“There is nothing about a democracy that ensures that it will govern better than many other forms of government. If voting by citizens is a measure of democracy we have had democracies that have governed badly and authoritarian states that have been governed well. No one would call China a democracy but when they had elections over 90% of the people vote.” Carroll Quigley.
In most democracies, especially in the United States, who is elected is not determined by who votes but who does not vote. Nominations in most of those democracies are more important than the elections. Far fewer people vote or take part in the nomination process than the members of the parties that vote in the general election. It is essentially undemocratic at its core.
The United States Constitution did not create a democracy. It created a Republic with certain minority rights contained in the first 10 amendments. It did not give the right to vote (SUFFRAGE) to all citizens. That right has evolved throughout our history and is still evolving.
Suffrage, the simple right of a citizen to vote, has never been universal in the United States. It began under the Constitution as a right limited to propertied males and is still evolving. But that right has never come with real power. Power, in the United States, includes wealth and ideology.
We currently have a plutocratic system governing the United States’ political system. It is similar to that which controlled the politics of the nation from about 1873 replacing the spoils system until 1932 where it, in turn, was replaced by the New Deal. During the 1980s, the New Deal had run its course and was replaced with the plutocratic system on steroids we have now.
Many politicians now see politics in America as simply a matter of buying elections. Here’s why. As our economy is now structured, the big corporations — aerospace, oil, and so on — are able to pour out million to support the candidates they favor. The restrictions on the books are easily evaded, and the politicians in power won’t do much about it because they want some, too. The Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions by the Supreme Court merely confirmed a process that already existed. What it did do is take away the power of the government to alter the process.
A new phase?
We, perhaps, are witnessing a new phase in the evolution of parties and elections in the nation. The traditional structure of both parties and the nomination systems that supported them appear to be in a state of collapse or at least major change. It is as though we are returning to the mirror image of the process that existed at the end of the Nineteenth Century. Now, instead of nominating an unknown party hack as they did during the 1873 to 1932 period, the parties through the nomination process seem to be moving toward selecting celebrity outsiders. The nomination process now exists for the benefit of ideologically based media operations. To them, it appears to matter less who wins the nominations than how it enhances their ratings.
As pointed out above, the nomination process is more important than the election. We as a nation are faced with a political party of the right well organized and capable no matter who is their standard-bearer or whether he wins or loses. On the left, any group professing an ideology more radical than that acceptable to the more centrist elected officials on the Federal, State, and local levels usually lacks an organization able to develop candidates on all levels and get them elected. However, the Obama campaign using modern telecommunications strategies appeared able to win, his success was not able to be carried over to subsequent Congressional, State, and Local elections. The Sanders and O’Roarke campaigns demonstrated again how electronic media fundraising and campaigning may assist and individual candidate to achieve electoral success it has not yet demonstrated that that success can be translated to a party as a whole.
In 2016, on at least on the Federal level, the ideological based media organizations backed by the Financial, Natural Resource and Super Large Retailer plutocracy, elected one of their own to the Presidency (They had been successful on the more local level primarily through ideologically based radio in electing hoards of super conservative and generally unknown politicians under the rubric of the Tea Party.) 2018 has seen a significant reaction to the reality TV excesses (but surprisingly not the corruption of the recently elected federal administration).
Nevertheless, the underlying fundamentals remain the same. The plutocracy and ideologically biased media continue to fund and prop the Republicans. The South remains solidly conservative Republican although cracks in that have appeared primarily through the emergence of ideologically Democratic women and people of color at the polls. Retail fundraising and identity politics appear to have worked in 2018 and may work again in 2020, but until there is another fundamental change in how campaigns are financed, I do not expect a long term change in national politics.