The answer is complex. It would be nice if it were simple. It’s not.
Writer Ezra Klien attempts a narrative in his book Why We’re Polarized, but Stephen Metcalf’s rebuttal in the New Yorker blasts Klien’s explanation as over-simplistic.
Like the complexity of the fractal image below, the issues that have led to the polarization of the US voters have multiple variables and potential chaotic interactions.
A complex fractal image. Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
I wish I could articulate a clear list and recommend remedies for each item, but my grasp of the issues is limited. However, I am comfortable with delineating a brief list.
Below is Part 1 of this list.
1. Presidential primaries and thus party conventions are too democratic.
This headline may seem odd. Why would too much democracy be a problem? We are America, right? We are the land of the free, the home of the brave, and the epicenter of democracy!
Sort of.
We must recall that the Founders led by James Madison were careful not to inject too much democracy into the US Constitution with a preference for republican forms of governing over pure democratic forms. Time after time, when the Founders had a choice between more democracy or more republicanism, they leaned for more republic.
The reason is that Madison’s study of large democracies led him to the conclusion that they failed because demagogues could gain control. The change in presidential primaries after the Democrat’s 1968 convention opened the door for populists and demagogues.
Vox does a great job of laying out what happened after 1968 and how the party primaries and thus the conventions changed. Lawrence Lessig in his book America, Compromised also outlines this change in the context of “Tweedism.”
Boss Tweed was a 19th-century political boss of New York’s Tammany Hall. He was infamous for stating his vision of democracy, “I don’t care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.”
William Magear “Boss” Tweed (1870). Public Domain.
Tweedism was not very democratic. It wasn’t very republican either, but under Tweedism, demagogues had little chance of gaining the reigns of American federalism. With time, the parties faded out the corruption of Tweedism into more democratic republic party selections of presidential candidates, culminating in the 1968 cycle.
The change in 1968 injected too much democracy and Jimmy Carter was the first to exploit this change. He was a little-known, one-term southern governor, who took advantage of the new plurality voting in the primary system. “Jimmy, Who?” Carter rapidly collected early wins in the Democratic primary process and escalated from a no-name to the front runner.
Since then, Carter and other presidential candidates–in both the Democrat and Republican parties–have won pluralities in early primaries to claw their way to be the front-runner. They have not received majorities. The long primary process usually culminates in a majority, but the individual state primaries require only small pluralities, sometimes much less than a majority.
As a result, extreme populist candidates, who polarize a party, can capture early wins. Party hardliners tend to be more motivated to go to the polls for their candidates. They are not necessarily more representative of the whole party’s interests but are more likely to vote in the primary.
Less polarizing and less populist candidates tend to have less motivated voters in party primaries. Thus, when we see a broad field of primary candidates, the loudest voice in the room tends to win rather than the candidate most representative of the party.
The loudest voice in the room does not equate to the most representative of the people in the room. Image by Lee Murry from Pixabay
The primary system as it exists today prefers populist demagogues over candidates that have broad party support. However, once a party selects a candidate, the entire party tends to rally around the “winning” candidate, which only a plurality and not a majority prefers.
This one change for a more democratic process in the primaries has driven the presidential candidates in the general election further and further apart ideologically.
That’s all for this post. We’ll next look at the Gingrich Revolution in 1994. Stay tuned for the next post.