A year ago I read an article in the Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch celebrating that Joe Biden being forced out of the Democratic nomination represented the reassertion of the principle that “nominations belong to parties, not to candidates”. Rauch argued that “for most of U.S. history…Americans saw the party, not the individual candidate or the particular office, as the locus of political life”, nurturing and directing politicians and ultimately controlling who ran for office on their ticket, from President all the way down to dog catcher, from the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms”.
Contrary to popular belief, the decision-makers did not and could not override or ignore public opinion; they wanted to win, after all. What they could and did do was blend public opinion with other considerations, such as who could unify the party, govern after the election, and advance the party’s interests…And here’s something else they did: choose qualified candidates…Although the machines of yore could be insular and corrupt – traits no one wants to go back to – they reliably screened out circus acts, incompetents, rogues, and sociopaths.
By 2016, however, in a process started when the Democrats put more weight on the primary process following the contentious 1968 nomination fight – which initially resulted in George McGovern’s landslide loss in 1972, leading to party insiders clawing back influence in the “invisible primary” – “the public saw the parties as vehicles for candidates at best, and as useless and corrupt intermediaries at worst”. In Rauch’s telling, the revelation in the hacked DNC e-mails of the party putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders would, in times past, have gotten a shrug: “Of course the Democratic Party favors the candidate who is actually a Democrat. That’s why it exists!” While the Republican Party has effectively become a cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump, the Democrats continue to exert influence over the nomination, lining up behind Biden in 2020 and forcing him off the ticket in ’24, showing that “both man and party” can “put the institution ahead of the person. That is how American politics is supposed to work.”
Rauch argues that the weakening of the role of party professionals has fueled our present-day dysfunction, creating bitter divisions between factions that put furthering their ideology ahead of the national interest. Americans may “have lost their memory of parties that behave like institutions, not just platforms or brands”, but the demonstration that “a political party can act independently and wisely to serve the national interest at a crucial juncture” can point the way forward. Our democracy, in Rauch’s telling, worked because party bosses had the perspective to ignore the screeching of ideologues and choose the candidate that could best appeal to the broadest cross-section of the electorate, that could actually win an election.
You know, like when they stopped Sanders from dooming the party to certain defeat and chose Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination, as the best choice to win the election, as opposed to the Republicans who fell victim to the Trump insurgency that would surely doom them in November.
Last week state representative Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York, defeating former state governor Andrew Cuomo by a fairly decisive margin. For many observers, this was the biggest triumph for the progressive movement since the start of its current rise with Sanders’ 2016 run. New York, like most American cities, is known for its relatively left-wing politics, but it has a history of electing moderate and even Republican mayors, including Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in relatively recent memory. Now Mamdani should be the favorite to become mayor of America’s largest city, taking on a mantle of responsibility significantly greater than that borne by the holders of the relatively safe House seats that have heretofore represented progressives’ biggest successes.
Both candidates were deeply controversial. Despite becoming a semi-celebrity during the pandemic, in 2021 Cuomo resigned from the governorship in disgrace following accusations of sexual harassment, also being tailed by numerous scandals surrounding his actual governance of the state. Meanwhile, Mamdani, who would be New York’s first Muslim mayor, is controversial not only for his policies, but for his support of Palestinians in their struggle for recognition and rights in the shadow of Israel, including an interview earlier in the month where he defended the phrase “globalize the intifada” as being a call for human rights for Palestinians rather than for violence or antisemitism. For many more centrist New Yorkers, Mamdani is unacceptable enough to lead them to look for another option, with hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman proposing a write-in candidate and Cuomo muscling his way back into the general election – raising the prospect of two or more different candidates desperately trying to win over enough centrists to stop Mamdani. (Incumbent Eric Adams, running as an independent, is already deeply unpopular with the left and, after being investigated by the FBI, was indicted on federal charges in September.)
