Sunday, January 8, 2023

Our Political Discourse And Candidates Have Not Declined Immensely Overtime. And The People Who Are Telling You This Should Know Better

 

For as long as I’ve been alive, there has been a constant stream of blather from the media, from political journalists, from bloggers, from historians, from Hollywood, from the conservatives, from the liberals and basically everyone who you would think and hope would know better.

It is more or less a variation on the same message. Every aspect of politics and our democracy is worse than it was fifty years ago, a century ago, basically before they were alive or at best when they were much younger. Their arguments consist more or less of the following: the political candidates are worse than were before, no one discusses the issues any more, the media is not doing its job, and elections are not about the quality of the candidates but just a popularity contest. (This last is honestly the most ridiculous charge, but one thing at a time.) They argue the voters are indifferent, either because they are aware of the crisis to our society or because they’re not engaged in the political process as they were at one point. They’ll point to the fact as to how much the average turnout rates for elections are compared to a century ago (I’ll cover that too) and their conclusions are inevitable. Americans either don’t care about the issues facing them today because they are distracted by trivialities, are fundamentally uneducated, or just don’t care.

All of this at its core is utter crap and demonstrates what is fundamentally the total ignorance of the elite because it doesn’t take a lot into consideration. There are many fallacies to the arguments, but let’s deal with what is fundamentally the biggest problems with politics at its core. It’s amazingly simple.

Politics is dull.

I’m not surprised that no one who works in the media has said this out loud; they make their living at it and it’s their job to convince their viewers – who are at best a small percentage  of the national population – that this is the most important thing. And it is. It’s just not interesting and that’s because the bulk of the issues are fundamentally to complicated for most people to understand.

Yes, I realize the progressive elites will yell at me for saying this is because no one is properly educated about society, I’m telling you right now they’re talking out of their asses. Most political issues require a level of education and research that most people – most college graduates, and many doctoral students – could barely get a grasp on. John Oliver has a gift for taking some of the most complicated scenarios in the world – the situation between China and Taiwan, all the crises with the EU,  the water shortages in the west – explainable and even entertaining, but even he can only do one major story a week and he has to do a lot of work and research to make it palatable. And honestly, how many of us are watching to learn something for some deep national insight and more because he makes it funny? He regularly jokes as to how dull and repetitive he can be in his presentations. If it were anyone else – if say CNN were telling the same story with no jokes – most of us would change the channel in five minutes. Politics is dull and complicated.

Some of the doom-criers on this blog will make the argument that the reason the populace doesn’t understand just how serious the issues facing the world are is because of capitalism keep us forever busy and the plutocrats keeping us suppressed. They want to make that argument, fine. But let’s engage in the magical thinking they do: in this hypothetical world where you don’t have to work until you drop, would you really want to spend your time learning about stuff that is definitely important but is fundamentally complicated and almost assuredly not interesting? I’ll use myself as an example. I’ve spent much of the last decade spending more of my time not working than working. I’ve seen just how horrible so many of the political crises around us are. And I know it’s in my interest to get more educated on them. But at the end of the day, I don’t want to because most of these books are maddeningly dull. I put it to the rest of you: on a weekend, do you want to spend your free time learning about the geopolitical problems involving Ukraine and NATO or would you rather binge-watch the most recent season of, say, Only Murders in the Building? (Fill in your own entertainment example here.) If I were ask a hundred people this question, would one of you honestly say you’d prefer the former? Politics is dull and complicated.

Now to those historians who say that in the nineteenth century people were more engaged with the political process, they’ll make two arguments: that people would comes from miles around to watch a politician speak for hours on important topics and that the voting turnout was much higher than it was today, ranging from 70 to 80 percent of the people until the beginning of the twentieth century. Two things: what options for entertainment did the average person have back then? Electricity wasn’t in most houses until the end of the nineteenth century and much of the country was more rural than urban. Once you were finished working, there was almost nothing to do but eat and go to bed, and if you were extremely fortunate read by candlelight. Theater was barely existent (and frankly, had a horrible reputation). Sporting events were most not national and fairly localized – usually they came to the community rather than the other way around. Medicine shows were considered the height of entertainment. You could go to a bar or saloon if one were nearby. You might go to church on Sunday and make a whole day of it. That was basically it. Most people did not go to political rallies because they wanted to hear their local senator or Congressman tell you why they should vote for them or their parties candidates for President (I will get to that in a bit) because they were more interesting politics than they are today; it’s because for them, this was the nineteenth-century equivalent of dinner and a show.

