Podcast Episode 9 — A Recap to Catch You Up (Full Transcript)
I started this podcast because after the 2016 election, I wanted to ask hard questions and dig deep to try to understand what has gone wrong with American politics, and whether there are ways to fix it.
Most Americans want government to work effectively and efficiently and solve problems. They have different opinions over what exactly government is supposed to do. But even before Trump was elected president, the Congress in particular wasn’t doing its most basic tasks. Year after year during the Obama presidency, Congress had trouble passing budgets to fund the government.
But what convinced me to think about this topic of institutions and political parties in particular was the rise of Trump in 2015 and 2016 to take over the Republican Party. I remain more amazed by Trump’s victory in the Republican primary than I am by the fact that he beat Hillary Clinton and won the presidency.
And that’s saying something. More Americans voted for Clinton than for Trump after all. She got 65.8 million votes to Trump’s 62.9 million. It’s kind of remarkable really, that 3 million more Americans voted for her than for him. But the Electoral College is there in part to disperse influence among all the states, not just the big ones, and Trump won fair and square according to the rules.
But if a little more than half of general election voters didn’t want Trump, he was even more unpopular among Republican primary voters. When the primary effectively ended in early May, about 17 million Republicans had voted for one of the other candidates, and Trump had only 10 million votes. Most of those other votes were split among Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and John Kasich. What that means is that nearly two third of the Republican primary vote wanted someone other than Trump.
That continued in the general election. Only about a third of Trump’s support came from voters who said they were excited about voting for him. The rest said they were either voting against Clinton or that he was the lesser of two evils.
And of course, very few Republican leaders at any level — federal, state or local — wanted him to be the nominee during the primary. The party regulars who understood politics and governance best saw through him. They believed him to be completely unprepared for the job, they knew how serious it was that he had had demonstrated authoritarian tendencies, and his morally questionable private life was also problematic.
So, you might ask, how did Trump win the primary with such meager support? Yes, me too. I found myself asking that same question over and over again.
Part of the answer is that a perfect storm occurred. There was a huge Republican field of 17 candidates that split the votes of the establishment-leaning Republican primary vote. And what’s less understood is that the GOP establishment had set up its primary to favor an early leader. The establishment figured that an early favorite would usually be someone they had consolidated around. But they didn’t consolidate around anyone, the moderate Republican vote was split between Rubio and Kasich and Bush and Cruz early on, and Trump had an open lane to win early states even though he only had about a third of the vote. He won New Hampshire with 35%, South Carolina with 32%, and then the ultra-important showdown in Virginia with, again, just 35 percent.
At a certain point, Trump began to get 40 percent, but even then, if non-Trump Republicans had consolidated around Rubio, he would likely have beat Trump. Trump won Rubio’s home state of Florida with 46 percent. Rubio got only 27 percent, but if you added Cruz’s 17 percent and Kasich’s 7 percent to his total, that would have put him at 51 percent.
Then, when Republicans arrived in Cleveland for their convention, only 900 of 2472 delegates — 35 percent — were estimated by Trump’s own campaign to be loyal to him. That’s because other campaigns had worked more effectively to organize in each state to push delegates through the multi-step process that begins at the hyper-local precinct convention, then moves to the county level, and then to a state convention. This process is a supplement to the popular vote that tests a candidate’s organizational skill but also is a way for party activists, who are invested in the long-term health of the party and its ideas, to signal whom they support. It was the clearest statement of where the most committed grassroots Republicans stood.
And so, having missed an opportunity on the front end of the primary to organize and consolidate to stop Trump, the Republican establishment had another opportunity on the back end to perform the job that parties were created to do: to produce a qualified candidate for president and offer this person up to all Americans — not just party members — for consideration.
If ever there was a primary in which it was clear that party leaders, grassroots activists, donors, and the average Republican Party member were not happy with who had emerged from the process so far, it was this one. And conventions had been created to serve as a final step in that process where the party could convene, debate, deliberate, and choose a nominee.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus chose not to allow a debate on the floor. He used his organizational muscle to squash a robust movement to go to an open convention, where the delegates would have voted — for as many ballots as it took — to produce a nominee. I had coffee recently with one of the most preeminent Republican insider experts on election rules and conventions, and this person said it was 99% certain that the convention delegates would have chosen someone other than Trump if Priebus had allowed the convention to become a true convention, rather than the made for TV show it has been since the 70’s.
As I wrote at the time, that process represented the self-decapitation of the GOP establishment. They had started off with very little power, and at the end of the process, they used what little power they did have to cement a nominee whom none of them wanted.
I sensed even then that there was something wrong with the calculus that led them to this decision. Party leaders didn’t believe they had any right to exercise leadership. They were cowed by Trump’s appeals to the “will of the people.” And something similar was going on in the Democratic Party, with the howls of protest over the DNC’s preferential treatment of Clinton.
As I read back over The Federalist Papers and thought about our constitutional design, and studied the changes to the primary nominating system, it only increased my sense that something had gone wrong with our nominating system, and with how modern Americans think about parties. I heard smart political people making similar comments from time to time.
Here’s David Axelrod, former adviser to President Obama, in January of 2017, on his AxeFiles podcast from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN.