But polls suggested that if anything, the bloc of voters coalescing around the candidates other than Cuomo or Mamdani could best be described as “Anyone But Cuomo”, suggesting Cuomo’s scandals turned off voters more than Mamdani’s progressivism or perceived antisemitism. Between that and Cuomo barely campaigning at all, the wonder is not that Cuomo lost but that he could even have a chance at winning, let alone have a significant lead in the polls right up to primary day, and beyond that, that he’d be the candidate that the establishment rallied around to begin with – especially since Democrats have historically been the party for whom scandals matter, that has sought the high road with more morally clean candidates compared to the scandal-ridden Republican candidates. Nonetheless, Cuomo racked up a laundry list of endorsements from the Democratic establishment – with the crown jewel supposedly being former President Bill Clinton, a move that may have backfired and underestimated how much the popularity of the Clintons has fallen for the Democratic base. And when he did campaign, and when his endorsements came in, they emphasized the value of experience and fighting Trump – themes that have had mixed success for Democratic presidential candidates in the last three cycles, let alone in a mayoral race that typically turns on more local issues.
Nate Silver wrote a non-paywalled post on his Substack explaining how this should be the final, decisive defeat for the out-of-touch Democratic establishment. Despite Rauch’s paean to the value of powerful parties, the Democratic establishment has failed utterly to read the mood of the electorate for most of the past decade, while the same outsider energy that led Trump to bring the Republican establishment to heel has also carried him to the White House twice and close enough a third time to allow him to cry foul. They put their chips behind Hillary Clinton in 2016 only to find themselves backing perhaps the one candidate that might have been less popular than Trump, failing to recognize how the popularity of both Sanders and Trump pointed to how disillusioned a significant chunk of the electorate was with politics as usual, and instead effectively embodying what everyone hated about it, especially once the leaked e-mails came out. And while Rauch gave the Democrats credit for ditching Biden, that was only because they failed to identify how much of a liability he’d be and give him any real competition for the nomination – after he’d reportedly told aides in 2020 that he’d serve only one term – in the first place, leaving them with little choice but to coalesce around Kamala Harris, who’d gone from one of the frontrunners for the 2020 nomination to not even making it to Iowa and apparently wasn’t even Biden’s first choice for his running mate.
One thing I was struck by reading Rauch’s piece was the contrast with an editorial in the New York Times earlier in the month by Oren Cass, an economist at a conservative think tank. Cass argues that the American electorate’s ability to cause chaos with their vote, to allow “an anti-establishment outsider…to wreak havoc”, is a feature, not a bug, of the American electoral system – a way to reject an out-of-touch ruling class who think they can dictate who the American people can vote for. (How out-of-touch? Cass tells of being part of Mitt Romney’s policy team in 2011 and not even knowing what opioids were, let alone that they were an epidemic, despite over 20,000 opioid deaths that year alone.) In Cass’ view, Trump’s triumph in 2016 should have been cause for serious soul-searching and reform among the establishment of both parties; instead, they have doubled down, seeking to restore politics as usual as it was before Trump and disdaining the segment of the electorate that voted for him, choosing to see Trump’s popularity as a sign of the electorate’s unfitness to make the correct decision, not its desperation for something, anything, that would end the decay of their communities and their lives.
The result is that Trump could come within a thousand miles of the White House, let alone win, despite everything that happened over the course of his first tenure and despite his supporters’ attempted coup – and not only that, but that during the time that Biden faced calls to step down but hadn’t yet done so, at least one poll suggested that swing-state voters who considered “threats to democracy” to be of paramount importance trusted Trump more on the issue. That is how bad the Democrats’ handling of their nomination process had gotten to that point: telling people to take what you give them and like it is not democracy.
