College Politics

Various states of the US are conspiring to overthrow the electoral college, which can cause presidential elections to hinge on a few swing states, and can occasionally put someone in the White House on a minority of the popular vote. This century's beneficiaries from the latter anomaly have been the Trumpster, his head-tribble, and the alcoholically demented chimpanzee who fronted for the late President Cheney. It is to be hoped that the Democratic Party will manage a little better on the issue of electoral reform than did the mainland's Liberal Democrats, who touted proportional representation as their flagship policy for some years and then casually threw it out for the sake of a special relationship with the hard right. In the US as on the mainland, it also remains to be seen whether any amount of proportionality can help much when the only choices on offer are between business as usual and fascism, or between variants of business as usual distinguishable mainly by their corporate branding.