AXELROD: Well, in many ways, you know, I was one of the young reformers back in the day when I came to Chicago as a college student and was absolutely convinced that the total democratization of the process was not only necessary but right. And to some extent we achieve that in the Democratic Party in the nominating process of candidates. And there are times when you say, you know, you kind of yearn for the old days. I’m sure I get lots of tweets and e-mails about this, but, you know, the party bosses, they often chose people who were corrupt and inadequate, but just as — but they also produced Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas and some — and people who’d took governing seriously.
WALLACE: And FDR and a lot of people. No, it’s, you know, you wonder — it’s a terrible thing to say but too much democracy can be a bad thing. But sometimes I think it can and that, you know, you’d like to have a blend. You certainly don’t want to go back to where it’s just six guys in a room who —
AXELROD: Picking Warren Harding (ph).
WALLACE: — right.
AXELROD: in the smoke filled the room.
WALLACE: But you know, in some mixture of primaries and also I mean, to some degree maybe the Democrats have it with the super delegates, which the Republicans didn’t despite —
AXELROD: Which by the way, I mean, it’s something that there are many people in Democratic Party would like to do away with —
WALLACE: Right.
AXELROD: — would like to do away with, so —
WALLACE: But the idea that people who have contributed to the party I mean, who contributed financially, contributed in terms of their efforts, their product — their production, their involvement with the party over years to have some — the stakeholders to have some stake in the process by not being all together about the—
AXELROD: And the people who have some appreciation for governance, you know, but that — I mean, that’s the theory behind the superdelegates. I think the Republicans kind of yearn for superdelegates in this last process.
And here’s David Plotz, host of the Slate Political gabfest, and John Dickerson, host of CBS This Morning, in July of 2016.
PLOTZ: We’ll say it it again. The piece is ‘How American Politics Went Insane,’ by Jonathan Rauch, and he tries to explain why our political system seems on the verge of collapse in a way it hasn’t since the 1850’s. I’m going to quickly summarize a very elegant and brilliant argument. Rauch’s argument is basically you’re at fault, number one. It’s that America has reformed its politics into a state of chaos, that for most of our history, our political system was dominated by middle men — party leaders and institutional figures who did deals, who greased things, who organized groups, who raised money, who delivered votes, who distributed pork, and these were party leaders and chiefs and senior figures and they were highly invested in a political system, and in stability, and in creating a system of rewards and punishment to get things done. But political reform has stripped those middle-men of their power, so we have electoral reforms: we directly elect senators and have primaries where we’re directly choosing presidential candidates. There are limits on pork and earmarking and hence the limits to the ability to reward politicians for taking hard votes. We have the abolition of congressional seniority rules and prerogatives, so it reduces the incentive for any young legislator to go along with anything, or to serve loyally. There are limits on donations to candidates and to parties, which in effect shifts the money into private donations to outside money, that transparency and open meetings reduces smoke-filled rooms but it also reduces the ability of people to make deals in private. And the result, Rauch claims, is that we have politicians who are loyal to nothing except themselves, and there’s no infrastructure for getting something done. We have what he calls ‘chaos syndrome.’
PLOTZ: Neither Trump nor Sanders is saying, ‘Actually the solutions are really hard because they require acts of political compromise and cynicism and abandoning of principles, which is what the truth is, that politics — to me the illness (applause)
EMILY BAZELON: You’re clapping for that deep Plotzian cynicism?
PLOTZ: Well, no, the illness of America is an idealism, that we have a kind of idealism about politics that we don’t have about anything else in life, that family life and work life is a constant process of negotiated disappointment (laughter), but we don’t believe that about, a huge fraction of Americans don’t believe that about politics.
DICKERSON: Just looking at the Senate you used to have to, like, get on a committee. You were then maybe lucky enough to be chairman of a subcommittee, then maybe the next time you might get a committee chairmanship, and then if you were nice to the majority leader you might raise up after a little while. Now you just blow through all that and go book yourself a few hits on cable, and you are now equal to your majority leader because you can say —
BAZELON: You are now Ted Cruz.
DICKERSON: And John Boehner called them false prophets, which is that if you’re charismatic on television you can say, you know all these hard things that the leaders of our party are doing here that are part of governing, that are part of what David’s talking about, those are all capitulations. Those are all ideological weaknesses. They’re not tactical decisions made in a system that was designed to be slow and designed to be complex. They’re all moral flaws. And if you can do that, then you do incite the kind of chaos that we have.
…I tend to like things the way they were, or a balance that was part of the original design, which was that you have a voice of the people playing a strong role in the process but there is also some longer term thinking and mediation that goes on somewhere in the system. We’ve been dismantling that since 1824, so it’s a long term project.
Dickerson’s comment about “a balance that was part of the original design” is key. He has obviously studied this question and thought about it too, since he refers back to the “corrupt bargain” election of John Quincy Adams by the House of Representatives over Andrew Jackson.
Parties are a key tool that has helped American democracy maintain this balance, where the “will of the people” is a big part of electing leaders but not all if it. As I heard the complaints from Trump and from Sanders supporters that the system was “rigged,” I thought about how rigging can be something that holds a ship together, and how the American political system was rigged in such a positive way to keep too much power from those in power, but also from the will of the people.
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But before I explored the arguments about making political parties stronger, I wanted to think more about the conventional wisdom attitudes we all generally have about this.
A few thoughts:
- Most people think the system we have is the way it’s always been. It’s not.
