It’s come up hundreds of times before. But it’s back again. Brace yourself for yet another proposal to nix the electoral college.

In the middle of December, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL) published a press release announcing a new proposal to abolish the way Americans have always elected their president. Joining him were U.S. Senators Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Peter Welch (D-VT). 

The timing is interesting—seeing how Donald Trump won the both the popular and electoral vote this time—but the senators are vigorously arguing against the system anyway.

Two comments in the press release really jumped out at me because of the clear arrogance leaking through the rhetoric. (Granted, I’m not attempting to judge the heart condition of the senators, but I can at least observe an arrogant statement when I see one.) 

Take a look at the second paragraph, where Senator Durbin announces, 

“It is time to retire this 18th century invention that disenfranchises millions of Americans.”

Hmm. I’m not sure exactly why being an “18th-century invention” is a mark against it. Isn’t the entire Constitution an 18th-century invention, for crying out loud? Senator Durbin seems to assume that “old = bad,” or at least, “old = irrelevant,” which is chronological snobbery plain and simple. 

So I have a question for Senator Durbin: Why didn’t previous generations see what you now see so clearly?

For the good of the order, let it be known that Senator Durbin is not the first one to come up with this idea. As a matter of fact, the National Archives report that over the past two hundred years, there have been more than seven hundred congressional proposals to reform or eliminate the electoral college. 

And apparently, we’ve still found it valuable enough to keep it around. Perhaps there’s a reason for that? 

It seems that Senator Durbin is up against more than just the 18th century. It seems more like this is “Senator Durbin vs. the grand scheme of U.S. history.”

Just a bit later in the press release, Sen. Brian Schatz added a comment of his own: 

“In an election, the person who gets the most votes should win.  It’s that simple.”

No, actually, it isn’t.

Whenever anyone concludes a principle of political science with the phrase “it’s that simple,” gird up your loins and run. Political science generally—and American political science particularly—is exceedingly complicated, because nations are complicated and so are the people that make them up. 

Centuries of political history and volumes of political thought cannot be crammed into (or dismissed by) a dozen-word statement like this, even if it’s topped with the pretty bow of “it’s that simple.” 

Perhaps—just perhaps—there were some good reasons why America’s founding generations skipped over the simple solution and constructed something a lot more complex? 

Durbin’s and Schatz’s remarks exemplify an arrogance toward the past that I wish this generation of Americans would learn to toss in the wastebasket. Some of us tend to assume that we are simply better than all who came before us. We know more. We care more. We can forget about what our forefathers did and said. 

It’s especially easy to dismiss the past after considering our staggering increases in knowledge over the last couple generations. Aren’t we so much smarter than they were? The same temptation arises when we consider the obvious sins that many of our forefathers deemed acceptable, like slavery. “Man, we would never do that! Lord, thank you that I am not like…” 

In light of this, here are three quick reminders for today’s generation of Americans regarding how we should think about our forefathers.

• They weren’t dumber than you. They usually had reasons for what they did. And many of them were highly educated, reaping the fruit of an educational system that was a lot better than the one we have now. So, in all likelihood, they actually were a lot smarter than you.

• They weren’t more evil than you. Granted, we have the advantage of hindsight—we’re better at picking out their flaws (like tolerance of slavery) than they were. But this works both ways—I pray for the day in which a future generation looks back at our toleration of abortion and condemns it even harder than we condemn slavery now. (If anyone thinks that a generationally acceptable sin means we should write-off anything that generation ever did, we’d better be nixing ourselves before anyone else.) Just remember: the fact that we see their blind spots more clearly does not mean everything they did was worthless.

• They were your forefathers, so respect them. Even if they were blissfully ignorant about how to frame a country, or hopelessly saturated with the sins of the day, God still tells you to honor your father and mother. 

Okay, now that I’ve vented a bit about the attitude seeping through these statements, let’s get down to some substance. 

I’m not a rote traditionalist; just as I believe you shouldn’t dismiss our forefathers because they lived back then, neither should you blindly believe what they said for the same reason. They deserve respect, but they still ought to be able to justify their system. 

As a matter of fact, I do think there are good reasons why it’s not just “that simple,” and why it’s actually a good thing that we don’t have a purely popular presidential vote.

So stay tuned for my next article, my attempt at a political treatise to defend the electoral college in under 1,000 words. I hope you bring popcorn.