In a separate cover story for the Atlantic in 2016 (non-paywalled version), Rauch claimed that back in the day, insurgents could inject the system with new energy and ideas, but the middlemen would still have the role of “safely absorb(ing) the energy that insurgents unleash”, converting it into a more respectable form. But while the Republican establishment has simply been taken over by the Trump insurgency without resistance, the Democratic one has seemingly been less concerned with “absorbing” the energy of popular outrage than snuffing it out – and as long as they continue to do so, they will continue to pay the consequences. Yet after nearly a decade, they don’t seem to have gotten the message. Even as the system Rauch extols has collapsed, we’re still seeing how it can utterly fail at serving the public.
Ultimately, Rauch’s description of “how American politics should work” is naive and self-serving. Americans didn’t “see the party…as the locus of political life”, but as a necessary evil at best. I was taught, as I suspect most Americans in the 20th century were taught, that America is a democracy where the people rule; to then be told that our options for who to vote for were decided by unelected bureaucrats in back rooms, based on such things as who schmoozed them the best, who was best at following their orders, and who the bureaucrats deigned to claim to know the people would vote for, can’t help but sound unsavory. The system Rauch extols did not exist to exert the will of the people, but to restrict it.
Yet at the same time, the tool Cass extols as the mechanism for Americans to fight back against out-of-touch elites, to simply throw the wrench of chaos into the proceedings, is a blunt instrument, threatening to destroy what works as well as what doesn’t – and in the case of Trump, wrecking what works while barely touching, in some ways even empowering, what doesn’t. Moreover, it shouldn’t be necessary; Americans should be able to express their will, to send a message about how things aren’t working or even keep them from getting to the point where they aren’t working, without burning everything down. That is, after all, part of the point of democracy: to allow for the peaceful redress of grievances without large-scale, destructive conflict or revolution. The system Rauch extols and the mechanism Cass promotes as the corrective for it both come from the same place: a structure for American democracy that’s woefully insufficient to either express or, because of that, enact the will of the people.
Being a cover story for the Atlantic‘s print magazine, Rauch’s 2016 article explained how politics used to work, and what went wrong in destroying it, in more detail than he did in 2024. He traced the origin of the pre-1970s party system to a flaw in the Constitution: it had no recourse for a rogue element in any branch of government. Unlike parliamentary systems, Congresspeople and Presidents are elected for fixed terms; if government cannot perform its business, it cannot hold snap elections to resolve deadlocks, nor is the President directly answerable to Congress except under the high standard of an impeachment proceeding. It is in this context that American political machines developed, using a complex system of incentives, some of them more savory than others, to keep politicians in line and maintain discipline, rewarding party men and punishing troublemakers.
According to Rauch, “parties, machines, and hacks…did their job so well that the country forgot why it needed them. Politics seemed almost to organize itself, but only because the middlemen” put in so much work organizing it and making sure the system worked. So when reformers in the 20th century looked at the system, they saw a system built on graft, personal favors, financial influence, and other unsavory elements, without seeing the reasons those things existed, and set about trying to fix it – and in the process, clearing away everything that incentivized compromise and mediation, leaving a system that incentivizes extremism and hardline stubbornness.
Ultimately, the problem the reformers had was that they had what Rauch would consider a naive view of how politics should work. Rauch talks at length about the conclusions John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse reached in their 2002 book Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work. Hibbing and Morse found that 25 to 40 percent of Americans are what Rauch calls “politiphobes”, “because they see the contentious give-and-take of politics as unnecessary and distasteful”:
[T]hey believe that obvious, commonsense solutions to the country’s problems are out there for the plucking. The reason these obvious solutions are not enacted is that politicians are corrupt, or self-interested, or addicted to unnecessary partisan feuding…Politiphobes, according to Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, believe policy should be made not by messy political conflict and negotiations but by ENSIDS: empathetic, non-self-interested decision makers. These are leaders who will step forward, cast aside cowardly politicians and venal special interests, and implement long-overdue solutions. ENSIDS can be politicians, technocrats, or autocrats—whatever works. Whether the process is democratic is not particularly important.
