Might we have to admit that this is an agreement with Hell?

These are "times that try our souls" wrote revolutionary agitator Thomas Paine in 1776. And the sentiment speaks to current times as well, while also demanding of us unrelenting patient pragmatism while we strive to push MAGA and their 2025 Project to the fringes of national life.

Michael Podhozer is a former political director of the AFL-CIO. And he suggests, to use another antique expression, we will have to someday "grasp the nettle," take the pain, and accept that our current anti-democratic, Constitutional,  national election framework in the electoral college is Legal but not Legitimate. If this is a country whose system is supposed to mean that the people rule, the Electoral College must be reformed. This is not optional.

One reaction to my last post [writes Podhozer], “Kamala Harris Will Win the Popular Vote,” has been some variation of a smug suggestion that I take a civics class because the next president will be decided by the Electoral College. Another has been a bit less condescending, something like, “Sure, but what matters is the Electoral College.”

I have a respectful suggestion for anyone who had those kinds of reactions (other than “read the post”). I ask you to consider what it means that we collectively shrug off such an anti-democratic structure as “just the way it is.”  

Because when we do that, we align ourselves with those who in their times scoffed at the abolitionists, the Radical Republicans, the suffragists, the modern civil rights movement, and those who called for the direct election of senators and “one person, one vote” in legislative districts. All of these people had the courage in their own time to call out the ways in which American elections were legal but not legitimate, either by universal standards of democracy or even by the Declaration of Independence’s central claim – that governments depend on the consent of the governed, legitimately ascertained.

... But, as long as systematic reform is so easily swatted away merely by embarrassing those who would wish otherwise as being too naive or insufficiently “realistic,” we’ll bounce around the room like a Roomba, with serial diversions like “Democrats need a better message.”

This is as true now as it was in the 1960’s when James Baldwin wrote:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Which is why I would rather count myself with those who, in their times, had to acknowledge that enslavement, the disenfranchisement of women, the indirect election of senators, egregious gerrymandering, and Jim Crow were legal – but never conceded that they were legitimate.

Here Podhozer places himself in the proud tradition of William Lloyd Garrison who, in the 1830s contemplating the curse of enslavement, insisted that the Constitution was a "covenant with death" and "an agreement with Hell."

Rule by popular majorities is what the people of this country want. We cannot forever note that fact and shrug, thinking getting there is just too hard. In previous eras, we found ways to make impossible, unthinkable, improvements in the structure of government. We need to do this once again or the country will die.