Powerful Old Men
CrowdSource 7.22.2024
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: Democracy and destiny, one old man going down and another (maybe) taking off.
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The Party Decided
Was Biden’s exit from the race a triumph for democracy? An offense against the voter’s wishes? Or the return of old-school party politics?
The Numbers. For what it’s worth, some polls shifted in Biden’s favor in the last two weeks. Most Democrats wanted him to stay on the ticket.
The Primary Process is not that Democratic, Anyway. So argues Wisdom of Crowds Contributing Writer, Osita Nwanevu: “When Biden became the presumptive nominee in 2020, 26 states and territories hadn't even cast votes yet. No one cared about this whatsoever because that's how primaries work. This idea folks are genuinely concerned about respecting the democratic agency of voters here — spare me.”
Smoke-Filled Rooms. The Party Decides is an informative book outlining how candidate-selection has become more democratic in the last decades. But the coordinated effort (by Democrat members of Congress, party leaders, and major donors) to push Biden out signals a return to the days when semi-secret committees of notables ran political parties.
Reactions. Here’s Shadi, calling for an open convention: “Would it be chaotic? Yes. Would it lead to divisions? Yes. That’s sort of what democracy is meant to be — competition and conflict, waged not through war but through politics.”
And here’s Damir, arguing that democracy itself is arbitrary: “Democracy has always been nothing more than a symbolic struggle for adequately defining legitimacy ahead of a sanctified poll.”
The Winds behind Trump’s Back
Two weeks ago, “Trump was a highly vulnerable, defeated President,” writes Tyler Cowen. “Yet he now stands as a clear favorite.” Cowen cites 19 reasons for the sudden shift in Trump’s fortunes. This shift has prompted writers to consider whether Trump is playing some sort of historical role in the life of the Republic — not necessarily a good role, but one that, apparently, is very hard to stop.
Trump was sent to expose the unseriousness of the ruling class. So argues Justin Smith-Ruiu: “I no longer think it’s useful or meaningful to call [Trump] a charlatan, to insist that he’s ‘faking it,’ that he’s actually a really bad businessman who only pretends to be a successful one on TV, that he’s a common low-end huckster of bad steaks and worthless paraphernalia. All of this implies that there are other actors on the world stage who, by contrast, are the real deal … I just don’t believe that’s the case anymore.”
Trump was sent to break us out of complacency and decadence. Ross Douthat says as much: “But to beat him … you have to do more, go further, risk much, become something you yourself did not expect. Because in a struggle with a man of destiny, there is no normalcy to be restored.”
Trump was sent to announce the death of the Modern World. N. S. Lyons: “… the upheaval we’re seeing is not just the tumult of politics and geopolitics as usual but the wider breakdown of Enlightenment liberal modernity. And it seems that Trump, like Hegel’s Napoleon, has somehow become a concentrated symbol of these times ... ”
That Hegel quote. The above journalists all allude to a famous letter by the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, where he describes a close encounter with Napoleon. Hegel wrote: “I saw the Emperor — this world-soul — riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”
From the Crowd
writes to us about the crisis in the Democratic Party:There’s an argument that this situation was entirely foreseeable and avoidable. Had the Democratic Party establishment not short-circuited the democratic feedback process in its candidate selection in 2020 and 2024 (not unlike in 2016), perhaps there would’ve been an earlier reckoning with Biden’s weaknesses. In 2020, party elites worked behind the scenes to engineer Buttigieg’s exit before Super Tuesday despite him having won the Iowa caucus (Biden came in fourth) and narrowly lost to Sanders in the New Hampshire primary (Biden came in dead last). Buttigieg could have given Biden a run for his money but risked splitting the moderate vote and handing a plurality to Sanders in the coming contests, so the party muscled him out. And this year, the party cancelled primaries and shielded Biden from competition and scrutiny at almost every turn. Perhaps if voters could pressure test their candidates or more freely express their preferences, we wouldn’t wind up with such brittle options.
See you next week!
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Government is supposed to be under the control of its citizens. That so many people can so easily be led by the nose by political schemers scares me to death.