- Most conversations about what is “democratic” and what is not isolates a particular portion of the political system, and fails to think about our system holistically. For example, people would bristle at the idea of going back to having senators elected by state legislatures, but Congress would still have one branch that was directly elected by voters, as it was designed in the Constitution. Similarly, Trump’s talk of delegates as undemocratic is essentially a statement that the only input into who a party chooses as its nominee is a vote by marginally informed and involved people who may or may not even be members of that party. It ignores that there are several components and phases to choosing a nominee.
But in the second episode of the podcast, I backed up and talked with Yuval Levin about the attitudes that shape our views on topics like these. Yuval’s book, “The Fractured Republic,” did a great job of explaining how different America is now than it was 75 years ago. Mid-20th century Americans were far less individualistic. They had just come through a Depression and the second World War. They knew they needed others, and they needed big institutions, to get through hard times. But the post-war era ushered in unprecedented prosperity which continued for decades. And we are still incredibly prosperous, though over the past 20 or 30 years, the wealthy seem to have benefitted more than the rest.
One of Yuval’s best insights is that individualism has led to a devaluing of institutions.
YUVAL LEVIN: Why should we have faith in institutions? What is it that we have faith in? Institutions in some ways are either too abstract or too concrete to actually have faith in.
JON WARD: And it also sounds like you’re saying, ‘Well just agree with the status quo.’
LEVIN: Exactly, trust what we have. I think what it means to have faith in institutions is to have faith in the ways in which the structure and culture of an institution forms the individuals within it. And what that does is it produces trustworthy products. Journalism is a good example again but so is a hospital, so is a school, so is a state legislature. What it means to think of it as an institution is that it has an internal culture and what it means to have trust in it is to believe that that internal culture forms the people inside the institutions to be more trustworthy. It makes it part of their self-understanding that what they do follows certain rules, has certain obligations and responsibilities, and I think the ways that we’ve come to think about institutions in recent times in America have a lot to do with the fact that this idea of an internal culture that is formative inside institutions has really lost steam. It’s not the way we think about institutions anymore.We’ve come to think about institutions more and more as ways of providing platforms for individuals to be themselves, rather than creating molds that form individuals to be reliable and trustworthy. To me that’s the beginning of what it means to talk about faith in institutions. People now look to institutions much more to provide them with platforms to stand out. They’re much less interested in using institutions to provide them with structure, with formative culture, that turns them into something they weren’t already to begin with.”
One institution I follow closely is the U.S. Congress, and I think you see there that where members used to come in and gradually be shaped into something called a member of Congress, they now come in and use the institution as a way to elevate their own profile, again, to be more of what they are rather than to become something like what the institution wants them to be.
I don’t consider myself a critic of individualism. I think it is a very important facet of Americanism. And individualism is essential to freedom. I think it’s a wonderful thing. But to me what it means to understand myself as a conservative is to think that we are not born ready to be individualists. To make use of our freedom in ways that are constructive — which I think is really what America enables us to do and what other free societies enable people to do — requires a person who is formed in a certain way to be able to use our freedom responsibly. And a society made up of those people is a society that’s suited for a constructive individualism.”
That really is the essential conservative insight, that people are fallen, people enter the world needing to be made better before they can be made free. And that’s what our institutions do. Our institutions turn us into human beings who are capable of being free men and women, who will choose to do the right thing, generally speaking, and so can be left free to choose, and don’t have to be coerced into being responsible.
Yuval echoed the view that in 2016, the Republican Party leadership like Reince Priebus had failed to do their job, but in large part because the public didn’t put any pressure on him to do so.
YUVAL: The expectations of the public will shape what happens here, and the exceptions of the public now I think are not well honed to demand that our institutions be stronger. We just don’t think in these terms. It’s not what we imagine as necessary.
In our second episode, I wanted to lay down a marker that demonstrated clearly that talk of how things worked in the past should not blind us to the ways that institutions can be tools of oppression and injustice. For example, the Democratic machine in Chicago was the kind of organization that helped keep demagogues away from the presidency throughout the 20th century, but that same machine was also used by Mayor Richard Daley to systematically discriminate against and disenfranchise African-Americans.
Jemar Tisby, president of The Witness, spoke about how to prevent institutional abuses of minorities and vulnerable people.
JEMAR TISBY: The danger of institutions is the way it can mistreat those who are most vulnerable in our society. And that I think is actually a danger that is mitigated through diversity. So when you have in a particular party or an institution people who are black, who are women, people who are poor, whatever kind of diversity you want to talk about, they can say, ‘Wait a minute, here’s how this policy will affect me or my constituents.’ They can say, ‘Wait a minute, you haven’t thought of this, or from this perspective.’ So we are impoverished in our institutions to the degree that we lack diversity.
And then, in the fourth episode, we got into the first of several detailed conversations about political parties.
JONATHAN RAUCH: They are the only longstanding, durable actors in American politics. Individuals, politicians, movements all come and go, but the parties stay with us, and that’s what institutions do when they work is they transmit values from generation to generation.
That’s Jonathan Rauch, senior fellow at Brookings and contributing editor at The Atlantic magazine. Rauch has been one of the preeminent advocates for what he calls “political realism.” And I’ve included some longer clips of my conversation with Jonathan here, because I think what he says is so compelling.
