THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-EDFRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2020 N A27A
S OUR revived national conversation on race has
made clear, the legacies of slavery and white
supremacy run wide and deep in American so-
ciety and political life. One such legacy —
which is particularly noteworthy in a presidential elec-
tion season — has been the survival and preservation of
the Electoral College, an institution that has been under
fire for more than 200 years. Our complicated method of
electing presidents has been the target of recurrent re-
form attempts since the early 19th century, and the poli-
tics of race and region have figured prominently in their
defeat.
It is, of course, no secret that slavery played a role in
the original design of our presidential election system
— although historians disagree about the centrality of
that role. The notorious formula that gave states repre-
sentation in Congress for three-fifths of their slaves was
carried over into the allocation of electoral votes; the
number of electoral votes granted to each state was
(and remains) equivalent to that state’s representation
in both branches of Congress. This constitutional design
gave white Southerners disproportionate influence in
the choice of presidents, an edge that could and did af-
fect the outcome of elections.
Not surprisingly, the slave states strenuously op-
posed any changes to the system that would diminish
their advantage. In 1816, when a resolution calling for a
national popular vote was introduced in Congress for
the first time, it was derailed by the protestations of
Southern senators. The slaveholding states “would lose
the privilege the Constitution now allows them, of votes
upon three-fifths of their population other than
freemen,” objected William Wyatt Bibb of Georgia onthe floor of the Senate. “It would be deeply injurious to
them.”
What is far less known, or recognized, is that long af-
ter the abolition of slavery, Southern political leaders
continued to resist any attempts to replace the Electoral
College with a national popular vote. (They sometimes
supported other reforms, like the proportional division
of each state’s electoral votes, but those are different
strands of a multifaceted tale.)
The reasoning behind this opposition was straightfor-
ward, if disturbing. After Reconstruction, the white “Re-
deemer” governments that came to power in Southern
states became the political beneficiaries of what
amounted to a “five-fifths” clause: African-Americans
counted fully toward representation (and thus electoral
votes), but they were again disenfranchised — despitethe formal protections outlined in the 15th Amendment,
ratified in 1870, which stated that the right to vote could
not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous con-
dition of servitude.” White Southerners consequently
derived an even greater benefit from the Electoral Col-
lege than they had before the Civil War.
A national popular vote would have eliminated that
benefit. As the region’s political leaders recognized, pas-
sage of a constitutional amendment instituting a na-
tional popular vote would have spawned strong legal
and political pressures to enfranchise African-Ameri-
cans. Even if those pressures could be resisted, an Ala-
bama campaign pamphlet noted in 1914, “with the Ne-
gro half of our people not voting, our voice in the na-tional elections, which is now based upon total popula-
tion, would then be based solely on our voting
population and, therefore reduced by half.” The political
consequences of a national popular vote could simply
not be countenanced.
By the 1940s, many Southerners also came to believe
that their disproportionate weight in presidential elec-
tions, thanks to the Electoral College, was a critical bul-
wark against mounting Northern pressures to enlarge
the civil and political rights of African-Americans. In
1947 Charles Collins’s “Whither Solid South?,” an influ-
ential states’ rights and segregationist treatise, im-
plored Southerners to repel “any attempt to do away
with the College because it alone can enable the South-
ern States to preserve their rights within the Union.”
The book, which became must reading among the Dix-
iecrats who bolted from the Democratic Party in 1948,
was highly praised and freely distributed by (among
others) the Mississippi segregationist James Eastland,
who served in the Senate from 1943 until 1978.
Driven by such convictions, the white supremacist re-
gimes of the South stood as a roadblock in the path of a
national popular vote from the latter decades of the 19th
century into the 1960s, when the Voting Rights Act and
other measures compelled the region to enfranchise Af-
rican-Americans. There was, of course, resistance to the
idea of a national vote elsewhere in the country, but it
was the South’s well-known adamance — and the fact
that Southern states alone could come close to blocking
a constitutional amendment in Congress — that kept the
idea on the outskirts of public debate for decades.
Numerous political leaders who personally favored a
national popular vote, like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge
Jr. of Massachusetts, a Republican, in the 1940s, con-
cluded that such a reform had no realistic chance of suc-
cess, and they shifted their advocacy to less sweeping
measures.
