Tim Walz is, of course, the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee. He is also the governor of Minnesota, the 22^nd-largest state in the union (by population). As of the last census, Minnesota has roughly 1/7^th of the population of California, the most populous state. Indeed, if you took the five largest states and then added Minnesota, it would account for less than 5% of the total population. In the grand scheme of things, Minnesota is pretty insignificant, at least in terms of population.

Given this, it might seem a little batty (to say the least) for Walz to be running around the country declaring his opposition to the Electoral College. And it might seem even battier that Walz would have signed into law Minnesota’s participation in the National Popular Vote Compact, an agreement between 17 blue and deep purple states and the District of Columbia to allocate their electoral votes based on the national popular vote (but not until states with a combined total of 270 or more electoral votes have signed on, naturally).

Why would anyone do such a thing? Why would anyone advocate for and then participate in the de facto disenfranchisement of the citizens of his state? And it’s not just Walz and his fellow Minnesota leftists. Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and DC are all signatories and all have fewer electoral votes—and thus smaller, more easily ignored populations—than Minnesota. Why would the elected representatives of those polities do that to their constituents? Why would anyone deliberately say to the two major parties, “Hey! We don’t matter! Please forget about us!”

The answer to this question is not especially complicated. It can be summarized in just one word: Progressivism.

For starters, all of the signatories (and a majority of their constituents) are unshakably convinced of the righteousness of their ideology. They believe not only that they are “on the right side of history,” but that they will always be. It never even crosses their minds that political winds might someday shift and blow majority opinion in a different direction. They are utterly incapable of imagining a situation in which they might be in the political minority and, therefore, dependent on the mercies guaranteed by the Electoral College and the rest of the Constitution’s republican features. Since its inception, this type of unflinching sanctimoniousness has been one of the chief defining characteristics of Progressivism.

More importantly, as good Progressives, the elected representatives of the signatory states care neither for the Constitution nor even for the very idea of “states.” In their eyes, the Constitution is an impediment to “good governance,” while the states are arbitrary creations that serve no purpose other than to obstruct the power of the national government and, by extension, to empower “outside-of-the-mainstream” cranks and reactionaries.

The Progressive movement has long loathed the nation’s founding documents, finding their reliance on federalism and the separation of powers to be inconvenient obstacles in their efforts to fix the world and rule the nation as only they know how. Teddy Roosevelt, the nation’s first Progressive president, was interminably frustrated by the Constitution, considering it an outdated document meant for another time, another place, and frankly, another people. In Roosevelt’s eyes, the nation had changed over the course of a century-plus, but the Founders’ arrogance kept the government from changing along with it. Woodrow Wilson, the second Progressive president and a godfather of the movement, also loathed the Constitution and sought to skirt its restraints as often as possible. Likewise, Herbert Croly—a Progressive intellectual giant and a guru of sorts to both presidents—found the Constitution cumbersome and overly restrictive. He actively encouraged its “reform” or complete abandonment.

The 16^th and 17^th Amendments to the Constitution—both of which permanently (and negatively) altered the nature of the federal government—were the work of the Progressives, as was the near-simultaneous creation of the Federal Reserve, the nation’s nominally “private” central bank. In the span of roughly a decade, the Progressives thoroughly undermined the Framers’ vision and set the stage for a perpetual war by the left against the Constitution. When Vox.com’s Ian Millhiser declares that “the Constitution is actually quite bad,” for example, he is merely echoing more than a century of Progressive orthodoxy.

The largest part of this war on the Constitution and its safeguards has been the left’s enduring effort to place greater and greater power and authority in the hands of the centralized national government. Nearly seven decades ago, Russell Kirk, the driving intellectual force behind the rebirth of American Conservatism, noted that the overarching trend in human-social relations is toward greater centralization and away from “community.” This trend, he continued, had accelerated dramatically since the Enlightenment and, at least, in the United States, since the launch of the Progressive Movement, which marked the start of the nation’s “modern era.” “All history, and especially modern history,” Kirk wrote, “is in some sense the account of the decline of community and the ruin consequent upon that loss.” He continued:

In the process, the triumph of the modern state has been the most powerful factor. “The single most decisive influence upon Western social organization has been the rise and development of the centralized territorial state.” There is every reason to regard the state in history as, to use a phrase that Gierke applied to Rousseau’s doctrine of the General Will, “a process of permanent revolution.” Hostile toward every institution which acts as a check upon its power, the nation-state has been engaged, ever since the decline of the medieval order, in stripping away one by one the functions and prerogatives of true community—aristocracy, church, guild, family, and local association. What the state seeks is a tableland upon which a multitude of individuals, solitary though herded together, labor anonymously for the state’s maintenance.

The Progressives—then and now—have always aligned themselves with the interests of the centralized, national government (what Kirk terms “the state”). Consequently, they have always joined in the national government’s hostility to and aggressive repudiation of “every institution which acts as a check on its power.” Kirk notes that the list of these repudiated institutions includes the church, the family, and “local association.” It also includes all civic, athletic, business, and social organizations, including all alternative sources of democratic power, including state governments. There is a reason, after all, that the left has spent the last century demonizing those who believe in “state’s rights,” despite the fact that those rights existed long before they were used to justify secession from the Union and are, in fact, enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Of course, the left has also spent the last century demonizing anyone who expresses support for an originalist interpretation of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments for the very same reason.

Why does Tim Walz not care that the Electoral College was designed specifically to protect the interests of states like the one he governs? Why do none of the elected officials from the other states that have signed the National Popular Vote Compact care about their own states’ interests?

Because they don’t believe that states should have interests. They hate the idea that other states are able, to some extent, to reject the dictates of the ideology they know in their hearts is ideal. They hate that the Constitution establishes that state governments should serve as a counterbalance to the national government. They desperately want their states—and all the others as well—to serve “a tableland upon which a multitude of individuals, solitary though herded together, labor anonymously for the” maintenance and growth of the national government.

Tim Walz thinks states’ interests just get in the way. So, to hell with them—and the Constitution.