RAUCH: It wasn’t, in my case, until around 2011 when I really began to say we’ve kind of got an emergency on our hands with the crumbling of institutions. Until then, I thought well you know, this is an issue, it’s one of a lot of things going on. It’s in the background. But in 2011, you may recall, the Republicans, majority of Republicans, I think, and the Democrats, and the president wanted to do a budget deal, John Boehner wanted to do it. He couldn’t get it past a minority of his own caucus.
JON WARD: Right.
RAUCH: And that’s cause he no longer had the institutional mechanisms and clout to get that done. And we lost a big opportunity as a country.
WARD: Namely those institutional mechanisms would be what?
RAUCH: Well, for example, in the house there used to be lots of ways to reward people who helped you out, you use earmarks, which you can no longer do.
WARD: Right, which were banned in 2010.
RAUCH: Which were banned in 2010, so they lost that tool. A lot of the discretionary budget was used as that kind of tool. A lot of other changes … I think if you had to name one that’s been of crucial importance, it’s when we had the really bright, well intentioned idea in the 70s of giving the power to choose nominees to the public and primary elections. So that was well intentioned, but it took that power away from party regulars. So they’re no longer in a position to say hey Jon, if you’ll vote for me on this tough bill, this debt limit bill, I’m gonna help make sure there’s not a primary challenge in your district. Parties are no longer able to protect their people on the tough votes so that means it’s every person for themselves. That means Boehner’s in a situation where he can’t go to someone and say look, help me with this deal, I’ll make sure you get some help in the election.
WARD: And the way that they would’ve protected a candidate in the primary would’ve been through money?
RAUCH: Money.
WARD: Endorsements.
RAUCH: It’s resources, it’s endorsements, it’s …
WARD: Manpower.
RAUCH: … discouraging other people from getting into the race, you know. Maybe they say hey, Joe Blow, I don’t think this is the right year for you to challenge Jon Ward maybe. Why don’t you wait two years. We can give you some help, but we owe Ward a favor this time around and we’re gonna not help you, gonna make your life difficult. So it had all kinds of subtle, back room ways of shaping the field. To a limited extent they still do but we’ve taken away a lot of those tools, and we’ve taken away the reputability of those tools. So if you tell people now parties are doing that, they go ballistic. Like if you tell them you know what, the Democratic National Committee wants to favor the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, over the non-Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders. People go well that’s not fair. Well of course, parties exist to favor the people who are part of the party. That’s the whole point.
WARD: Right, now let’s make sure we are very clear about why this is important, because some people are gonna hear this and say well that’s anti-democratic, it’s corrupt. Why do you think it’s … and there are counterarguments that we’re gonna talk about in a minute from other people who work at the Brookings Institute, but why do you think it’s important for a party leader to be able to say to that member of congress “I’m gonna protect you on this tough vote.” Why does that matter to the average person?
RAUCH: Because, in America there is no system in law or constitution that gets politicians working together, and to run a government, and run an advanced society, somehow every single day you’ve got to get enough majorities together to pass the legislation and do the programs that keep things running. When you don’t have those possibilities, things break down. What parties are doing, and what political machines and these other institutions do when they work, is they work behind the scenes to get people coordinated, to get politics organized, to dole out the rewards and punishments. If you can’t do that then it’s chaos, which is what we got right now.
…
RAUCH: I think public anger is way out of proportion to the reality of how government’s doing. Sure there are problems with it but it’s not so terrible, and I think a lot of what’s driving the anger is people don’t feel they have voice. They don’t feel they have agency. They can’t change anything. They see this stuff on the paper, on Fox News, or on MSNBC, and they growl, and they scream, but the places where they used to go to be effective aren’t so much there for them anymore. So I look at the failure of institutions more than the failure of government to help understand why we’re so angry.
The line from my conversation with Jonathan that has stuck with me the most is that “mediated democracy is more democratic than direct democracy.” Here he explains what that means:
RAUCH: One of the reasons that James Madison and the founders had genius for their time or any time, is that they understood the paradox of populism, which is that unmediated direct democracy is less democratic and less representative than mediate democracy . Well why is that? Well, if you have an election, not everyone turns up, and the factions that do turn up are gonna be the most motivated, or they’re gonna be the elites, or they’re gonna be the people who know how to manipulate the system, and they’re gonna organize other people. And so what’s really gonna happen is you’re gonna get narrow factions which are going to predominate. And the founders said so what do we do about this? Well, you have to have two things. You have to have a hybrid system. Yes, you have to have elections and direct participation. That’s essential to provide a check on government and a reality test. But you also need people who are there for the long term. You need experts and professionals, career politicians who will be around, who will be able to look at all this, and look around and say okay, who is not represented in that primary election? Like seven percent of the people turn up to vote in a lot of primary elections.
WARD: Seven?
RAUCH: Yeah. Seven, ten, that kind of number. What about the other 90 percent? The people we need to think about and engage when we make policy in the general election. And they said you’ve gotta have both. The right answer is not technocracy with the elite in charge. The right answer is not direct democracy, with just whoever votes in charge. The right answer is you need both screens. You need perpendicular filters. And if you have both, you have better representation than either alone. And the problem now is we’ve become all about strengthening direct participation and we’ve forgotten about the equal importance of mediation.