The politics of race and region also figured promi-
nently in the stinging defeat of a national popular vote
amendment in the Senate in 1970 — the closest that the
United States has come to transforming its presidential
election system since 1821. Popular and elite support for
the idea had mushroomed in the 1960s, leading in 1969 to
the House of Representatives voting overwhelmingly in
favor of a constitutional amendment that would have
abolished the Electoral College. The proposal then got
bogged down in the Senate during a year when regional
tensions were high: Two Southern nominees to the Su-
preme Court were rejected by the Senate, and the Vot-
ing Rights Act was renewed over the vocal opposition of
Southern senators. Meanwhile, the national popular
vote amendment was stalled in the Judiciary Commit-
tee, which was headed by none other than Senator East-
land.
When the amendment resolution finally came to the
floor of the Senate in September 1970, thanks to the
prodigious efforts of Birch Bayh of Indiana, it was
greeted by a filibuster led by the segregationists Sam
Ervin and Strom Thurmond (with an assist from the Ne-
braska Republican Roman Hruska). Although things
were changing in the South, its political leaders re-
mained steeped in the values and perspectives that had
informed their hostility to the civil rights movement and
the Voting Rights Act. “The Electoral College,” wrote
Senator James Allen of Alabama in 1969, “is one of the
South’s few remaining political safeguards. Let’s keep
it.”
The filibuster succeeded, dooming the proposal: At-
tempts to invoke cloture — to end the debate and vote on
the amendment itself — fell a few votes short of the two-
thirds majority then needed to break a filibuster. The re-
gional lineups in the crucial cloture votes (there were
two) were starkly visible. More than 75 percent of
Southern senators voted against cloture; a similar pro-
portion of senators from outside the South voted favor-
ably.
Southern political leaders, shaped by segregation and
white supremacist beliefs, thus kept the idea of a na-
tional popular vote off the table for many decades and
played a crucial role in blocking its passage through
Congress at a historical juncture when change actually
seemed possible.
To be sure, electoral reform is almost always a com-
plex, difficult process, with diverse actors competing to
defend their ideas and interests. But had the politics of
race been less salient, both in the 19th century and the
20th, the Electoral College would most likely have been
relegated long ago to the status of a historical curiosity.
We might want to keep that sobering fact in mind as we
look ahead to an election whose outcome is in question
only because of the peculiar manner in which we choose
our presidents. 0How Has the Electoral College Survived?
BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGESAlexander KeyssarALEXANDER KEYSSAR, a professor of history and social
policy at Harvard, is the author of “Why Do We Still
Have the Electoral College?” and “The Right to Vote:
The Contested History of Democracy in the United
States.”Maintaining it has long been tied
to the idea of white supremacy.
I
T BEGAN as a rumble. A deep bass
rattling through the building. And
then a roar for seven, eight, nine sec-
onds, an eternity. A sound that could
be made only by the world itself breaking
open. I was certain it was an earthquake.
My husband rushed from the balcony
to our bedroom. Waves of pressure rolled
over us; we crouched and clutched at one
another. Glass broke, doors blew open,
objects shattered. From the street rose
screams and oaths. And terrified exhor-
tations: “Ya Muhammad! Ya Muham-
mad!”
“What was it?” I asked, when I could
breathe again.
“Infijar,”he responded. Explosion.A
word we have used far too often in this
country. Thinking the blast had come
from underneath our building, I went to
the balcony to survey the damage: The
ground glittered with glass as far as the
eye could see.
My hands shook as I scrolled through
my phone, trying to call or text friends,
checking Twitter to see what happened.
The internet connection went in and out
of service. My husband coaxed me back
inside. “Get away from the windows,” he
said. “Put proper shoes on! We might
have to run.”
Messages poured in on various Whats-
App groups.
“We’re OK, all our glass is broken but
we’re fine.”
“Has anyone heard from H?”
“I spoke to him, he’s fine, but his house
isn’t. He said he won’t be able to answer
for a while.”
“The newborn kittens at my mom’s
house all died! From the pressure I thinkbut my parents are OK.”
We didn’t know what had actually hap-
pened, but the reports seemed certain
about the location: the Beirut port. From
our bedroom balcony, I saw a thick
plume of pink smoke rising in the cloud-
less sky. Speculation was rampant: Is-
raeli warplanes! A Hezbollah weapons
cache! A suicide attack! A fireworks de-
pot on fire! The truth, which came in bits
and pieces over the long and terrible
evening, turned out to be far worse.
