A shrewd political observer once said that Americans rarely
solve their most pressing political problems; instead, they amicably bid them
goodbye.
Take the primary system by way of example. The primary
system itself has been attended, especially during the current Presidential
election, with glaring problems that pretty nearly everyone has studiously
ignored. It is the primary system that has given us two of the most unpalatable presidential candidates in U.S. History. Nearly fifty percent of voters on
either side of the political spectrum this year will be voting AGAINST the
Presidential candidates, according to a September Pew Research poll.
Primaries lengthen the political season, an unintended
result of a “participatory democracy” that benefits news producers, editors and incumbents
trolling for campaign cash but few others.
The current primary season began on the Republican side eighteen
months ago when Senator Ted Cruz announced his candidacy for the Presidency. In
due course, sixteen other Republican hats were thrown into the Presidential
ring. After the Republican Nominating Convention dispersed sixteen months
and millions of dollars later, Donald Trump, whose conservative bona fides and political affiliation
still remain in question, emerged with the Republican nomination clenched in
his teeth. Among the vanquished also-rans were three anti-establishment
Republicans – Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Ron Paul – all Tea Party favorites and
thorns in the side of the ancient Republican Party regime.
On the Democratic side, former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton was almost successfully challenged in a primary by Socialist Democratic
Senator from the People's Republic of Vermont Bernie Sanders. Votes tallied at
the Democratic Nominating Convention showed Sanders winning a not
inconsiderable 1,865 delegates before he put forward a motion to nominate by
voice vote primary opponent Hillary Clinton who, hacked emails later disclosed,
had turned her efforts to subverting Sanders’ Presidential bid. During his
primary campaign, Sanders refused to dwell on Clinton’s email scandal,
remarking to a smugly smiling Hillary Clinton during one of their debates that
America was “sick of hearing about your damn emails," in hindsight a fatal strategic mistake. Sanders did mention that his campaign
had been subverted by the Democratic National Committee, a charge later
confirmed by hacked emails that Sanders thought tedious and not worth
mentioning.
Almost everyone, except true-believers on both sides of the current
political barricades, will agree that both Republican and Democratic Party
nominees are scarred with defects that would not have made it past the
jeweler’s eyes of the party bosses of yore.
The last Democratic Party boss in Connecticut, John Bailey,
would not have failed to notice both Mrs. Clinton’s glaring defects, not the
least of which was her husband, and Mr.
Sanders’ leftist drift from what used to be called among Democrats the “Vital Center”
of American politics. Mr. Bailey would have allowed liberalism, but not
libertinism, and he would have put the kibosh on Democratic candidates who
favored an administrative repeal of any of the First Ten Amendments to the U.S.
Constitution. Pragmatic to the bone, Mr.
Bailey almost certainly would not have sanctioned a measure to force The Little Sisters of the Poor, first brought to the east coast of the United States by Abraham Lincoln, to dispense condoms to fellow workers who were not nuns or priests. He also
would have counseled against any polity that refused adamantly to make
reasonable accommodations with Evangelicals and members of the Catholic Church.
America began to experiment with presidential primaries as
early as 1901. From 1936 to 1968 only 20 states deployed primaries, which were
useful, progressives realized, in wresting political power and influence from
party bosses like Mr. Bailey – and vesting political power… in what?
We now know the answer to this question. Political power and money is now controlled
by political party outliers. We have gotten rid of John Bailey, and replaced him
with political PACS that furnish negative ads and dark money in the service of
political actors who, petite parties themselves, are independent of either of
the major two parties. Because incumbent politicians are able to tap into money
and power resources unavailable to their competitors, the political campaign
table has been tilted in favor of incumbents favored by the country’s left of
center media – which means that the correlation of forces pushes moderate
Democratic candidates off center and, in some cases – c.f. Bernie Sanders and
Elizabeth Warren – very far left. These correlations of force have produced an
ever widening, unbridgeable gap between the two major Parties.
What Mark Twain said of the weather in New England –
everybody talks about it, but no one wants to do anything about it – is also
true of the modern primary system, which had been put in place long ago by
progressives to mitigate what they felt were the defects of a strong two-party
political system.
A party system that once depended upon sometimes corrupt
party bosses for financing and direction now depends upon PACs that operate
outside campaign financing laws, provided they do not engage in promoting
specific candidates. These party outliers are the wellspring of vicious ads
that have only a nodding connection with the truth. The parties themselves are
poor. Primaries have reduced national conventions to rote political thought and action, breaking the
indispensable live connection between state and national politics, which is now
run by the whimsical nominal heads of parties. In November, the nation will reap what it has sown. This time around, the primary system has
allowed access to the presidency of two of the most unloved candidates for
the presidency in modern times. And dark politics has produced nation-wide cynicism, dark thoughts and dark deeds.
Such is political progress in the age of progressivism, all bottom and no top, all lower depths and no heights.
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