Archive for June 17, 2008

Democracy in America: the Polity Above the Person

I fundamentally don’t understand why a Democrat wouldn’t vote for the party’s candidate. Now that the shouting of the primaries is over, I think we have bigger problems to solve, and below is my attempt to puzzle out why I so fundamentally don’t understand the continued anger on the Clinton side.

America’s party system emerged as a tacked-on addition to a functioning democracy, a way of minimizing transaction costs in the run-up to elections, rather than a way of allocating power, as in a parliamentary system. Here in America, unlike much of Europe, we vote for people not parties, and our very own Cincinnatus thought, early in the Republic’s history, that it ought to stay that way. While Washington’s exhortation to avoid parties staved off the pallor of partisanship for a brief while, it entrenched in the American mindset the idea that when we vote we are voting for an individual, complete with that individual’s personal failings (without which no-one is complete). Since campaigns are therefore “personal,” they risk becoming overly personal, meaning the party platform – the only thing that matters in purely partisan systems like England – becomes less important than the one poor, flawed individual we’ve picked to lead the party to victory.

That ought to be self-evident to anyone who watched the Clinton years, and saw President Bill Clinton’s dubious personal legacy overwhelm his incredibly successful professional legacy in the public eye, irrevocably tainting Al Gore and sending America into its current tailspin under the auspices of 2000′s “winner.” And now, on the eve of the Democrats’ redemption, we’re risking letting personal grievances, personal offenses at candidate Barack Obama’s imagined elitism, and lingering anger over a protracted campaign season divide us, to the detriment of the ideology that unites us all. Even at reputable, ex-Kos sites, it’s all about the primaries and emotion, not about the issues. Barack Obama’s imagined airs of elitism shouldn’t matter more than the cause of creating a progressive America in the 21st century.

That we want a person and not a platform, I think, is a fundamental problem with the way we see elections, and the way we conduct politics. The candidate and the politician, as the servant of the people, need only serve the state wisely, legally, and with the best interests of the constituents at heart.

The candidate, as Washington put it, ought to represent the “the delegated will of the nation”: when the candidate steps into the office, they do not so much become the state, as they become the office. The personal qualities melt away, or give way at least, to the office and the candidate’s promise to the American people of how that office’s duties will be discharged. The candidate is the avatar of the ideology he or she represents and campaigns vowing to defend. The candidate is not your best buddy, or always your first choice. But while avatars come and go, the ideology remains constant, and also remains the ultimate good of the political campaign. To place the ideology below the avatar, I think, is the ultimate treason: for a person to give up on the Democrats because Hillary lost, and because they don’t like Barack Obama, is to lose sight of the very essence of the Presidency and of politics.