Lebanon has been pushed into a full-
blown economic collapse by the corrup-tion and cronyism of the warlords and in-
fluential families who have commanded
the seats of power in government since
the end of our 15-year civil war in 1990.
Our currency has devalued over 80 per-
cent. Stories of destitution abound. Yet I
couldn’t imagine how spectacular and le-
thal the incompetence of the Lebanese
state could be.
The explosion turned out to be 2,750
tons of ammonium nitrate, which had
been confiscated from a ship and stored
in a hangar at the port since 2014 without
proper safety measures.
Customs officials sent numerous let-
ters to the courts, seeking guidance on
how to dispose of the material. The judi-
ciary never responded. The chemicals
sat in the hangar until the inevitable hap-
pened.
I slowly processed the magnitude of it.
There were photos of the people stillmissing; the homes shattered, books and
clothes and furniture underfoot. The
neighborhoods of Gemmayze, Mar
Mikhael and Geitawi, coveted for their
red-roofed, century-old houses overlook-
ing the port from the east, all nearly flat-
tened. One friend narrowly missed being
decapitated. Another friend, seven
months pregnant, was briefly buried un-
der debris.
My friend’s father was waiting for his
wife in the hallway of a hospital near the
port when the explosion hit. The ceiling
collapsed on him. He came to his senses
surrounded by bodies buried under the
rubble. He wished he could see his wife
one last time. And then someone pulled
him out. Fortunately, my friend’s mother
too was unscathed.
There were messages from friends,
colleagues, acquaintances from all over
the world. The news had traveled far and
fast, another measure of its horror.
My husband spoke to his uncle in New
York; I surveyed the damage in the
kitchen. Glassware had flown out of the
cupboards. I pulled out the broom and
began sweeping. The night was filled
with the dissonant music of broken glass
and in the distance, sirens.
Growing up in Lebanon taught me that
an explosion resonates across time, that
the shock reverberates forward into
your life, and the pressure reconfigures
the landscape of the mind. I know that it
comes to shape everything you think you
deserve from the world. The people of
Beirut have been shaped by the bombs
that reconfigured this country.
We haven’t even begun to assess the
damage that this explosion has done to
us, to our city. At least 135 dead and 5,000
injured. And then there is the loss of the
port, a lifeline for a country that imports
nearly everything it consumes. We werealready facing food shortages. The ex-
plosion took out two massive grain silos;
wheat spilled into the rubble and the ash.
This is not some lamentable accident.
“I can’t stress this enough but the inter-
national community must respond to
this as a war crime and not an accidental
tragedy,” the Lebanese-Palestinian au-
thor Saleem Haddad wrote on Twitter.
In 1989, when I was 10, during the final
and deadliest phase of the Lebanese civil
war,we were huddled with our neigh-
bors in a vestibule on the fourth floor of
our building when a shell screeched into
the floor below us and exploded. I
thought that was the loudest sound I had
ever heard in my life. Our upstairs neigh-
bor was screaming; our downstairs
neighbor’s face was gray with concrete
dust.
We referred to that phase of the civil
war as the “Aoun war,” after Michel
Aoun, the general who commandeered
the Lebanese Army like his own militia,
decimating West Beirut in his bid to oust
the Syrians from Lebanon.
Mr. Aoun is now our octogenarian
president, allied with Hezbollah and Syr-
ia. That is how vile and opportunistic and
immortal our warlords are. I use him as
an example not because he is the worst
among them — that is a tough competi-
tion. I mention Mr. Aoun to remind my-
self how long we have been at the mercy
of the same people and their pernicious
ambitions.
Beneath the rubble, beneath the sad-
ness, an immense rage has begun to boil.
Lebanese blood has been spilled for so
long. After the war, the criminals all
granted themselves amnesty. This time,
it won’t be theirs for the taking. 0It Sounded Like the World Itself Was Breaking Open
LINA MOUNZERis a Lebanese writer and
translator.Rage now rises against the
corrupt and incompetent
political class.
Lina Mounzer
BEIRUT, LEBANONI AM TRYINGto think of when I first real-
ized we’d all run smack into a wall.
Was it two weeks ago, when a friend, or-
dinarily a paragon of wifely discretion,
started a phone conversation with a boffo
rant about her husband?
Was it when I looked at my own spouse
— one week later, this probably was — and
calmly told him that each and every one of
my problems was his fault?
Or maybe it was when I was scrolling
through Twitter and saw a tweet from the
author Amanda Stern, single and living in
Brooklyn, who noted it had been 137 days
since she’d given or received a hug?
