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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