This theme of voter frustration came up again when I spoke with Elaine Kamarck, one of the most experienced and knowledgeable experts on the primary process in the Democratic Party.
KAMARCK: When politicians can’t get anything done, it breeds distrust. It breeds anger. You now have a situation where there’s no discipline in either party because simultaneously the House of Representatives gave up everything that allowed their leaders to be leaders. They gave up earmarks. They gave up money raising through the campaign finance laws they passed. Suddenly, first John Boehner and then Paul Ryan, they can’t enforce any discipline in a legislature. The weakening of parties … Most people think it’s a good thing. Parties are bad, blah blah blah. The weakening of parties has meant the weakening of government. People don’t like that, but very few people see the connection between political parties and government.
Kamarck, now a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, believes that the problem is not that political leaders and parties can’t or won’t put the voters first or follow through on promises, but rather that politicians are free — are in fact encouraged — to promise things they can’t deliver, because it allows them to say things that have mass appeal regardless of whether those pledges are based in reality and are achievable. If it turns out they’re not, politicians can just blame the easy scapegoat: the establishment.
KAMARCK: The way I explain it sometimes is, imagine Donald Trump going in to see Governor Lawrence, who had to deliver Pennsylvania’s delegates to Kennedy, and saying, “I’m going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it.” That is, to anybody who know anything about it, on the face of it such a stupid idea that if you sat down one on one in a smoke-filled room with a governor and said that, they would say, “What’s the matter with you?” If you persisted in it, and didn’t have some good way of doing it, or if you had some crazy idea like, “We’ll invade them if they don’t,” if you couldn’t convince somebody of that, they would leave. The candidate would leave, and the person controlling delegates would say, “That guy’s out to lunch.”
That’s important. The reason it’s important is because there’s going to be some subset of the public that was convinced that we need a wall. That wall will not be built, and it will not be paid for by Mexico. They’re going to not turn … Some of them will turn against Donald Trump, but others are going to say, “The system’s terrible. The system can’t do what needs to be done.” The whole thing was built on nonsense to begin with. You go from the deficiencies in the nomination system, to the myths that then dominate modern elections, to a government that then doesn’t deliver on those myths, and then a public that gets more and more unhappy about government, because they don’t do what we want them to do. That’s not the case when you have powerful intermediaries.
This creates a vicious negative feedback loop.
Kamarck is a DNC insider who sits on the rules and bylaws committee. She would like to see the Democrats take more control of their nomination process. But Kamarck has given up on super delegates, and has instead proposed a different way of reinserting the party’s expertise and authority.
KAMARCK: What I would like to see is a pre-primary process that consists of the superdelegates, and I’d even give up the superdelegates as a voting bloc, that basically functioned like a pre-primary convention in a couple of states, where in order to get on the Democratic ballot, you needed to get some percentage of these people, 15%, 20%, a small percentage, because what you want is you want this element of peer review back into the process. You can’t have people vote and then say … That’s why I say I would have made the same decision Priebus did. You can’t have people vote and then have a bunch of party leaders say, “You guys made the wrong choice. We’re going to reverse it.” That’s a recipe for disaster. You can have a process where you say, “These are the people we think could be president of the United States. They have the temperament, they have the experience, and they are a member of our party. These are people we know.” Democrats exercised this, mostly with Lyndon LaRouche, candidates for delegates. They’ve literally written to state secretaries of state and said, “Take these people off the rolls. These are for Lyndon LaRouche.” Other than Lyndon LaRouche, everybody’s been in the game. The Republicans have really borne the brunt of this lately, but there’s no reason Democrats couldn’t. The Republican primaries of 2012 have a handful of very serious players, like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, guys who no matter what you think of their politics are absolutely, by temperament and background, qualified to be president. Then you’ve got this guy who runs a pizza company. What the hell was he doing onstage? What you see is you see people running for president to be publicity, to get a spot on a talk show. Trump I think started out running to improve his brand.
Kamarck said that Massachusetts has a system like this in place for their governor.
KAMARCK: how it works in Massachusetts, where they have this, and they have a little bit in some other states. In the year before the primary, the state convention meets. State conventions consist of people who get elected at various levels.
WARD: At precinct, then county, then to the state convention.
KAMARCK: They’ll go to the state convention at some point. There’s 3,000 people there. A gubernatorial candidate, let’s take that, has to get 15% of that group in order to be placed on the Democratic primary ballot.
WARD: That limits the number of people first of all who can get on the ballot.
KAMARCK: It limits the number of people who can get on the ballot. If you don’t get 15%, you can go out and get petitions to get on the ballot, but that’s pretty hefty. Most people don’t do that. What it says is, “These are the people we think are ready to be governor. These are the people who have some base of support in the party, and therefore could actually govern as governor.” What we forget about parties is people who get elected without parties tend to be terrible at the business of government. The expectations are high, and then they’re dashed. Jesse Ventura, case in point. He was a one-term governor. He defied all the parties, got in, and he crashed and burned
I wanted to get some push back on these idea from some of the foremost experts on the topic who have a different view. So last September I went to an event (at The American Enterprise Institute) featuring three of them: Thomas Mann, EJ Dionne and Norm Ornstein. They were there to talk about their book called “Surviving Trump,” and during the Q&A I asked them about the issue of parties and machine politics.
