#1 - Legitimacy in elections, contested conventions, & reforming the Republic
The specter of a contested Democratic convention in which party insiders attempt to subvert the results of their own primaries could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of electoral legitimacy in America - that is, if it isn’t broken already.
📰 The News
Establishment democrats have apparently determined they would rather leave open the possibility of taking the nomination away from the candidate who enters the Democratic convention with the most delegates, rather than allow Bernie Sanders to become the party’s nominee.
In other words: they’d rather set fire to what’s left of their own credibility than risk going with what their own voters have said they want.
And that’s only the most recent instance of Democrats’ self-inflicted wounds. The corn-fed dumpster fire that was the Iowa Caucus has “undermined faith in the entire primary process,” noted a Vox headline in the aftermath of what was a legitimacy-undermining disaster for the ages:
The issue is entirely one of perception. The complete and unexpected meltdown of the reporting system, including the failure of an app from a company literally named Shadow, and the opacity of the process have created the conditions for a breakdown in trust among voters. In the absence of definitive answers from party officials, conspiracy theories have filled the gap.
Meanwhile, news broke that Russian disinformation campaigns are now helping both Trump and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, because, as Wired wrote, Putin’s regime prefers chaos - and chaos undermines the legitimacy of Democratic elections.
📚 The Context
The undermining of Americans’ faith in elections isn’t new by any stretch. It’s a long-term trend that has picked up steam, egged on by a President who sees the loss of faith as in his personal interest.
As Yascha Mounk wrote in The Atlantic back in 2018:
America does have a democracy problem. If we want to address the root causes of populism, we need to start by taking an honest accounting of the ways in which power has slipped out of the people’s hands, and think more honestly about the ways in which we can—and cannot—put the people back in control.
The past two Republican presidents have come to office by winning the electoral College while losing the popular vote, leading to loss of faith in national elections. Meanwhile partisan redistricting and gerrymandering have undermined the core principle of one person, one vote. And a Republican minority has been winning and holding disproportionate levels of power at all levels of government for decades.
🚫 The Problem (for Democrats)
With Democrats bungling their own elections and Russia helping both sides, it’s no longer tenable to suggest that Republicans are to blame for undermining legitimacy in elections. On top of which, it’s Democrats, not Republicans, who have a gigantic superdelegate problem.
The moment at this week’s debate where candidates were asked whether they thought the candidate with the most delegates should become the nominee, even if they don’t have a majority, was both telling and brutally destructive to the idea that Democrats hold the high ground on this issue. Each and every candidate running said they thought the “rules should govern,” which is to say they left the door open to the Democratic party establishment taking the nomination away from Sanders even if he enters the convention having won the most delegates.
While it’s true as a matter of historical record that party insiders have often handed their party’s nomination to candidates who didn’t enter the convention as a leading contender (Read: Abraham Lincoln), make no mistake: the look on stage Tuesday night was a terrible moment for electoral legitimacy in the modern era.
🏛 What A Liberty Democrat Might Say in Response
It’s time we acknowledge the writing on the wall: our Democracy is broken on all sides. President Trump was right when he called the Iowa Caucuses and “unmitigated disaster,” and when the president is right we should give him his due. We also can’t pretend that Democrats have the high ground on this issue any more. Caucuses, for example, are a process as un-Democratic for working families as gerrymandered Congressional districts are for voters of color.
The only truly American agenda is a Democracy reform agenda, or if you prefer it the way our founders would have said: a reform of our Republic. Everything should be on the table: the electoral college, the way we draw Congressional boundaries, the balance between regionalism and a strong central government - even the two-party system itself, which represents exactly the kind of factionalism that our founders warned against and tried to prevent from arising.
We’ve got to acknowledge: the system they set up is failing us. Which means it is left to us, to our generation, to reform. The goal in any effort should not be how to balance left vs. right, or Republican vs. Democrat. But rather, how we balance the competing needs of a large and geographically diverse country. This is the challenge the founders did in fact anticipate, and the one to which we must re-dedicate ourselves now.