While Donald Trump resoundingly won the electoral college — the state-based “point system” we’ve used in presidential elections for more than two centuries — Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by about 780,000 as of a week out of the election. In other words, more Americans wanted Clinton to win, reason enough to revisit the wisdom of using the electoral college to determine elections. But a larger, more important argument is often overlooked in this ongoing debate.
The United States of America: We use the phrase all the time but rarely think of what the words actually mean. In 1776, when this country officially became the United States of America, the words signified a bold idea. Geographic neighbors had formed alliances previously in history to form nations, of course, but these united states shared a vision and philosophy that was literally revolutionary.
The coming together of 13 disparate colonies was itself a historic achievement; never before, perhaps, had a collection of diverse, often contrarian regions merged to create a country whose leaders so vigorously rejected the political and religious doctrines of the times. (The people were not as enthusiastic.) We tend to forget how difficult a process the uniting of the original states was, as the cultural boundaries of the 13 regions persisted after the Founding Fathers joined forces to form a federated republic.
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