As for seventy to eighty percent of the people coming out to vote, this has nothing to do with people enthusiastic about the candidates of the campaigns; indeed, the lion’s share of the elections with the highest turnout had some absolute mediocrities as candidates. (Seriously, can anyone tell me something that Benjamin Harrison or Rutherford Hayes did as President?) No, it was math. Suffrage was basically white men; blacks didn’t vote in the south or much in the north, and women couldn’t. Now, the leftists will no doubt say I’m a racist or a sexist and I’m not, universal suffrage should have come at the beginning of the democratic process and Jim Crow was an abomination. But if those things had been available at the time, the voting percentages would have been closer to today. There’s proof of this; in 1920, after the Nineteenth Amendment was put into effect making female suffrage a national right,  the overall turnout dropped from 61.6% of eligible voters to just under fifty percent.

This is how math and human nature work. The more people you invite to something, the more are less likely to show up. If you invite ten people to something, you will almost certainly get a higher percentage of people to show up for it than if you invite a hundred people to the same thing on the same day. You could make it mandatory (and I imagine there are some leftists who want too) but that defeats the purpose of  democracy. You have the choice to vote and the choice not to vote.

And that’s the thing, no matter how much easier you make the process for people to vote, it’ll turn out the same. Move Election Day to a weekend, put drop boxes for voting on every corner. You’re never going to convince eighty to ninety percent of a nation with this many eligible voters to come out. People are going to be indifferent, if not to the issues, then to the candidates. Which brings me neatly to my next point.

I once saw a movie by Barry Levenson arguing that the current political process demeaned what elections were. It argued that so many of the great Presidents of the past would never make in today’s modern society. It argued that the idea of a candidate having to go before the voters in a primary and general election was undignified to the process. This has been argued by many historians and pundits saying that the grand process of democracy has been reduced a popularity contest rather than one of ideas.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but let’s get to the most fundamental misconception. The idea of the democratic process is a popularity contest. I could make some glib remark here about the term “popular vote” but I know I’d be dismissed of making an overstatement, but that is what an election is. It’s the majority of the voters who decide which candidate they find more preferable then another. You want to argue that it should be about issues or which party or group is taking on a series of positions, I will grant you that, but it’s still a choice of people choosing one point of view or the person who represents that viewpoint over another. That may not be the textbook definition of a popularity contest, but you have to do some real contorting of the term to say it isn’t a variation of one.

Now let’s go to the fact that the idea of the great Presidents of the past not making it in the modern electoral process and remind all of these talking heads that from the start of the Republic until at least the 1960s – and probably later, depending on how you want to stretch the definition – none of them had to. Set aside the fact that the founders – Washington, Jefferson and all the way down to John Quincy Adams – didn’t have to face any real voters at all to win the White House. For almost a century and a half, no man who ever earned the nomination for President by any party was chosen by the voters at all. They were chosen by party elders and bosses, committee heads and chairman, most of whom no one ever cast a vote for in the first place. Those men chose delegations for their states and basically told them who to vote for and when. After a certain amount of time, those men who would meet in smoke-filled rooms and ‘compromise’ – sometimes on men who hadn’t even been running at all.

And for the record, for the majority of our country’s history, the candidates they ended up picking were not Lincolns and Teddy Roosevelts. They were Franklin Pierces and Benjamin Harrisons. Nor were the lion’s share of the defeated candidates much of an improvement; if the Pierces and Hayes are footnotes in history, how would one rank  Lewis Cass or Alton Parker? (Look them up.) The leaders of the era were aberrations; in fact, Theodore Roosevelt became McKinley’s Vice President because the bosses of that era wanted to make sure he never became President and making him Vice-President would do that. (It didn’t work out.) The truly ambitious men who might have been able to do good – the Daniel Websters and Salmon Chases and Robert LaFollette’s  - were never going to be considered by the party elders because of the positions they took. And does one really think that if the voters had truly had a say in it, they would have chosen William Jennings Bryan after his defeat the first – and second – times?

And to be clear, for the length of the nineteenth century until early in the twentieth, the idea of a President campaigning for office was considered undignified. Lincoln might well have been a great public speaker, but he never made a campaign speech. Stephen Douglas, his great rival, did stump the country – and was considered desperate to do so. The few who did afterwards looked much better. When Horace Greeley stumped the country in 1872, he was considered a buffoon. When James Blaine did so in 1884 against Cleveland, he was considered an egotist. And when Bryan did so in 1896, many questioned his sanity. Theodore Roosevelt was the most energetic campaigner of his era, but running for election in 1904, he didn’t go near the campaign trail. And we did so in 1912, first for the Republican nomination and then as a Bull Moose, many questioned his sanity too. Campaigning for the Presidency became more common after that point, to be sure, but it wasn’t until FDR did so that it became customary and even part of the process. (I will get to him in and the issues surrounding him in a different article, some day.)

