Democracy is Ruined: What Now?
How the primary system has slaughtered our government, and what we all ought to be saying to the Democrats in 2022
An important pandemic-related story lately has been the increasing number of severe-COVID sufferers who attempt to force doctors and nurses to give them quack treatments. More and more of these patients are arguing with and even threatening healthcare workers who don’t give them the “right” medicine — the “right” one being whatever ineffectual or even dangerous drug they’ve most recently heard about on social media, or from a conspiracy-theory-level broadcaster.
More and more … patients are arguing with and even threatening healthcare workers who don’t give them … whatever ineffectual or even dangerous drug they’ve recently heard about on social media …
That is to say that a large number of Americans have now so elevated tribe and emotion over reason and expertise that they’re leaving tribe and emotion in the driver’s seat even when a rampaging disease is threatening their very lives, and healthcare professionals with a great track record of fighting that disease are standing right in front of them. This implies a level of emotional intoxication that should give us all a shudder when we consider that the same drunkenness has taken over our politics — and is driving us into a new era of populist hyperdemocracy.
This implies a level of emotional intoxication that should give us all a shudder when we consider that the same drunkenness has taken over our politics …
Democracy’s a Risky Business
America’s Founders were terrified of democracy, largely because of what they referred to as the “passions” of the people. They knew that the voting public could easily degenerate into an overheated, pitchfork-wielding mob. That’s why a lot of them wanted U.S. senators and the electors of the Electoral College to be chosen, not by the people, but by the states’ legislators (whom John Jay in The Federalist number 64 referred to as more “enlightened and respectable” than the general population).
The Founders were right to be afraid of giving significant power to the people at large. They were also right to hate the idea of leaving power in the hands of a small elite of royals and aristocrats. Power has to be handled with care, and the Founders, in drafting the U.S. Constitution, were aiming for a sweet spot between elitism and populism. The sweet spot they found was of course blatantly racist and sexist, and we should all be glad to have evolved beyond it — and angry and embarrassed that it took us until 1965 to do so. But the evolution we’ve undergone since then has taken us to a spot that is very far from sweet.
… we [have] evolved past some anti-populist guardrails that served us well.
It would have been nice to evolve beyond the Senate and the Electoral College, whose mathematics exaggerate the influence of the smallest states. It also would have been nice to evolve to a House districting system that would prevent partisan gerrymandering. Instead, while mostly treading water on those fronts, we evolved past some anti-populist guardrails that served us well. With the 1970s came the rise of the binding primary system, which cost us our political gatekeepers: the senior party officials who traditionally named candidates and wrote platforms. This gave voters their present-day superpower of shoving unexamined candidates and extreme platforms down their parties’ throats. Meanwhile, over the last four decades or so, we’ve also lost our news and information gatekeepers, and as a result voters have taken on the additional superpower of assembling their own news feeds — just as they do their own medical “educations” — from the echo chambers of talk radio, cable TV, the internet, and social media. Taken together these unprecedented developments have made our nation’s voters simultaneously supremely powerful and supremely misinformed, their heads stuffed with more nonsense, and self-assurance, than at any time in our history.
In other words these developments have transformed our political parties into something like hospitals that are run by the patients — really, really bad patients — instead of the doctors.
[We] have transformed our political parties into something like hospitals that are run by the patients … instead of the doctors.
The Genie is Out of the Bottle
The scary thing is that there appears to be no going back. Any talk of imposing gatekeeping onto our new media landscape brings howls of protests about censorship. And on the political side we’re stuck too: there seems to be little chance of our taking power out of the primary system and giving it back to convention delegates and party honchos. This is in spite of the fact that Americans’ trust in democratic institutions has plummeted over the last fifty years, in large part because of the jackass candidates the primaries have been forcing on the parties — many of them garnering our votes based on nothing but name recognition or a punchy media presence.
Americans’ trust in democratic institutions has plummeted over the last fifty years, in large part because of the jackass candidates the primaries have been forcing on the parties …
At this point the primary system is so entrenched that people seem to think that it’s part of the Constitution, that it’s an inherent part of the right to vote. Or at least they think that there’d be no hope of making progress toward good government (or equal-rights government, or power-to-the-people government) if nominating clout were taken away from “the people” and given back to the party elders in their proverbial smoke-filled rooms. But progress was being made under that traditional system — progress, that is, in terms of environmentalism and the distribution of opportunity and equality to previously disadvantaged people. Under traditionally (or largely traditionally) — nominated officials we achieved women’s suffrage and Title IX; civil rights, voting rights, and housing rights; aid programs for the poor, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
… progress was being made under [our] traditional system …
Prejudices regarding race, gender, and sexuality remained strong during that era of course, but they remain strong in our populist era also. These are not things that a president or Congress can sweep out of people’s hearts legislatively. The point is that back in the bad old, pre-populist days, the U.S. presidency and Congress were doing what they could reasonably do in terms of passing legislation to keep pace with the changing needs and attitudes of a society comprising hundreds of millions of diverse individuals spread out across a continent, and across multiple generations, tribes, and biases.