JON WARD: You guys in the past have — or one of you, I think Tom, mentioned ‘The Party Decides.’ And a number of you — maybe all three of you — have disagreed vehemently with people like Jonathan Rauch who wrote a piece for The Atlantic about a year ago, saying we needed to bring back machine politics. The title of that was ‘How American Politics Went Insane.’ I haven’t heard a ton from you guys on this topic since the election, and I’m wondering if you’ve reassessed any of your disagreement over the case that we do need to bring back machine politics. In particular Elaine Kamarck wrote in the spring in favor of a process that would be a pre-primary process to vet the nominees. Thanks.
E.J. DIONNE: For anybody who is interested in this argument, Tom and I wrote a long paper about, what, two years ago, a year and a half ago, taking issue with Jonathan — by the way somebody I really admire, really smart, really creative mind. This was an argument between friends who had a real disagreement on something, and our skepticism about machine politics is a.) I don’t see any social basis for how you rebuild machines that look anything like the machines that existed before, b.) there’s an awful lot of romanticism about the political machine. The political machine at its worst was deeply corrupt. It didn’t deliver for people. It didn’t deliver good public services. We tend to focus on certain kinds of machines that had some success in at least paving the roads, picking up garbage, and by the way, Barack Obama — a long time before he became a national figure — borrowed some ideas out of Chicago, and he argued that the problem with the new machine is that we now have pinstriped patronage, and that at least the old machine might have delivered some jobs in the neighborhood. The new machine is based on fundraising where you deliver consulting contracts and legal contracts to … consulting companies, legal business to law firms. So it’s the machine without the jobs, which is about the worst combination I can think of. But secondly, we don’t locate the source of the problem in the same way Jonathan does. He seems to think that if you just — and I’m parroting him a little bit, and so forgive me Jonathan if I am — but there’s an argument here that if only you gave more control over campaign money to the central agents of the political parties, they would ensure that we got better candidates. We have plenty of centralized control and if you really want to fix things, we think you need old-fashioned reforms to limit the power of political money, not to just pump more money into the system through political parties. And Tom, I don’t want to leave it just to myself because Tom has very strong views on this too.
THOMAS MANN: E.J. summarized it really fine. The reality is, which Jonathan would never accept, is that party leaders in Congress control most of the so-called outside money in politics.
That was a pretty dismissive answer, so I asked Ornstein to come on the podcast to talk more in detail, and he kindly agreed. Ornstein doesn’t see eye to eye with Rauch and Kamarck on a lot of issues, but he surprised me when he said that the Democrats’ move to reduce their super delegates was a bad idea. He also criticized those who support opening primary votes up to anyone regardless of party affiliation.
NORM ORNSTEIN: Making some adjustments in a process that has taken the figures who have the most stake in and spend the most time dealing with the selection of candidates for parties, that’s a key, an important point. Here, I’m with them, for example, in believing that what the Bernie Sanders people are trying to do, which is to abolish the superdelegate role, for example, is a huge mistake. At the same time, an attempt to move to open primaries where the parties have less of a role, the partisans have less of a role in choosing their own nominees, and which invites a lot more mischief, that’s a mistake as well.
Ornstein also blamed Republicans for not doing more to lead their own party away from extremist views.
ORNSTEIN: have they lost control of their nominating process? Yeah. Some of that is not because of reforms. If you look at, just to pick an example, what the so-called young guns, Cantor, McCarthy, Ryan, did after Obama got elected, they went out around the country to fan the flames of Tea Party anger, populist anger, and fanning the flames of that populist anger meant that you got a lot of people coming in who wanted to nominate angry populist candidates. They were fine with that as long as they could win more seats and then win a majority. But they created a monster of their own.
Ornstein may have his differences with the realists, but I thought it was significant that he endorsed the general idea of strengthening party control of its primary process.
Something pretty interesting happened as I walked this path of exploration. I stumbled upon books and experts that were saying a lot of the same things on this subject, who were raising some very serious red flags.
Seth Masket is the chair of the political science department at the University of Denver, and he’s closely studied the impacts of reforms by those who — like Axelrod described himself — wanted to make the system more fair. But Masket’s research found that reforms that reduced the power of political parties did not make things more fair, but rather simply less democratic and less transparent.
“It’s notable that people have come to perceive polarization as a problem in need of an immediate solution, but many of the proposed solutions have struck me as short-sighted, uninformed by history, and unconcerned with the positive aspects of political parties or in the general principal of unintended consequences,” Masket wrote in his book “The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How They Weaken Democracy.”
One of Masket’s main points is that “most voters do not follow politics closely” and so their ability to hold politicians accountable is very limited, but that parties “make such accountability possible” because they “serve as a convenient cue for voters, allowing them to make informed decisions.” He also found that in those states that have non partisan state legislatures — where the parties have been eliminated — like Nebraska, it’s easier for politicians to stay in office, they are less accountable to voters, and it’s harder for activists and outsiders to get things done.
The most revelatory point he made in our podcast interview was that it wasn’t all that shocking that Trump beat Hillary Clinton, because of the way voters behave once the election is down to two candidates.
SETH MASKET: Once that person becomes the nominee, then you can just sort of coast on the partisanship of the population. As we saw in the election, basically 90% of Republicans will vote for their nominee, whoever it is. Ninety percent of Democrats will vote for their nominee, whoever it is.