“Hello, I am depressed” were its last four
words.
Whatever this is, it is real — and quanti-
fiable, and extends far beyond my own
meager solar system of colleagues and
pals and dearly beloveds. Call it pandemic
fatigue; call it the summer poop-out; call
it whatever you wish. Any label, at this
point, would probably be too trivializing,
belying what is in fact a far deeper prob-
lem. We are not, as a nation, all right.
Let’s start with the numbers. According
to the National Center for Health Statis-
tics, roughly one in 12 American adults re-
ported symptoms of an anxiety disorder
at this time last year; now it’s more than
one in three. Last week, the Kaiser Family
Foundation released a tracking poll show-
ing that for the first time, a majority of
American adults — 53 percent — believes
that the pandemic is taking a toll on their
mental health.
This number climbs to 68 percent if you
look solely at African-Americans. The dis-
proportionate toll the pandemic has taken
on Black lives and livelihoods — made
possible by centuries of structural dispari-
ties, compounded by the corrosive psy-
chological effect of everyday racism — is
appearing, starkly, in our mental health
data.
But even the luckiest among us haven’t
been spared. According to the Kaiser
Family Foundation, 36 percent of Ameri-
cans report that coronavirus-related
worry is interfering with their sleep. Eigh-
teen percent say they’re more easily los-
ing their tempers. Thirty-two percent say
it has made them overeat or undereat.
I’m solidly in the former category.
Turns out the extra ten extra pounds
around my middle have moved in and un-
packed, though I’d initially hoped they
were on a month-to-month lease.
So. How to account for this national
slide into a sulfurous pit of distress?
The most obvious answer is that the co-
ronavirus is still claiming hundreds of
lives a day in the United States. This is
true, and on its face is awful enough. But I
suspect it’s more than that.
America’s prodigious infection rates are
also a testament to our own national fail-
ure — and therefore a source of existential
ghastliness, of sheer perversity: Why on
earth were so many of us sacrificing so
much in these past four and a half months
— our livelihoods, our social connections,
our safety, our children’s schooling, our at-
tendance at birthdays and funerals — if it
all came to naught? At this point, weren’t
we expecting some form of relief, a re-
sumption of something like life?
“People often think of trauma as a dis-
crete event — a fire, getting mugged,” said
Daphne de Marneffe, author of an excel-
lent book about marriage called “The
Rough Patch” and one of the most astute
psychologists I know. “But what it’s really
about is helplessness, about being on the
receiving end of forces you can’t control.
Which is what we have now. It’s like we’re
in an endless car ride with a drunk at the
wheel. No one knows when the pain will
stop.”
Nor, I would add, do any of us know
what life will look like once this pandemic
has truly subsided. Will the economy re-
main in tatters? (One word for you: infla-
tion.) Will our city centers be whistling,
broken conch shells, gritty and empty at
their cores? (Lord, I hope not.) Will Presi-
dent Trump be re-elected, transforming
democracy as we’ve known it into an eerie
photonegative of itself?
In her own therapeutic practice, de
Marneffe has noticed that families with
pre-existing tensions and frailties are do-
ing much worse: The pandemic has only
provided more opportunities for strug-
gling couples to communicate poorly, roll
their eyes and project rotten motives onto
one another. Parents who were barely
limping along, praying for school to start,
are now brimming with despair and ruing
their lack of imagination: How are they
supposed to make it through another se-
mester of remote schooling?
“Those of us who are average parents
rely on structure,” she told me. “We need
school.”
I recently thumbed through “The
Plague,” to see if Albert Camus had intu-
ited anything about the rhythms of human
suffering in conditions of fear, disease and
constraint. Naturally, he had. It was on
April 16 that Dr. Rieux first felt the squish
of a dead rat beneath his feet on his land-
ing; it was in mid-August that the plague
“had swallowed up everything and every-
one,” with the prevailing emotion being
“the sense of exile and of deprivation, with
all the crosscurrents of revolt and fear set
up by these.” Those returning from quar-
antine started setting fire to their homes,
convinced the plague had settled into their
walls.
Camus chose, in other words, to make
the four-month mark get pretty freaky in
Oran. That’s more or less what happened
here. If only we knew how it ended. 0
JENNIFER SENIOR
Hitting a Wall
Of Pandemic
Proportions
Americans are suffering
from record levels of
mental distress.