My namesake, Jonathan Rauch has done
a fine piece for the Atlantic this discussing the polarized partisan divide. This is yet another "unconventional wisdom" piece, this time suggesting that it is not the American culture that is divided--we seem to be about as similar as ever culturally. It is the parties that have shifted.
"Who sent us the political leaders we have?" Alan Ehrenhalt asked in 1991. Ehrenhalt is a respected Washington political journalist, the sort of person who becomes known as a "veteran observer," and the riddle is from his book The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office. "There is a simple answer," he continued. "They sent themselves." This, he argued persuasively, was something new and important.
"Who sent us the political leaders we have?" Alan Ehrenhalt asked in 1991. Ehrenhalt is a respected Washington political journalist, the sort of person who becomes known as a "veteran observer," and the riddle is from his book The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office. "There is a simple answer," he continued. "They sent themselves." This, he argued persuasively, was something new and important.
Ehrenhalt, who was born in 1947, grew up in the dusk of a fading world that I, at age forty-four, am just a little too young to remember. In those days politicians and their supporters were like most other people, only more so. Ambition and talent always mattered, but many politicians were fairly ordinary people (think of Harry Truman) who were recruited into politics by local parties or political bosses and then worked their way up through the system, often trading on their ties to the party and on their ability to deliver patronage. Party machines and local grandees acted as gatekeepers. Bosses and elders might approach a popular local car dealer and ask him to run for a House seat, and they were frequently in a position to hand him the nomination, if not the job. Loyalty, not ideology, was the coin of the realm, and candidates were meant to be smart and ambitious but not, usually, too smart and ambitious.
In a society as rambunctious and egalitarian as America's, this system was probably bound to break down, and in the 1960s and 1970s it finally did. The smoke-filled rooms, despite their considerable (and often underappreciated) strengths, were too cozy and homogenous and, yes, unfair to accommodate the democratic spirit of those times. Reformers, demanding a more open style of politics, did away with the gatekeepers of old. The rise of primary elections was meant to democratize the process of nominating candidates, and so it did; but hard-core ideologues--with their superior hustle and higher turnouts--proved able to dominate the primaries as they never could the party caucuses and conventions. As the power of the machines declined, ideology replaced patronage as the prime motivator of the parties' rank and file. Volunteers who showed up at party meetings or campaign offices ran into fewer people who wanted jobs and more who shared their opinions on Vietnam or busing.
With parties and patrons no longer able to select candidates, candidates began selecting themselves. The party nominee, Ehrenhalt wrote, gave way to the "self-nominee." Holding office was now a full-time job, and running for office was if anything even more grueling than holding it. "Politics is a profession now," Ehrenhalt wrote. "Many people who would be happy to serve in office are unwilling to think of themselves as professionals, or to make the personal sacrifices that a full-time political career requires. And so political office--political power--passes to those who want the jobs badly enough to dedicate themselves to winning and holding them." Those people, of course, are often left-wing and right-wing ideologues and self-appointed reformers. In the 1920s the town druggist might be away serving in Congress while the local malcontent lolled around the drugstore grumbling about his pet peeve. Today there's a good chance that the druggist is minding the store and the malcontent is in Washington.
I like Ehrenhalt's take on this one; I think it makes a lot of sense. As we sought to end the rule of the party bosses through a democratic process, the primaries, we shifted the burden of candidate selection from the bosses, who tended to chose average Joe's, to individual candidates who tended to be rich, ambitious, and activist. What we see then is a situation where people with good intentions sought to make our system more democratic, but the result handed even more power to the country's elites.
I'm working on a diary right now that discusses how I believe its time make the American political system much more democratic--that history is paving the way for it right now, and the sooner we jump on the bandwagon the better. However, historically, empowering democracy in America has not always worked out well. There is the problems inherent with the primaries, and then there is the disaster the democracy movement has been for my state, California, in terms of its intiative and referendum movement. Hopefully, we can come up with something better.
MoralQuestionsBlog.com