JON WARD: Which is what makes these primaries so important.
MASKET: Yes, incredibly so. This is what makes parties screening and deciding whether someone really is up to the task of being their nominee incredibly important, because once that person has the nomination, particularly if it’s an open seat race for the presidency, they basically have a fifty-fifty shot at getting in.
WARD: You’re point though about how once you get the nomination of a party you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting the presidency is a really — you stated it very concisely and clearly and I think it just crystallized something that I’ve long thought, but not been able to articulate, which is that the real shock is not that Donald Trump won the presidency, it’s that he won the primary, because as you said, once he got to the general election as the nominee, because of reflexive partisanship, he had a fifty-fifty shot. The shot was that the party allowed him to become its nominee.
MASKET: Yes, I think that’s entirely the case. And I think that’s really what we should be looking at. There’s been a lot of discussion since the election about, ‘Well, how were our models so wrong?’ and ‘What’s wrong with polling?’ and ‘How did we get to a point where Donald Trump could even get like 46 percent of the vote?’ And in some ways I think that is secondary. We’ve seen the pattern throughout U.S. history, that even under terrible circumstances, people within a party will vote for their party’s nominee … I’m always sort of amused when I see people over the past year say, ‘Gee what if Donald Trump, what if’ — some people suggest he’s mentally ill — ‘maybe we should have some sort of a board that evaluates whether presidential candidates are mentally fit for this job, or whether they’re physically fit for this job, or whether they’re otherwise competent, and I’m just thinking, ‘We have those! They’re called political parties!’ And they’re supposed to take this job very seriously of actually screening people and deciding whether they’re fit for the job. The Republicans really kind of, they kind of lied down on this job.
Another book I became aware of as I worked on this podcast was “How Democracies Die,” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. They are Harvard government professors who have studied the ways in which democracy has been undercut in Latin America and in Europe, respectively. One of their key findings in years of research on this topic is that strong and effective political parties are essential to preserving democracy.
JON WARD: in chapter one, you say, “We like to believe that the fate of a government lies in the hands of its citizens. If the people hold democratic values, then democracy will be safe. This view is wrong. What matters more is whether political elites and especially parties serve as filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers.” Just in a broad sense, can you explain why you say that? Why are political parties the gatekeepers of democracy?
STEVEN LEVITSKY: Because we live in a representative democracy. When we use the term democracy, it’s shorthand for what political scientists call liberal democracy or representative democracy. The people don’t govern us on a daily basis. So people choose representatives who then govern us. That for one. Our main point, and this is not … This is a point of view that can be contested but we adopt a pretty unique centered approach to democracy. Our view, and I think there’s quite a bit of support for this, is that across our history and across the history of other countries, there have been … There are large sectors of society who are not fully committed to democracy. That may change over time. And for that we go back in US history throughout the 20th century, you can come up with four, five, six political figures who I would call demagogues who I think had dangerous authoritarian proclivities, who had a lot of public support, 30–35% public support. Not far from the level of support that Donald Trump has had over the last couple of years. Charles Coughlin who never entered politics but was wildly popular. Henry Ford, who was extraordinarily popular in the Midwest, toyed with the presidential bid in 1924 and ended up not running. Huey Long, McCartney, and Wallace …
WARD: Lindbergh also was somebody you mentioned.
LEVITSKY: Lindbergh as well. Lindbergh actually never actually toyed with politics. In Philip Roth novels, but yes, him too. So it’s not so much that the people are democratic or undemocratic. You can trace a fairly authoritarian sector of our electorate going way back. But the critical thing is whether our political parties filter those guys out. Obviously the views of the people matter but in a representative democracy, the representatives, the elected representatives, those who actually govern us, their views, their attitudes, and their behavior is more important than that of individual voters. Individual voters have an indirect relationship to our democracy. Our politicians, our parties, those who govern, have a direct relationship. They’re the ones who can kill it more quickly. Or save it.
Levitsky addressed the issue of super delegates directly, and what he thinks might result if the Democrats reduce their number. This is a little longer clip.
LEVITSKY: Dan and I actually think that super delegates are a pretty good idea.
WARD: Right, exactly, yes. Good point.
LEVITSKY: There’s no going back to the smoke filled room. There’s no going back to a world in which primaries are not binding and they don’t matter. People want the … Party members want the vote. But what super delegates do and the super delegates constitute about 15% of the delegates in the Democratic party convention. Republicans don’t have super delegates. They are a check on voters. And the idea is that party leaders actually have some insight into who is a good candidate. There’s that old political scientist at Berkeley where I studied, Nelson Polsby argued … compared it to a process of peer review. The argument was that politicians actually work with these guys. They see these guys at work. They’ve seen them work under pressure. They’ve seen their strengths, their weaknesses. They are in a better position than voters who have seen these guys on TV a few times to actually evaluate whether this person is fit for office and would be a good president. And that’s pretty important. So a super delegate system is not a return to the old system but having a set of party leaders involved in the candidate selection process. Whether it’s a third of them or 10% of them, whatever, is a way of essentially checking the decision making of the electorate.
That’s not very popular. If we move in any direction of the Democratic party, it’s almost certainly going to be to remove super delegates. So even after Trump was elected, even after Democrats were scandalized, scandalized, that Donald Trump could become president of the United States. Many of them are still pushing to remove super delegates rather than either keep them or even expand them. Had the Republicans had a system with super delegates, that might have led to a different nominee.