There’s a semi-famous scene in the movie Dave, about an ordinary guy who happens to be a dead ringer for the President who ends up standing in for the President indefinitely when he suffers a stroke and his advisors opt to hide his condition from the public, only to be more committed to the welfare of the American people than the actual president. In the scene in question, Dave brings in an accountant friend of his to look at the federal budget, identifying significant enough amounts of waste and mismanagement to preserve funding for a homeless shelter. This is the fantasy of the ENSID: the solution to our problems is out there if we just stop leaving the business of government to the corrupt politicians and bring in people with common sense. Specifically, it’s the fantasy that Elon Musk appealed to with his Department of Government Efficiency: that if we just identify all the places where the government is wasting money, we can get everything we want.
The fatal flaw of the politiphobes, according to Rauch, “is that they do not acknowledge that meaningful policy disagreement even exists.” In other words, politiphobes cut across the political spectrum, but they are convinced that their principles are Americans‘ principles, that the right solutions to America’s problems are not just obvious to them but to everyone. So why is Congress wasting time with so much horsetrading? Clearly all the politicians that don’t follow my principles must be corrupt, craven opportunists bought off by special interests, and should be replaced with people that will actually do what Americans want, which, of course, perfectly aligns with what I want. It’s an attitude that’s familiar to anyone that’s been engaged in politics for long enough at any point in American history: both parties are the same; we need politicians of principle, not compromise; things would be so much better if we’d just elect normal people instead of politicians; and so on.
Social media and the rise to prominence of extremist movements on both sides should have corrected this flaw in the politiphobes’ thinking. The existence of real people with real reasons to support social programs and equality, or real concerns about cultural shifts and the growth of government, should have served as a check on people’s absolutism of principle and started a conversation seeking common ground and finding a way to accommodate everyone’s priorities. But partisans on both sides have become more entrenched than ever. Instead of being more understanding of the difficult position politicians find themselves in, they have turned their ire on the people who support the politicians they disagree with. Republicans are frothing bigots who hate democracy and who are manipulated to vote against their own interests by the 1%; Democrats are moochers who want everything handed to them on a silver platter when they aren’t trying to destroy America with socialism and unchecked immigration. Partisans have simply adjusted their perceived enemy from “politicians” or “government” to their fellow Americans, and the result is that America seems to be running headlong into civil war.
This also puts into perspective how the system Rauch extols broke down and how much of the left has responded to it. Since at least the Obama administration if not longer, progressives have watched as Republicans have used every trick in the book to stonewall anything and everything proposed by Democrats, ensuring that even in the early years of the Obama administration when Democrats had a sizable majority in the House and a nearly cloture-proof majority in the Senate, they had to fight tooth and nail to get any meaningful legislation passed out of their own caucus. Meanwhile, when Republicans have had power, they have had no shame in using any tactics they want to move the country as far to the right as they possibly can and stuff the courts with right-wing justices that will enshrine those values for a generation. Americans have punished Republicans for their cravenness by giving them control of the House, then the Senate, and finally the Presidency – and while dissatisfaction with the Trump administration resulted in Democrats taking power again, ultimately Americans ended up giving it right back to the Republicans.
For many progressives, the lesson they’ve taken away from this is that cravenness, stubbornness, refusal to compromise, and the use of every tool at your disposal to stop the other side and advance your own agenda works. The Republican base cheers on every time their politicians stand their ground and pursue their agenda, while calling anyone who gives Democrats the time of day a RINO; the Democratic base gets disillusioned at how much more the Republicans get their way when they’re in power than Democrats get when they are, yet have limited ability to voice their displeasure that doesn’t let the Republicans get their way even more; and the people in the middle don’t care enough about it, or don’t exist in large enough numbers, to outweigh the partisans and consistently punish Republicans for their cravenness. Yet Democrats still insist on playing by the rules, on seeking bipartisanship and common ground from a party completely uninterested in either, refusing to go as far in enshrining their own values as the Republicans are theirs. Democrats act like they’re still playing a game Republicans threw in the garbage bin long ago – and that Americans never knew they were playing and didn’t particularly like if they did. But can you blame them? For those old enough to remember when both sides actually were playing the game, it was the only thing preventing the collapse of the republic – and to acknowledge that that collapse is already underway, and playing dirty is the only way to ensure your values survive, is too scary a thought to contemplate.
