Ok, so hundreds of people running for office in elections being held in the U.S. in a few days are guaranteeing that if they win, they already know which party's candidates will certainly prevail in future elections. And a lot of those people are candidates for secretary of state, which means they'll be in charge of those future elections. That should seem like a pretty dangerous situation to anybody who thinks elections should be fair.
And that is the kind of thing that has caused me to hide under my bed with my laptop--not just for the Halloween season, but for the foreseeable future.
Lots of pundits talk about how polarized the country is now, but sometimes they probably mean to say "partisan" rather than "polarized." The difference is that, while two groups who absolutely despise one another are certainly hyperpartisan, that alone wouldn't make them polarized. Polarization requires that the opinions on issues of a person or group have moved out toward "the polar regions." Consider the Crips and the Bloods. They've generally been extremely partisan, but they're not polarized: in fact their views may be in accord on almost everything except who are the best people to hate/fight. It's pretty clear, though, that the Dems and Repubs aren't just engaging in that sort of Hatfield/McCoy imitation. They really have been moving farther and farther apart in addition to hating each other more and more each day. That's not good--especially when one of the parties has become enamored with autocrats like Viktor Orban and doesn't seem to care much about maintaining democratic norms in the U.S.
This may explain why I'm starting to bring several seasons worth of provisions under my bed with me and the laptop. (I know: everything down here is going to get extremely dirty. But...what can you do? If it seems weird to people who stop by, I'm thinking of blaming my condition on a particularly acute ability to perceive poltergeists. Not sure, but I may have picked up this power from Neil of The Young Ones.)
Anyhow, my newest Hornbook review, of Sam Rosenfeld's The Polarizers, a detailed history of how things in the U.S. got this way, is now up here. Rosenfeld mostly blames an old (1950) American Political Science Association study for for our current, perilous situation. As he tells it, back in Eisenhower's day, the parties really were more like sororities without dues, clubs in which stated goals are mostly just window-dressing. But the APSA study made the case that there should instead be crystal clear distinctions between the policies that each group would like to see enacted. Such a change would allow the electorate to know what every candidate a party puts forward must stand for and so have reasonable expectations of what to expect if the people they vote for win. Since on this view there shouldn't be a mix of left- and right-wingers in each party, we can infer that bipartisanship wasn't seen as a very important objective.
Well, except for the fact that the Republicans now won't deign to provide any platform at all (Whatever Trump happens to want at any moment is just fine!) we now seem to have precisely the condition the APSA committee called for. The two major parties in the U.S. have completely sorted: there are no more Dixiecrats or Republican Ripon Society members to be found either hither or yon. There's very little incentive for legislatures to do much besides making the other party look evil, stupid, and incompetent. In other words, things are extremely bad in the U.S.
Would a different package of electoral rules be better for the country? Absolutely! With or without perfect sorting, every democracy requires both majority rule and (proportional) minority representation; we have neither of those now. Maybe we also need more parties, since, as my earlier entry on that subject indicates, it seems that we can't do very well without them. Furthermore, as Lee Drutman argues in his Doom Loop book, two seems not to be a particularly magic number. Rosenfeld doesn't get into the theoretical stuff himself, but according to what used to be called "Duverger's Law," if we had multi-winner elections, we'd probably have more parties. (I want to point out, though, that if, like federalism in big countries, parties are needed, they will produce some of the same problems that subsidiary districts make for majoritarian democracies. Unalterable ethnic connections and other sorts of closely held identifications inevitably also generate those issues. I discussed that kettle of complicating but probably ineliminable fish here.)
Whatever may be done with parties, the main thing, as I press over and over in my book, is that we need a new and different form of democratic populism: a carefully distilled variety. And, of course, we need a renewed affection here for the rule of law. Real democracy requires a much more sensible constitution than we now have, one that is both more democratic, and also less focused on what may NOT be done. I'm sorry to say that getting involved in a "Save our democracy" movement, as if we actually ever had a decent system here, simply isn't going to cut it. There's never been anything closely resembling authentic democracy in the U.S. And what has perhaps been justly describable for a couple of centuries as 'someplace south of mediocre' (except in it's treatment of rich white males) has now descended to the subterranean level of 'absolutely awful' for nearly everybody.
To me, this is all not just exasperating: it's horrifying (which is why I just pulled a hot plate under here with me and am now frantically searching for another outlet). So let me close by saying that while I wish you all a safe holiday season and wonderful new year, I don't really believe that those lovely things are in the cards. 😣
Nevertheless, to show that I can be supremely generous in spite of my intense fear and loathing, here's an old tape loop piece of mine you can use to scare trick-or-treaters while I'm down here tending my bedpan and trying not to inhale dust bunnies. Or you can use it for personal psychedelic purposes. I don't care. The point is, even if Rowman & Littlefield continues to refuse to reduce the price of my book much below 40 bucks, you won't be able to say I never gave you anything for free.