WARD: Absolutely it would have but what do you think are the implications for Democrats moving forward after they do … They’re definitely going to reduce the number of super delegates. I don’t know that they’re going to eliminate them. I’ve been to the Rules Committee meetings. I don’t think there’s enough support for eliminating them but they clearly feel constrained by public opinion even though I know many of the Rules Committee members don’t want to reduce the number of super delegates.
LEVITSKY: But they feel they have to.
WARD: They feel they have to, yeah. And so, what are the unforeseen consequences of that potentially?
LEVITSKY: The unforeseen consequences are that either increases the likelihood or increases the possibility that the Democrats get their own Trump.
WARD: Do you see anybody out there right now who could play that role or do you think that this could be somebody that we’re just not aware of at this point?
LEVITSKY: I would say the latter. With the election of Trump, there’s no question that there are now a much wider of pool of individuals, mostly either very wealthy people or celebrities, or both, who are now thinking to themselves, okay, well maybe I could. We’ve had outsider candidates before. We’ve had a handful of celebrities run before but them actually getting through the door sends a signal out to … And in fact, celebrities everywhere in the United States, that they too could be a candidate. I have no idea if Mark Zuckerberg or Opera Winfrey has ever thought seriously about running for president but it’s a more serious consideration today than it was five years ago. And I think that’s probably pretty problematic for our democracy. I don’t think we want celebrities governing us.
WARD: Yeah, I don’t either but why don’t we make the argument. Why not?
LEVITSKY: Why not? For one, celebrities are political amateurs. They lack experience in the democratic process. Americans tend to devalue this and even be somewhat ignorant of it. Our democracy, our system of checks and balances, is pretty complex. It’s not easy to get legislation through Congress. It’s not easy to build and sustain a governing coalition. It’s not easy to deal with the courts, with the media. It takes a fair amount of political experience and a fair amount of political skill. Very few people are just born with that. People point to Ronald Reagan who was an incredibly talented leader in many respects but he also gained political experience as governor and as a participant in the political starting in the early 1960s. So he had a couple of decades of political experience even though he started off as a celebrity before he raced for the presidency. I think we’re seeing firsthand in the Trump presidency, the downside, the costs of having an amateur in the White House. Just like we need experience in our engineers and our doctors and our lawyers, our business people, our politicians need to be experienced. They need to know what they’re doing.
WARD: Yeah, there’s a guy names Tom Nichols who wrote a book called The Death of Expertise which I think is a key insight into again the cultural attitudes that feed into this. Yeah, people … The whole idea of expertise has been undermined in many ways but I would say when you call a plumber out, you’re hoping that that guy has some experience.
LEVITSKY: Exactly, exactly. And there is this sort of populous current in the United States in both parties. It’s not just in the Republican party. It’s in both parties that somebody who’s just like me should be President. Or somebody who is outside the political establishment and who is just a common citizen ought to be governing us. I would say nothing could be further from the truth.
WARD: Right.
LEVITSKY: Governing is a complicated thing.
And so here’s where we’ve ended up. The preponderance of the evidence and the weight of argument seems to point in the direction of empowering parties.
At the same time I want to continue to hear the best counter arguments.
I didn’t set out to say I definitely have the answers, and still don’t feel like I do. But one thing I’m certain of is that this topic, this way of thinking, needs to gain far more prevalence than it has now.
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My thinking about this podcast is that now — with a bit of table-setting now done — we can have more guests on who are involved in politics day to day, and dig in to some of these subjects, while also talking about current political events. This episode, I hope, will serve as a way to get people up to speed, and if they want more they can go back and listen to the episodes in full.
I also plan to keep the book segment going, called “What I’m Reading,” and am going to add a third track that will focus on the institution of journalism.
Thanks to all of you who have listened so far. If you like what you’ve heard, spread the word. Have these conversations with your own friends and circle of influence. I’d love feedback as well about what you think is right, wrong or somewhere in between. And your reviews on iTunes and other podcast platforms will help The Long Game be heard by more people as well.
Until next episode, I’m Jon Ward. Thanks for listening.
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My dispatches from the Republican National Convention:
- Mike Lee predicts backlash after RNC smothers delegate rebellion
- In Cleveland, a dazed GOP marches toward a Trump nomination
- Chaos on the Convention Floor
- The Cleveland convention is ratifying the GOP’s loss of party power
Here is the first episode of The Long Game, which uses the convention as its jumping off point.
Audio of David Axelrod full interview with Chris Wallace, from January 12, 2017, is here, and transcript is here.
Here is the link to the July 14, 2016 episode of Slate’s Political Gabfest, with David Plotz, Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson.
Here are the links to the individual episodes of Long Game interviews, which are highlighted in this episode:
Video of the event at the American Enterprise Institute, with EJ Dionne, Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann, is here.
The paper by Jonathan Rauch and Ben Wittes from May 2017: “More professionalism, less populism: How voting makes us stupid, and what to do about it.”
Rauch & Wittes were responding in part to this paper from June 2015, by Mann and Dionne: “The futility of nostalgia and the romanticism of the new political realists.”
And here’s Elaine Kamarck’s paper from April 2017: “Re-inserting peer review in the American presidential nomination process.”