The problem the reformers had was not that the problem they were trying to fix wasn’t real, or that they misdiagnosed it, or even that their solutions weren’t appropriate. The problem was that they didn’t identify the root cause of the issue, the reason why the system they hated existed in the first place. They all figured that if we just replaced the corrupt politicians with men and women of principle and eliminated corrupting influences from the system, they’d pass the commonsense solutions that so obviously existed. The unsavory system of party bosses and political machines was, in the end, a band-aid for the real problem: a Constitution that was written before any other written Constitution, by men who had next to no way of knowing how democratic politics would actually work, who envisioned a system without parties but did nothing to prevent them from forming and indeed started forming them before the ink was dry. The reformers destroyed the system that produced cultural incentives to compromise but did nothing to fill the vacuum of structural incentives that gave rise to it. The solution to American political dysfunction today is not, as Rauch would have it, to bring back the system of party bosses and political machines, even in a reformed, more accountable form; for one thing, all the problems of political machines still exist in the modern Democratic Party. The solution is to actually fix the underlying framework so the system actually works how Americans want it to work.
This is, admittedly, a substantially taller order than the reformers gave it credit for. Even in parliamentary systems, snap elections are an imperfect mechanism for resolving gridlock, and while the election of the President separate from the legislature is a major contributor to American gridlock, few Americans would be willing to accept not having a direct voice in the election of the President (just look at the fate of the selection of Senators by state legislatures). And it’s clear that knowledge of the existence of people with differing viewpoints does little to make it easier to find common ground; instead, both sides simply want to drag the other kicking and screaming to the obvious correctness of their viewpoint.
But one thing that’s clear is that the two-party system, and the method in which we elect our politicians more generally, is woefully inadequate to actually measure the will of the people. It effectively gives voters a binary choice and imperfect at best mechanisms for expressing why they preferred one candidate over another, empowering partisans and centrists alike, on both sides, to read what they want into the results. Did our candidate lose because he was too hardline, or not hardline enough? Is Trump and his policies really what voters want, or is he just the only lever that voters have to effect the change they want and a Sandersite would be even more successful if he was only given the chance, or is the problem that delusional progressives pushed the Democratic candidate to adopt unpopular opinions and then didn’t show up at the ballot box anyway, either out of apathy or failure for the candidate to meet their unreasonable demands? Anyone who has ever complained about “both parties being the same” should note that we’ve gotten firsthand experience with parties with distinct identities in recent years, and it has proven no virtue; the pre-1970s system may have brought the parties to an arbitrary consensus, but a consensus it was, and it was far better for the stability of the republic than the system of diametrically opposed camps, with the entire direction of the republic potentially flipping on a handful of votes, we have today.
Reformers seeking to give Americans more choices sought to put more emphasis on the primary process as the means of choosing the Presidential candidates Americans actually wanted, but in retrospect, that amounted to bolting a method of expanding voters’ choices onto the existing party and election system, when the real solution should have been to change the system itself – to give Americans more choices in the general election, to allow swing voters, kept out of the primary process, to express what they really want beyond simply choosing the lesser of two evils. Admittedly, that would have been a substantially taller order, since it would have involved either changing the way we vote or painstakingly building a third party from the ground up that still would have imperfectly captured the mood of the electorate and, in the best case, threw presidential elections into chaos without changing the way we vote anyway. The reformers have turned their attention to the voting system in recent decades, but their preferred solution runs into problems of its own.
But as it turns out, there may be a voting method sitting in plain sight that not only allows better expression of the views of the American people as a whole, but corrects a number of other problems with the system without even trying – a system that, once you start looking into it, is so clearly superior to any other that it’s astounding that it isn’t more widely tried. I’ll explain in the next post or two.