The Upside of Politicians’ Self-Interest
A moment ago I said that allowing parties to be run by primaries instead of establishment politicians was analogous to allowing hospitals to be run by patients instead of doctors. This implies a comparison of politicians to doctors, and that comparison, taken literally, would be unfair to doctors, who discharge their duties with greater honesty and professionalism than politicians. But the establishment politicians — the titanically-flawed people who used to run the parties, and should still be running them — do have one thing going for them: a strong self-preservation instinct. This makes them tend to shun candidates who campaign as demagogues and megalomaniacs, and shun platform statements that slosh too extremely to one side or the other. Donald Trump wouldn’t have gotten within a million miles of the 2016 GOP nomination had these people still been in charge. Establishment politicians want to stay in office, meaning, among other things, that they don’t want chaos; they don’t want to be burned by political wildfires. They don’t want to be painted into a corner or have the rug pulled out from under them by insurgent, extremist platforms, nor do they want to be thrown under the bus by a demagogue, as a sacrifice to his or her personality cult (and surely establishment Republicans have been enjoying some schadenfreude lately, watching Donald Trump reap his own whirlwind as he’s been booed by anti-vaxxers).
Donald Trump wouldn’t have gotten within a million miles of the 2016 GOP nomination had [the establishment politicians] still been in charge.
The self-preservation instinct of establishment politicians is admittedly a slender and miserable thread on which to hang the hopes of a nation, but what more — realistically — do we have? What more has the world ever really had?
But, again, we’ve apparently lost that thread anyway. We’ve trashed the gatekeepers and traded whatever mediocre brand of democracy we possessed, for a populist food fight. Sane, serviceable right-of-center and left-of-center candidates are now regularly being “primaried” out of contention by poisonous, grandstanding zeroes. We are where we are: what do we do now?
Sane, serviceable right-of-center and left-of-center candidates are now regularly being “primaried” out of contention by poisonous, grandstanding zeroes … what do we do now?
Our Clear and Present Danger
We’re reduced to a self-defensive half measure. We begin by noting the obvious: the Republican coalition currently poses a greater threat to the country than the Democratic coalition. Specifically, the members of the Republican white working class (the “base”) constitute a larger, more monolithic, and more determined voting bloc than any currently operating on the Left. They have watched with horror over the last half century as America’s culture has shifted leftward and its complexion has darkened. They’re terrified of what’s happening and they’re heavily armed. That’s not to say that America’s political Left is exemplary in any way; they’re just as ignorant and just as afraid of a fair fight, a fair conversation, as the Right. But at the moment the Right is more dangerous.
And as we head into the critical 2022 and 2024 cycles, the lie most energizing the Right’s base is Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that he won the 2020 election in a landslide, and only appeared to have lost because of massive fraud and conspiracy by Democrats. Anyone believing this lie not only could but should see it as their duty to use force to overturn Democratic victories. And since two-thirds of Republican voters currently believe it, our nation is sitting on a very large pile of dynamite.
… our nation is sitting on a very large pile of dynamite.
The Democrats, since the morning of November 4, 2020, should therefore have been engaged in a steady, disciplined, and organized effort to defuse this dynamite. But Democrats aren’t organized, and they aren’t smart. Yet it’s not too late. What Joe Biden and the rest of his party need to do is to start pointedly and repeatedly stating the simple fact that Donald Trump’s own lawyers, and judges, don’t believe his lies.
Donald Trump’s own lawyers, and judges, don’t believe his lies.
For the Good of Us All, the Democrats Need to Wake Up
Already by December of 2020, eighty-six judges, thirty-eight of them Republican appointees, had simply rejected Trump’s election lawsuits. Even Trump’s own judicial appointees rejected his arguments as frivolous and a waste of time. By the time of the insurrection on January 6, 2021, more than sixty of Trump’s lawsuits had had their day in court, and he lost every single case (other than a narrow victory in a Pennsylvania case with no direct ties to allegations of fraud). And more to the point, once they got into court, Trump’s lawyers rarely even attempted to argue that there had been massive fraud. They knew Trump was lying, and they didn’t want to lose their licenses.
Democrats are constantly mentioning the Big Lie, and have even occasionally reminded us about Trump’s humiliating record of court failures. But in typical Democratic fashion, they have never organized to grind a simple statement relentlessly into the nation’s skull to the effect that Trump’s own people know that Trump is a liar, and have demonstrated that they know it. Neither Donald Trump nor any of his supporters should be able to take a breath in 2022 without hearing this fact pounding in their ears.
[the Democrats] have never organized to grind [this] simple statement relentlessly into the nation’s skull …
I’m not a fan of the Democratic Party, but the Republicans are completely off the rails at this point. The best of them seem to lack any agenda other than retaining power for the sake of power, and the worst of them are locked in an imbecile fever dream with Trump, ten stories below the sewer. Democrats are all we’ve got to defuse the GOP’s dynamite. If they don’t, we could be facing a very ugly and destabilizing period of political violence, even if the chance of an outright civil war seems remote.
… there is a tidal wave of viral violence and stupidity headed our way, and we’ve got to remind [the Democrats] that they have [the answer] in their pocket.
So let’s try to get Democratic officeholders to wake up — not to talk about Trump’s lawyers to the point that they fail to get their own positive messages out about what they want to accomplish — but enough to create a steady drumbeat. One way or another, they will inevitably find themselves talking about Donald Trump and the insurrection throughout the coming year: why not focus, and unify, and make it count? This we’ve got to goad them to do. During the coming election cycles, there is a tidal wave of viral violence and stupidity headed our way, and we’ve got to remind our doctors that they have a bottle of disinfectant in their pocket.
