Oscar Wilde once famously said that there are two kinds of tragedy: not getting what you want, and getting it. The recent ostentatious bunfight in Washington is an example of the second kind, and the “what you want” involves who gets to stand for Congress or the presidency.
Up until the 1960s, the metaphor most commonly used to describe the American candidate selection process was the smoke-filled room. The smoke came from expensive cigars, and the smokers were the committee members of the two major political parties. They were all white “men of substance” (no women, naturally), usually businessmen and lawyers, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, aged 50 and up. In the hands of these bumptious mandarins lay the political fate of the United States, for no presidential or congressional candidate from either party would find his name on a ballot without the imprimatur of the smoke-filled room.
This method of nominating candidates was, of course, deeply undemocratic, since the candidates of both parties necessarily favoured the interests of the men who held the cigars. But it did provide for a sort of stability and continuity in the system. Presidents and Congressmen, regardless of political label, could generally find common ground for discussion and policy-making.
It was the Vietnam war that finally broke the power of the smoke-filled room. By the time of the 1968 elections the great majority of the people opposed that war, but the great majority of the politicians supported it. The popular anti-war candidates got swept aside one by one by the holders of the cigars, leading to cries of “Never again!” and a movement to do away entirely with the closed-door selection process.
What emerged in its place was the system of state-wide open primary elections, adopted by the Democrats in the wake of their defeat in 1968, and by the Republicans after their humiliating loss in 1976. The idea was that anyone could stand in a primary election, and the voters of each party would themselves select the candidates to represent them in the general election a few months later.
So the reformers got what they wanted — democracy in the nomination process. The expectation was that America’s embarrassingly low voter turnouts would now improve, as the people would be energised to participate in a newly-transparent political pageant.
In fact, the opposite happened: Voter turnout fell even lower, especially during the much-touted primary elections. Once elections changed from a one-day event to a nine-month marathon, people’s interest waned quickly; politics became a spectator sport, with voters watching the polls the way they watched baseball standings. And the only people who actually voted were the nutters — those motivated by simplistic ideological explanations or, increasingly, religions.
Thus the real power of selection has passed from one group of mandarins to another. Instead of cigar-chomping “men of substance”, power now belongs to those with the money and the marketing skills necessary to organise the ideologically passionate to vote in primary elections. For the Democrats, this means cold-eyed political consultants like Joe Klein; for the Republicans, it means deep-pocketed extremists, as the Rockefeller brothers have been replaced by the Koch brothers.
Note that the Democrats and Republicans do not actually compete with each other in the primaries. It’s just extremists against normal people within each party; and since the normal people rarely bother to vote in the primaries, it’s the extremists who usually win the day. This is how the Democratic Party has reverted to the discredited Big Government social democracy of the 1970s, while the Republicans have been captured by the crassest form of bigoted plutocracy.
Is it any surprise, then, that these two camps can no longer speak to each other with any civility? The blame is not evenly divided here, because the right-wing nutters believe they have God on their side so that any tactic, no matter how destructive, is not only valid but imperative. This is why the Republicans felt not only justified, but actually elated, in shutting down the government last month, even though every poll has shown that they have guaranteed themselves big losses in next year’s congressional elections.
Thus has American democracy, once a model for the world, rendered itself a laughing stock. Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. The lesson for New Zealand, where voter turnout has also been dropping, couldn’t be clearer: Vote, you idiots. If you don’t, you consign your fate to the nutters who always will.
Waiheke Island, November 2013
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Copyright © 2013 T. Mark James
This article first
appeared in the Gulf
News,
Waiheke Island, New Zealand, on 7 November 2013.