Why have both parties failed us?
A tale of activists and demagogues
If you’re trying to find a way to follow all the goings-on in the new Congress and administration, I have a suggestion. Check out Gabe Fleisher’s Wake Up to Politics substack — he gives you readable, full coverage without bias. And he finds great hooks that make it interesting.
… on to the Mugwump
The idea of democracy contains a curious theoretical paradox: what if the electorate freely chooses a demagogue who has no interest in democratic processes?
Of course our system was set up to prevent exactly that outcome. Presidents were not elected directly by the people, and the three branches of government with overlapping powers checking each other would rein in the worst impulses of the excessively ambitious. Presidents who went rogue would be checked by Congress, especially the Senate which was intentionally not at all democratic in the original arrangement, and/or by the courts (no majoritarianism there either).
Political parties have a role, too!
A further check developed in the early years of the republic with the advent of the political party system. Our parties, Democrats nearly from the beginning and then Republicans starting in the 1850s, had staying power. As organizations they had the long view, which an individual politician striving for power may not.
Among the roles the parties had — in fact their most important role — was screening candidates for office. A demagogue interested principally in the accretion of power at the expense of democracy? Don’t nominate him.
Brenda Wineapple in The Impeachers argued that we have had a president who seemed especially prone to demagogic, anti-democratic impulses: Andrew Johnson. But he was never nominated for the office, only serving out Lincoln’s assassination-shortened term. Of course he was nominated by the Republican party for vice president in 1864, but, alas, American parties have always had a blind spot when it comes to taking seriously the possibility that the presidential candidate’s life could come to an untimely end.
The peculiar institution of primaries
Today it’s different. The electorate through primaries determines nominees for offices up and down the ticket, including for president. We’re nearly unique in this way; primaries are extremely rare outside the U.S., mostly relegated to fringe parties in a few countries. Instead, some parties allow some rank and file participation, usually limited, in the selection of candidates for office. For the most part it’s the organizational party that retains control.
Which was the way it was in the U.S. into the 20th century. Primaries were first put in place in the early 1900s in states where the Progressive Movement was influential. Gradually over the next several decades more and more state parties used them, but at the presidential level most states’ processes remained under the control of party leaders in “smoke-filled rooms” populated by governors, union bosses, business leaders, mayors, county officials, etc.
As late as 1968 there were only 15 presidential primaries, and even some of those were so-called “beauty contests” that weren’t connected to the selection of delegates who actually decided the nominee. Bottom line: the party as an organization retained the ability to screen candidates for the highest office.1
Democrats nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey that year — he’d competed in exactly zero of those 15 primaries. His waffling on Vietnam led to a convention gathering for which the word “tumultuous” could have been invented. There were riots outside the hall featuring heavy-handed tactics by the police — all televised in living color, with tear gas literally wafting into the hotels where the candidates were staying. Unrest wasn’t limited to the streets, either, as the convention floor itself saw strong arm tactics by law enforcement.
The party was in obvious disarray. Something had to be done.
The commission solution
Democrats moved rapidly. A commission was formed in 1969 to make recommendations for reform. It was referred to as the McGovern-Fraser Commission after the two men who led the effort: Senator George McGovern of South Dakota and Congressman Donald Fraser of Minnesota.
Given the calamity of the ’68 convention and subsequent defeat of Humphrey in November that year, the focus for reform was on the presidential nomination process. The members of the commission recommended that the process for selecting delegates to the next convention be opened up to those in the rank and file who normally were not directly involved. The recommendations were adopted.
The expectation was that most state parties, in order to abide by the new rules, would continue to hold caucuses and conventions but that now these meetings would be publicized and open instead of fully controlled by political professionals. And many states took that route. But more went with primaries that were also consistent with the new open-up-the-party rules. In the end, heading into the 1972 campaign, 29 states scheduled primaries to select delegates, the rest would use a caucus-convention system that was accessible to the public.
McGovern-Fraser’s impact
It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of the changes. With McGovern-Fraser the party chose a system that took ultimate control of presidential nominations out of the smoke-filled room, away from party leaders.
Interestingly the Alabama demagogue, Governor George Wallace, saw an opportunity, returning to the party fold (he’d run as a third-party candidate in ‘68 winning five states in the deep south) to compete in the 1972 primaries. He proceeded to sweep through southern state primaries and even won Maryland and Michigan shortly after an assassination attempt left him unable to campaign further. In the end, despite being forced to leave the race in midstream, he received about as many primary votes as his two main competitors — McGovern and Humphrey.
Yes, indeed, an extreme social conservative taking a hard line on race and crime had legions of followers among the Democratic rank and file. He would have had great influence over the presidential ticket — maybe even as its standard-bearer — had he not been shot. To put it plainly, the new processes made it so party leaders couldn’t prevent a race-baiting demagogue from competing.
