Legitimate? From a narrow and restrained viewpoint, yeah, sure. According to the law, appropriate formalities observed. Is that it then, case closed? Nothing to see here, move along, submit?
Many, if not most, of my fellow Americans see the electoral college as a formality to acknowledge and certify the results of an election. These are usually the same Americans who cherish a myth of the Founding Fathers as revolutionaries committed to an egalitarian democracy. Sadly, no. They were not, they were revolutionaries fighting to shift power away from inherited nobility to businessmen and landlords, as God intended.
But only a few of them saw it as a means to crush dissent, to force a regime upon an unwilling majority. As it has become. Most, with cold eyed realism, saw it as a compromise to create a unified nation that would not be sliced up into colonies by France, England and Spain. (Were I there, I would most likely have agreed, realpolitik, we could not progress in a country that does not survive).
A sensible person would see a divided country and think towards negotiations, how we might compromise, adjust so that our national family might continue, our over-extended family, our thermo-nuclear family. How we might adjust to each other as equals, with the side having the edge in votes having a proportional edge in negotiating. Not to slam the other guy’s face down in the mud and grind it, but a polite recognition of numbers.
But our Republican brethren have no such intention, they mean to seize more power than they are entitled to, to turn the country inside out and re-cut the pattern to fit them better. That is a whole different kettle of piranha.
More people voted for Democrats for Senators, more people vote for Representatives that were Democrats. And, of course, more people voted for Hillary than for Il Douche (you may have heard).
But the people, apparently, do not matter, only the legal mechanisms for placing a flabby butt in an undeserved chair. As I said, reasonable Americans dedicated to principles would look to open negotiations, to hammer out compromise. But the Trumpiviks have no such intention, they are reminiscent of Lenin and his so-called “bolshevik” (majority) party. They will seize power by whatever mechanism is available. They do not seek to govern, but to rule.
One may reasonably argue over the question of a legitimate election. But how can these actions be justified without doing violence to the very idea of election? The very men who weep copiously and bloviate piously about protecting the sacred vote from grubby hands now are willing to shuffle that all aside, as it might impede their grasp for power. Sad!
That is not legitimate, and they either don’t know or don’t care. But since we have told them, they do know. Which only leaves the other poisonous option. Its not the election that is not legitimate, but the purposes to which it is being put!
They should be ashamed, they are not, they expect us to be! Equality in compromise is the very essence of political justice, if that is purposely and intentionally violated, well…What is to be done?