Now some of those same historians will try to tell you that even the people didn’t know or even see the candidates, that was fine because they cared about the ‘platforms.” I don’t believe this for a minute and I don’t believe anyone cares now. The media was outraged in 2020 when the Republicans had no platform at all, but in my lifetime I don’t remember a single news network at any time ever discussing one plank in one of either party or the arguments about it. This is not truly a recent development; throughout American history, few major issues have ever been part of a major party platform. This was true with slavery up to 1856; both parties had so many factions that neither side was willing to risk isolating one part of the country. The Free Soil party, which was a fringe party in the north, did take a strong anti-slavery position and eventually the Republican party adopted it.

This has been a fundamental truth from that point forward; usually a fringe party will take on the views of a group feeling disenfranchised and after time a major party takes them on. The Populist party, a party founded by farmers in the unsettled West took on many progressive views in the 1890s and eventually both parties took on many of their platform to gain more voters. The Bull Moose Party was founded when the Progressives of the Republicans split off – and many of them were adapted after Wilson won. Usually that are part of a platform are the ones their members think are important but the general public doesn’t care about. (Prohibition is probably the most obvious example.)

In the modern era, the most important party platforms are the ones adopted by the 1964 Republicans, adopted by the followers of Barry Goldwater, and the 1972 Democratic Platform adopted by the followers of George McGovern. In both cases the traditional leaders of the party were taken over by what the leadership considered insurrectionists who were rejecting the models that had been in place for decades. In both cases, the party was considered too extreme by the party leaders. In the case of Goldwater, it was the embracing of extremists and the recently passed Civil Rights Act of 1964 (to deal with the biggest ones); in the case of McGovern, it included amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders, legalization of abortion on demand and perhaps most offensively to some, the first ever possible recognition of gay people as anything other than deviants. And in both cases, this platform and the candidate who was the representative of it, led to the powers-that-be in the party basically rejecting their party leader and in some cases, embracing his opponent – leading to a landslide victory for the incumbent president in each case.

To be clear, millions of people did not vote for LBJ in 1964 or  Nixon in 1972 because they trusted or even liked the incumbent or even agreed with the policies they were suggested. They did because the ideas in the platform their opponents were proffering were repugnant to them because they were radical and unacceptable to the way the order was.

In recent years, many have tried to offer reclamations of both Goldwater and McGovern’s platforms as being born out by history – in the former case, by Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980 based on a platform of many of Goldwater ideals; in the latter case, by arguing Obama’s 2008 victory was built on the voting groups McGovern put together in 1972. There is an argument for that, and I’d be more inclined to believe that were for the commonalities in both men’s wins: a staggering economy (stagflation in 1980; a recession in 2008) and being the nominee of the party out of power at the time. Say what you will about Reagan or Obama’s power as orator, campaigners, or policy; both were dealing with very weak opponents. If Reagan had lost to Carter or McCain had beaten Obama, no one would be trying to argue for anyone who had lost that badly.

At our core, that is the lie that so many historians,  journalists, progressives, conservatives or so many people who write or speak or do anything about politics are trying to sell us. They argue that the people choosing the candidates had led to weaker candidates and imply that the less involvement people have in the electoral process the better. They argue that campaigning is nastier than it has ever been and that it degrades the process while ignoring that it’s always been there – sometimes far less subtly – and that it is almost always effective.  They argue that putting cameras in Congress has turned legislation into pure theater when since Congress was founded, the legislators have always been performing for somebody – their speeches were recorded, printed, and read by their followers, and were accepted as gospel even if they didn’t mean a word of it or even say it. They argue that reducing complex idea to sound bites has demeaned the process as if campaign slogans have not always outlived the campaigns that they were a part of. They will argue every factor in to low voter turnout except simple numbers – when numbers are the part they consider in every other part of the process.

 This is what politics is. That’s what it’s always been. The people’s interest in their elected officials has always been related to how much they care about it. The quality of the candidates has always been affected by whoever chose them. And the great elected official has always been the aberration, never the norm. And no one ever trusted an elected official more now than they did then. The people who try to tell you any different are only telling you this for the same reason anyone in the political media is because that’s how they make their living.

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