In the end, McGovern, the left-wing candidate, beat back Humphrey, the labor-backed establishment choice, largely on the strength of success in the caucus-convention states as his dedicated anti-war supporters enthusiastically took advantage of the newly-opened processes.
In retrospect we can see that the McGovern wing of the party comprised of liberal activists had succeeded in a peaceful overthrow, wrestling control from the so-called “party regulars.” Labor would never have the same dominant level of influence in the party, and southern white support would nearly evaporate. Instead, Democrats would increasingly be the party of activists among the better educated who were more focused on social issues than the bread-and-butter concerns of the working class.
Some years later McGovern himself drolly observed, “I opened the doors of the Democratic party and 20 million people walked out.” A perfect summary of what happened.
We can glean two key lessons from McGovern-Fraser:
Open processes are especially susceptible to activist influence.
Open nomination processes can attract demagogues.
Let’s take each of these in turn.
Activists and the parties I: The Democrats
Politics 101 tells us that parties form to win elections in order to gain power and determine policy. The best way to do that in a system dominated by two parties is to bring together a large, diverse coalition that can be sustained over time.
Issue-based litmus tests are not in a party’s interest, as they tend to preclude the development of a large enough coalition to secure consistent wins. A properly functioning party tamps down the influence of activist ideologues who try to impose such a test. The best way to do that? Control nominations for office.
What did McGovern-Fraser do? Among other things it enabled activists to infiltrate the process and, in the right circumstances, take over and nominate one of their own. As for the Democrats, the takeover by McGovern-aligned liberal activists took the party away from its roots … as it turned out, forever.
And in time the same thing happened on the GOP side.
Activists and the parties II: The Republicans
In Democratic-controlled states laws that put in place primary elections for president applied to both parties. While Republicans were free to use them merely as beauty contests unconnected to delegate selection, the zeitgeist seemed to dictate otherwise. The Republican process became open to activist influence within a few years, exploited in particular by the pro-life “moral majority” social conservative movement that was blossoming at the time. The GOP had been the mirror image of Democrats — dominated by business instead of labor. But that was to be no more.
Did the new conservative activists apply a litmus test? Before you can say “Kennebunkport” George H.W. Bush switched positions on abortion so he would be viable as Reagan’s 1980 running mate. Many years later it wasn’t an accident that pro-choice Donald Trump became pro-life Donald Trump before he made the legendary trip down the escalator at the Trump Tower in 2015.
And then there’s the demagogues
The other problem with the organizational party relinquishing control over presidential nominations is opening up the possibility of a demagogue securing enough delegates to win the nomination.
This space wouldn’t be the first to cite the striking similarities between Trump and the Democrats’ George Wallace (see here and here) who, as noted above, was competitive for the Democratic nomination in 1972 until he was nearly killed by an assassin’s bullet.
The Republican establishment was almost to a person opposed to Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 race. As we all know, it didn’t matter. There were policy differences of course, although Trump did share many of the policy priorities of the establishment. The opposition to him was about temperament. He was regarded as a danger to the party and the republic by many if not most federal office-holding Republicans at the time. The list is very long, but included J.D. Vance, Lindsay Graham, and Ted Cruz.
Of course the rank and file preferred Trump. In a primary process that’s what’s determinant.
The policy priorities that Trump and the establishment shared enabled an uneasy peace to be established within the party once Trump’s nomination was official. Christian conservatives got their pledges on abortion, business conservatives liked his push for deregulation and tax cuts, and populists got their immigration hard line. Differences on trade and foreign policy were pushed aside for the time being — important issues but, after all, the thinking was he wasn’t going to win anyway so the party could put things back together after Hillary Clinton won the election.
So here we are, eight years later, with a party now fully in the grasp of a president the likes of which, some would argue, the country hasn’t seen since the late 1860s. This time with the full backing of a party. It’s an interesting experiment.
Coming full circle — McGovern-Fraser laid the groundwork
It’s saying a lot to lay the failings of both parties at the feet of the McGovern-Fraser Commission. But, to put it bluntly, there are consequences when a political party gives up control of nominations. Activists are invited in; activists who are decidedly less interested in the broad coalition politics favored by political professionals — coalition politics that gives a party a chance at attaining a stable governing majority.
And as for the paradox of democratic political theory referenced at the top of this post — it becomes a real possibility. We’ll see how it goes.
Republicans did have a rude awakening in 1964 — the exception that proves the rule in the party politics of that era — when Barry Goldwater’s people overran the poorly organized GOP state parties in the South, which enabled him to secure a closely-contested nomination against the wishes of the party establishment. The party went back to situation-normal in ‘68 nominating former Vice President Nixon.