In short, I am heartbroken that Elizabeth Warren won\u2019t be my party\u2019s nominee\u2014not so much because she is so wonderful, but because of what it says about us. But what do we do about that? How should we respond? The answer, I think, doesn\u2019t have anything to do with whether we choose Senator Sanders or Vice-President Biden as the standard-bearer for the general election. It has to do with the way we think about the Presidency, and about democracy.\r\n
\u2026\r\n
It\u2019s a mistake to think of the point of the primary system being to ascertain who is the best possible person to hold the job of President of the United States.\r\n
First of all, that person doesn\u2019t exist\u2014different people want different things from the President, and that will not and should not change. Nobody will be the perfect President for everyone, and the closest thing to that is a dictator who can prevent any criticism.\r\n
It\u2019s also a mistake to think of the point of the primary system being to ascertain who is the best possible person to hold the job of the Party\u2019s nominee for President of the United States.\r\n
That\u2019s trickier\u2014I personally don\u2019t believe that it\u2019s possible to know in advance which candidate would maximize the chances for victory in the general election. Even if it were possible, there are other things to consider, such as the long-term health of the Party, the short-term downballot effects of the nominee, and of course the candidate\u2019s potential in the actual job of President. If Candidate A has a 73% chance of victory but inferior governing skills and Candidate B has a 71% chance of victory and superior governing skills, I will choose Candidate B\u2014but replace those numbers with 49% and 47% and I will choose Candidate A. It\u2019s much worse, of course, because those numbers are guesses, but even if it were possible to make really good confident guesses, it would still be more complicated than picking the highest probability.\r\n
So what is the point of the primary system?\r\n
I think the point is to come up with a bunch of candidates who are acceptable enough to wide groups of people, likely enough to win the general election, and then bind those candidates as tightly as possible to the future of the Party (as argued about during the primary process). To attempt to ensure that whoever the eventual nominee is, if elected they will largely do those things that the Party wants them to do, and that when new situations come up that require new actions that couldn\u2019t be committed to in advance, those actions will be taken in consultation with other people in the Party and on the principles that the Party has outlined\u2014the Party being the coalition of people and organizations that want to work together toward that future and on those principles. And then to choose one of those acceptable-enough candidates, because in the end there has to be one name on the ballot.\r\n
\u2026\r\n
The question that this goes back to, of course, is: what is the point of democracy? Why not let the philosopher-kings rule? Surely it would be more efficient to train hereditary monarchs to govern capably than to keep finding, electing and replacing new office-holders all the time?\r\n
My answer: the point of democracy is to create a people capable of participatory self-government, and committed to equality and liberty. This will always be aspirational\u2014it can\u2019t be done once and then relied on, but in every generation we need to create a new generation that is capable of governing themselves, and is committed to equality and liberty. Maybe even more capable and more committed than the old generation! We can hope. But the point is the people<\/i>, not the government. The choosing, not the chosen. Always.\r\n
The real aspiration, though, isn\u2019t just the machinery of government, legislators and bureaucrats, executives and agency heads. The real aspiration is self-government, equality and liberty in our actual lives, in our workplaces and schools and homes, in the grand public works and the small private exchanges, in our characters, in ourselves. To be capable of self-government (not alone, but together) in everything.\r\n
We will never be there, but neither can we give up. The response to an electorate that is ignorant, brutal and indifferent is not the easy misanthropy of clean hands, but the long struggle against feudalism, fascism and fanaticism and for an electorate that is less ignorant, less brutal, less indifferent.\r\n
Presidents don\u2019t lead that struggle, unless first they are led to it.\r\n
\u2026\r\n
It\u2019s difficult to avoid thinking of the primary system as a search for a Savior. Certainly, the candidates present themselves as potential saviors, and whoever eventually holds the office of President has as much power as anyone in the whole world to do good or ill. It matters who has that power, and it matters what they do with it. And in some sense, it\u2019s a relief to think of government as happening at the Presidential level\u2014after all, nobody can blame me<\/i> for the current state of things; I didn\u2019t vote for him\u2014or my guy won and everything\u2019s fine\u2014but that\u2019s pretty much the opposite of self-government. Which makes it the opposite of democracy, really. Democracy isn\u2019t about just handing the power to the right person; it\u2019s about using the power ourselves.\r\n
We need a President; the framers eventually and reluctantly concluded that we need a single figure to be at the head of the table. They didn\u2019t give him a title, or a job description, or very many responsibilities or resources. Over time, we\u2019ve let the Congress\u2014we\u2019ve let ourselves\u2014give the President more and more power, and put more and more faith in the hope of finding the right President to yield it. If that\u2019s what we want, then of course it\u2019s frustrating to think of the system as a road to good enough<\/i>. But we don\u2019t have to think about it that way.\r\n
We could be thinking about what we want to do as a people<\/i> (as a Party, as a region, as an agglomeration of tribes and loyalties, as part of humanity and a global ecosystem) and think about what sort of President can be pushed in that direction, whether headed that way already or not. We could be thinking about which candidates we want to complain to, or complain about; which ones we feel better about constantly pressuring throughout their term in office. If leadership is mostly, as the saying goes, figuring out which way the parade is going and jumping out in front of it, we could be worrying more about the parade route and less about the Grand Marshall. And then we might find that a good enough<\/i> President is exactly what we need.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger says things that have been said before, even here in this Tohu Bohu, but that are worth repeating (I hope).","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20212"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20214,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20212\/revisions\/20214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}