H. L. Mencken once defined democracy as a system of government in which a nation of over one hundred million people, many of whom are competent and a few are even wise, choose as their president: Calvin Coolidge.
Some may find Mencken’s crack ungracious, but now the joke is on us all. We find ourselves confronted by a choice between two candidates who are widely disapproved. Disapproved is probably too weak a word. Trump is feared and despised by many Republicans who know him well. Attitudes toward Hillary Clinton are milder, but she is mistrusted by many. How did we come to this pass?
The Constitution does not tell us how candidates for the presidency are to be chosen. Everyone knew that George Washington would be the first president, but what then? Some of the framers apparently assumed that the electors would nominate some people, and if no one had a majority at that stage, the House of Representatives would choose one.
The process was an ungainly mess until Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren took charge of building an organization to insure that the Democratic party would keep control. Thus party leaders – bosses, if you will – filled in the hole in the Constitution until well into the 20th century.
Party leaders faced challenges from time to time, most notably from Progressive reformers at the turn of the 20th century. But it was not until the upheavals of the 1960s that they lost control. The old system fell apart when the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam exploded at the party conventions. Norman Mailer called his book about the summer of 1968 “Miami and the Siege of Chicago.” Democrats at that time had solid majorities in Congress and the states, so when the Democratic Convention appointed a commission to draft reforms in the presidential nominating process in time for the 1972 cycle, it was done.
The emerging system ensured that nominees were chosen, not by party conventions, but through primaries. The result, however, was ironic. Increasing the role of grassroots voters in the race for the White House has produced increasingly unpopular presidential candidates. Before 1968, when pollsters asked voters if there was a candidate running for president for whom they were happy to vote, around two-thirds said yes. In 1972 and thereafter, typically two-thirds have said no.
Turns out, realizing democracy is not simply a matter of asking an undifferentiated mass of people what they want. People must have a chance to deliberate, to consider what is offered, what the alternatives are and what they will cost.
It is not a question of whether people are smart enough. Do they have an opportunity to frame the question they are being asked and to consider alternatives?
In 2004 Philip Roth published a harrowing novel entitled “The Plot Against America.” It tells how Colonel Charles Lindbergh, the famed Lone Eagle, wins the Republican nomination in 1940 and scores a dramatic victory by promising to reverse Roosevelt’s push for an alliance with Great Britain against Hitler’s Germany. Lindbergh (this part is true) had accepted a medal, presented to him in 1938 by Hermann Goring, and he coldly rejected calls to return it in the wake of Kristallnacht.
The Roth family, until then deeply patriotic and living contentedly in a lower middle class Jewish neighborhood in Newark, is at first apprehensive. They grow alarmed as anti-Semitic behavior, unchecked, becomes more overt. Philip’s brother is recruited to work on a program aimed at removing Jews from the New York area to a settlement in Kentucky. His aunt marries a famous rabbi who becomes an adviser to the president. President Lindbergh stages a state dinner at the White House for ambassador von Ribbentrop. The rabbi, his wife and Roth’s brother are invited to attend.
Pretty soon all hell breaks loose, in Detroit and across the country, as police clash with vigilante bands determined to protect Jews. Lindbergh conducts solo flights across the country in an attempt to restore order, but he and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, are increasingly isolated in the White House. Lindbergh mysteriously disappears, Roosevelt runs successfully for a third term, and history lurches back on track.
Roth’s achievement is to demonstrate quite plausibly how fragile our political culture is. As the New Yorker put it, the book is “not a prophecy; it’s a nightmare, and it becomes more nightmarish – and also funnier and more bizarre – as it goes along.” But could it happen here?
Right now, there is much attention to the question of whether our candidates are “presidential.” This question baffles me. Who are the models?
Presidents don’t have to be able to walk on water. They must be energetic, resilient, flexible and capable of compromise. They need to be intelligent, and able to identify, use and defend themselves against advisers. They should carry themselves with dignity. How do we identify such people before they come to office?
Under the American system of government, the popular will ultimately controls what we do as a nation. The popular will evolves, and it is amazingly patient. The Declaration of Independence notes that people will suffer abuses while they are tolerable, but when they finally do withdraw their consent, look out!
That’s what seems to be happening now. We live in a dangerous time. Those who aspire to govern us had better figure out how to respond to the alienation and sense of displacement many Americans feel. When thoughtful people like David Brooks and James Fallows decide that they have been listening too much to the privileged intelligentsia, and that they cannot understand the popular will until they get down to the grassroots and listen to people who are really hurting, maybe there is ground for hope after all.
Don Robinson, a retired professor of government at Smith College, writes a regular column for the Gazette which appears on the fourth Thursday of the month. He can be emailed at drobinso@smith.edu.