Joe Rogan | Why We Need the Electoral College w/Dan Crenshaw

And I think this experiment in self-government, which is a completely new thing in human history that's redefined the way the rest of the world governs itself. I mean, that's what America really is. Is it perfect? Fuck no. But humans aren't perfect. There's not a goddamn human anywhere that's perfect. There's not a single culture anywhere that doesn't have something that's inherently wrong with it. It's the best system for imperfect human beings, right? And it's a system based on the fact, the unavoidable fact that we are imperfect. And that you cannot constrain mankind's nature to the extent that progressives would like to. There's a belief from an example from Marxist ideology and French Revolution thought that you can perfect human nature, that you can get people to be perfect eventually. If you just give the state enough control and stop certain thoughts that are bad, keep those down, elevate these other ones, you can eventually get us to where we think we should be. I think that's utopian. I don't see how that's ever possible. And I think our U.S. constitutional system understands that. It's not like the founders got together and just made a bunch of stuff up, right? They were very well versed in history. They studied it relentlessly. And they took ideas from Jerusalem and Athens and Rome and London. They took all these best ideas and these best practices and they said, this is probably how we should govern. We're first going to say why government exists. Okay, we're going to say that in the Declaration of Independence. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that, the Declaration of Independence wasn't just declaring its independence, it was also declaring why government exists. And it exists to protect unalienable rights, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. He gets these ideas from guys like John Locke who said, life, liberty, and property, or those are unalienable rights. And you protect rights. You can't give them to people, but you can protect them because they're already inherent in you. They're natural rights. Okay, and then the Constitution told us how to govern. It's like how do we live together? Well, there should be checks and balances. You should have an emphasis on local state control because the problems are closest to the people and they should be closest to the representatives down at that level. 51% of the population shouldn't be able to tell the other 49% what to do. We should have an electoral college so that the biggest population centers can't tell everybody else what to do. There's important structures embedded into the Constitution that have allowed us to actually last I think as long as we have. We have the oldest political, it's the oldest document in the world. It's the oldest Constitution in the world. So we're the youngest, one of the youngest countries, but we're the only ones that had such a long standing Constitution. I think that's important to realize too. It's very bizarre that they had the insight to realize that shit could go so sideways that they put all these checks and balances together that actually can reasonably well, in a reasonably well way, work today. There's a lot of people that disagree with a lot of the aspects of it. One person, one vote. They would like that. They don't think that representative democracy is as important now because we have this ability to communicate that we didn't have in the 1800s. You had to send a fucking pony with a letter on it in order to get your word across. Now you can actually tweet and you could vote online if we so deem it and we made it legal. But the Electoral College, do you feel like that, especially with things like superdelegates, do you think that that's still the way to do things and is still an effective way to... Yeah. Why is that? Because the alternative is the 51% versus the 49%. And what that really boils down to is New York and Los Angeles telling everybody who the president should be. But the vast majority of people don't live in New York and Los Angeles. That's exactly the problem. 20 million and seven... What is it, nine million or something in New York? I'm just saying, and that's the issue, right? Because you really are... And when people congregate in population centers, they also tend to start to think alike. And I just think... And on a more fundamental level, look at the difference between Democrats and Republicans. People always wonder what that difference is and there's a lot of differences, of course. But a really kind of simple heuristic to think about it is the word Democrat and Republican. One believes in a pure democracy, one believes in a republic. I was saying Democrats believe in total pure democracy. But when you're saying about the electoral college, you are saying pure democracy. You're saying 51% of the population can tell the other 49% what to do. Electoral college is a check and balance against that that gives those states in the middle some kind of voice that they wouldn't have otherwise had. It makes them... Why is everybody in Iowa right now? Do you think they'd be in Iowa if we didn't have an electoral college? Good deer hunting there. Yeah. That's a good reason to go. But the reality is they would only be campaigning in the big population centers. They wouldn't bother going to the rural areas because you're going to get the most bang for your buck going to just the populated areas. In terms of campaigning physically. Campaigning physically. But also who you're accountable to. That's the most important thing. Who are you accountable to? You're not going to care if you're accountable to the rural areas like you should be, into the middle of the country like you should be because if you only care about 51% of the vote, you're just going to go to those main population centers and you're only going to talk to them and you're only going to care what they think. I don't think that's good. That's not good for democracy, especially when we have such a wide diversity of preferences and just styles of living across the country. Still that important to be physically in a place to campaign? To physically go to Chicago to campaign? To physically go to Iowa? Yeah. I think people want to see you. It was a good argument to be made that Hillary Clinton lost because she just didn't go to Wisconsin in those last days. I think people want to get to know you. People want to see you. Well, the good argument with Hillary too is people didn't believe she had enough energy to go and campaign. And I don't know. I never met her. I can't tell you what the inside look at that campaign was. I just know it didn't work.