David Frum, former speech writer for George W. Bush, wonders aloud: When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality? The German weekly Der Spiegel carries this article in its English-language edition: A Club of Liars, Demagogues and Ignoramuses. Even if this is rhetorical overkill, the Republican Party’s range of would-be presidential nominees is rather less than impressive. Those who were skeptical of Obama’s deliberate cultivation of messianic expectations in 2008 hoped he would face a credible opponent in 2012. But thus far the GOP has yet to deliver and shows no signs of doing so any time soon.
It is long past time to repeal the internal party reforms of the early 1970s. It used to be said that any boy could become president. Even if we update the gender reference, we should not be happy with such a possibility. Do we really want just anyone to be the CEO of earth’s remaining superpower? I sure don’t. When I was a child, delegates to a party’s convention actually chose its candidate for president. Party leaders in state, federal, and local politics did their best to put forward a candidate they believed was qualified for the position and had a good chance to beat his opponent. Yes, there were smoke-filled rooms. Yes, there was wheeling and dealing. Yes, the occasional Warren G. Harding would somehow make it past the filtering process. Nevertheless, obvious incompetents were generally weeded out before they got too far.
That all changed four decades ago when Democrats and Republicans sought to more thoroughly democratize their candidate-selection process through a series of binding primary elections and state caucuses. Now by convention time everyone knows who the party’s candidate will be. No genuine choices have to be made. If the voters have chosen a weak candidate, the party convention is nevertheless obligated to give him or her its backing. Not to do so would be perceived as undemocratic.
Philosopher Yves R. Simon observed that a democratic constitution needs non-democratic elements if it is to survive and flourish. There is truth in the ancient Greek and Roman preference for the classical mixed constitution, combining the best elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy into a stable and enduring form of government. That the current crop of Republican candidates is being taken seriously as presidential contenders is a sign that things have got out of hand. It may be time to make the candidate-selection process within the parties a little less democratic for the sake of preserving the competitive character of electoral politics in the United States. It may be too late for 2012, but let’s shoot for 2016.
David Koyzis teaches politics at Redeemer University College and is the author of Political Visions and Illusions. He has recently completed a book manuscript on authority, office, and the image of God.
December 5th, 2011 | 1:35 pm
I agree with the prescription for a return to smoke-filled rooms. But I disagree with the slur on Harding, a very good president who got us out of a deep recession. See this: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/time-another-harding_595933.html
December 5th, 2011 | 3:51 pm
Delighted to see that FT is including parodies on its blogsite. This one is wonderfully droll.
Look, the answer to our current faux messiah president isn’t another messianic pretender from the opposite party. So stop wishing for one. Mortal humans should be able to execute the office of president, and one of the guys on offer will this year will do. I already have a messiah, thank you very much, and I’m not looking for one in the Oval Office.
December 5th, 2011 | 10:32 pm
ChrisZ, you’re missing the point. I don’t want to see a Republican messiah. I would just like to see a qualified candidate representing each party, including the Republicans. The current “reformed” selection process is not giving us this.
December 6th, 2011 | 2:30 am
I would rather have Anyone become President than most of the Someones we actually get.
December 6th, 2011 | 10:37 am
David: Thanks for replying. But what makes you believe the “back-room boys” would be any better at making a more suitable choice? These “expert insiders” are the same people who have given this country the debacles of the past decade. Indeed, I’d say that one of the lessons of this period is that the people who were charged with making educated, dispassionate judgments about what’s best for our country turned out to be merely self-seeking, and in fact lacked the very knowledge they claimed to have. This is true not only in politics and finance, but also to a surprising extent in the sciences. Bill Buckley’s insight about the superiority of an essentially random selection process over the prescriptions of some anointed class has greater force in such circumstances.
Put more pithily, maybe you’re not looking for a messiah, but perhaps you’ve imputed “messianic” properties to the workings of the parties. I’m confident that they, too, would prove fallible.
December 6th, 2011 | 11:33 am
ut what makes you believe the “back-room boys” would be any better at making a more suitable choice? These “expert insiders” are the same people who have given this country the debacles of the past decade.
I am inclined to think the problem is too little democracy, rather than too much.
All our leaders come from the same bubble – a society that starts with The Best Schools (waiting lists to get into kindergarten) and routes through the Ivy League. Such schools teach very different things than what most citizens are taught – and looking out for one’s social class ranks is more important than any sense of shared commitment to “America”.
This can be said even more strongly: it appears that prep schools teach their students to look down on Americans; there is no sense of shared identity but rather exactly the opposite.
Our current “elites” are not concerned about what is best for America.
December 6th, 2011 | 1:46 pm
What’s interesting to me is that this critique of the uniformity of a “ruling class” in America found its classic expression more than half a century ago, in The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills. At the time, Mills was a assessing that class from the Left. Today’s critique comes from the Right–and the outlines of the class are different, but the idea of its homogeniety of outlook remains the same. Amazing how those changes–in both the constitution of the “elite” and the perspective of its critics–came about.
December 6th, 2011 | 2:27 pm
As the good book says, “By their fruits shall ye know them.” The current primary process has been in place since 1972. Discounting Nixon, who was elected under the previous system, and Ford, who was unelected under any system, the current process has given us one good president, Reagan, two mediocre presidents, Bush I and Clinton, and three utter disasters, Carter, Bush II, and Obama. Is the previous system’s record worse than that?
December 6th, 2011 | 6:21 pm
I agree with Blake that we need more democracy, not less.
Specifically, we need to pick our electoral college by lot, like juries.
Pick our Congressmen directly by lot too.
December 7th, 2011 | 12:48 pm
Fred: The primary system is what allowed a candidate like Reagan to gain ascendancy–I’d say more significantly in 1976, when against all expectation he proved a real challenge to Pres. Ford. Yet even with that showing, it’s a toss-up whether he’d have been the nominee in 1980, had it been up to the brahmins of that era’s (as yet un-Reaganized) Republican party.
Whatever you think of Bush I and II, Clinton, and Obama, it’s not hard to imagine any of them getting to their final destination through anointment rather than an electoral process.
That leaves Carter–and here I admit I’d be tempted to get rid of more than just the primary system to erase him from the national memory!
December 10th, 2011 | 10:01 am
Actually, the author does make some valid points. If the proverbial “smoke-filled room” represented one extreme, the pendulum has certainly swung just as far to the other extreme. It’s not just the out-of-control primary system. It’s that the system has gotten SO out of control that national campaigns are now two years long; caucuses and primaries are beginning 10 months before Election Day; Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have a radically disproportionate role in determining nominees.
We are supposed to be living in a republic — not a democracy — a point which seems to have gradually been lost over the last 100 years or so. The national role that the legislatures of the several states was supposed to play has been lost. The balance between the voice of the average citizen (the House of Representatives) and the voice of the state (the Senate) is gone.
Re-thinking the caucus and primary system is a start. But we’ve got a long way to go.
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