Kierst said.
Every state automatically gets a total of two electoral votes, which skews the electoral college in favor of small states, he said.
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On a positive side, he said it makes it so that smaller states such as Alaska and New Mexico still have an impact, but the negative side of that coin is that 140,000 people in Alaska are a lot more powerful than 140,000 people in Texas or New Jersey, states with much higher population.
Kierst said it is a question of whether every state should have equal impact, or every individual ballot cast.
Regardless of which side won, he said the discussion needs to be on the basis of what is the best way to run a representative democracy in the modern age, and not what is the best way to make sure your preferred candidate wins.
Richard Wood — a sociology professor and director of the Southwest Institute on Religion, Culture and Society — said that there will soon be some high-quality academic studies which will offer an answer on what role society had on Trump’s journey from Republican candidate to nominee to President-elect. But until then, a couple of things can be said with confidence, he said.
First, he said that a large part of Trump's support appears to have been driven by white working-class and falling middle-class voters who felt like neither party has been representing their interests well.
Second, in mobilizing all that legitimate anger, Trump has enthusiastically tapped into some of the reservoirs of racism, nativism, xenophobia and misogyny present in Western culture, Wood said.
“He's tapped into those feelings partly with anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican sentiments, and partly through contempt for strong women,” Wood said. “He didn't create those feelings, but he's been willing to channel them into our political life in ways that we haven't seen for a long time at the national level.”
When sociologists listen to that voter anger carefully, it's very much about the fraying industrial economy, the death of labor unions, and the way that working-class wages have stagnated so badly and middle-class aspirations are just no longer viable, Wood said.
One of the ways Trump engaged in society despite being deeply disliked by about half the electorate, he said, was by targeted appeals to those voters. He did this with social media, the “alt-right” media, and mainstream media, who were all willing to play his game because it enhanced their ratings.
On Trump’s victory and America’s reaction, Wood said the social philosopher Richard Rorty predicted back in 1998 that eventually a demagogue would emerge to channel the frustrations of what he called “non-suburban voters” who were being left out of our politics — and channel them into a politics of resentment.
“We now live with the resulting tension: will that style of politics restore some accountability of elites to common people?” Wood said, “Or will it threaten the foundations of democracy by targeting vulnerable groups?”
Wood said he believes this moment in America presents a “deep challenge to all of us” in the University community.
“The coin of the realm in the University is truth, which we seek through human dialogue and the scientific method,” he said.
For this to work, Wood said, we have to preserve freedom in the University for all kinds of thought: liberal and conservative, radical and reactionary.
But, dialogue cannot live in an environment of hate, and Wood pointed out that Trump was elected via a campaign that incited hatred against vulnerable groups and contempt for strong women.
“The risk ahead is that the Trump presidency will normalize that hatred and contempt — make it acceptable in our culture, as we have already seen in recent incidents and in some of Mr. Trump’s appointments,” Wood said.
For the University to survive as an environment where truth is pursued, all of those in the University community have to find ways to resist normalization of hatred while also preserving voice for all civil points of view on campus, Wood said.
“Some will see that as taking political sides, but it’s not a partisan statement,” he said. “It’s just what we have to do in order to be a University.”
Nichole Harwood is a news reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @Nolidoli1.
