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The Nation is an old, storied magazine that has drifted so far left that it thinks Kamala Harris is too conservative. So when one of its columnists, Elie Mystal, penned a piece entitled “A Lesson in Basic Civics for People who Stubbornly Defend the Electoral College,” I was curious. Criticisms of the Electoral College are a dime a dozen, but a civics lesson from the far left?

Alas, Mystal’s monologue is too partisan to be interesting, too elitist to persuade. That's standard fare for The Nation, but I'll explain why the arguments are incorrect.

Mystal begins by agreeing with Electoral College defenders that the United States is a republic rather than a democracy. This “is not wrong,” he says, “it just has nothing to do with the Electoral College.” He then wanders about in a tendentious attempt at a history lesson, summing up by claiming the American Founders “were not as interested in forming a democratic republic as they were in forming a Western slave empire that would last for perpetuity.” (Thomas G. West demolishes such twaddle in Vindicating the Founders.)

Worse than political axe grinding presented as history is Mystal’s failure to suss out the real issue. To defend the Electoral College because the United States is a republic is to make an argument about the standard which ought to apply. The point, in a republic, is not simply to ascertain some general will, to hear the vox populi, then do its bidding. It is perfectly reasonable to have a system of checks and balances. Such a system may, at times, thwart a momentary majority in favor of better representation, greater stability, or some other republican value.

Mystal next takes on claims that the Electoral College protects “rural” Americans and prevents the biggest cities from gaining too much power. Here he makes his oddest argument, which is that the rural voters still get left out in our current system. He seems not to notice that, by his own reasoning, a direct national election would be very much worse. Reading between the lines, even as he quibbles with individual tweets, Mystal concedes that big cities have a lot of power already. He just wants them to have a lot more.

Throughout Mystal’s mutterings, he repeatedly suggests that if you disagree with him, you must be a racist. It’s almost as if he is unaware that racists tried to dismantle the Electoral College in the 1950s. Or perhaps he doesn’t want readers to know that civil rights groups once saved the Electoral College because it can amplify the voices of minorities.

He also fails to grasp how the Electoral College, by penalizing regionalism, forces the parties to be not just geographically larger but more diverse. It nudges our politics towards massive coalition parties striving for an outright majority.

Finally, Mystal never acknowledges how few major democratic nations use a direct national election. Parliamentary systems are even more indirect, and they can also result in a party receiving more popular votes but not electing the prime minister. Thus, claims that our two-step election is out of the main stream are simply false. So is the conspiracy theory that the Electoral College is simply a result of slavery. Just about 75 years ago, both Germany and India created their own versions of an electoral college.