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Although it eventually became a rubber-stamp body with no power—and, more recently, a mechanism that gives outsize influence to small groups of voters in a few states—the electoral college was originally meant to be something quite different: it was designed as a kind of review board, a group of elite lawmakers and men of property who would select the president, rejecting the people’s choice if necessary, in order to avoid the “excesses of democracy.”
There was no authoritarian-nationalist, antidemocratic wave after 1989 in central Europe, outside of ex-Yugoslavia. It has arisen more recently, in the past decade. And it arose not because of mystical “ghosts from the past” but as the result of specific actions of people who disliked their existing democracies.
people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity.
the language and tactics of Trump’s election suddenly seemed to offer something new to a lot of people who had been on the fringes of politics, not just in America but around the world.
