Election Jitters

Dixiecrat delegates walk out of the 1948 Democratic Convention

            Every week or so I have a telephone conversation with my brother out in New Mexico.  It’s generally pretty basic.  We cover a limited number of subjects, mostly competitive complaints about the state of our health, the miserableness of our weather, and the God-awful mess in which our country wallows.  There is a certain invariable sign that our conversation is nearing its logical end.  That is when Rick says “I’ll tell you one thing.  I wish this stupid election was over.”  I can count on him saying that every time.  That sentiment is pure Marvin Fleming, our father, expressed in his exact words.  It takes me back sixty, seventy years.   It’s actually good to know that there are a few solid rocks jutting out above the swirling surface of the sea of change.  My father, dead only forty years, would have difficulty recognizing our world; but he would certainly identify correctly certain stupidities of the current political moment.

            It is questionable whether it is the election itself, as opposed to the electors, that is “stupid.”  If your vote is seriously susceptible to interference from Internet trolls, whether Russians or Martians, the problem does not seem to me to be Internet trolls.  A sizable proportion of the American electorate is either not interested in voting at all or insufficiently interested to expend even a modest effort to do so.  Many who do participate are what are now euphemistically called “low-information voters”.  It seems clear from the huge sums expended by both major political parties on brief television attack ads that professional experts consider them an effective method of political persuasion.   As Mencken is supposed to have said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”  And if he didn’t say that, he should have.

            On the other hand there are several features of the electoral process itself that invite the dreaded adjective “stupid.”  Fortunately, there is some evidence that at least some of the electorate is beginning to twig to their stupidity.  During the past week I have either read or heard spirited and intelligent criticisms of two of them—our time-honored, circus-like political conventions and the so-called “debates” among the contestants.

            In the old days, when methods of communication were inadequate for the quick conveyance of news and information over a continental area, national in-person conclaves were a natural phenomenon, which in a sense were of a kind with the operations of our national government itself.  Through the earlier decades of the twentieth century nominating conventions, though increasingly buried in a blizzard of sophomoric show biz, did perform some strenuous democratic work.  The chaihh recognizes the gentlelady from the greeeet state of...etc.  Credentials committees sorted out conflicting claims of authentic representation.  Passionate delegates decided hotly contested competitions requiring many tedious ballots to bring to a conclusion.  Delegates walked out to protest either the adoption or the rejection of certain proposed  party platform planks they passionately championed or opposed.  But with the rise and increasing importance of the primary election—which seemed such a good idea until the appearance of the unanticipated results—there’s nothing substantial for a nominating convention to do.  But of course they still have to do it hour after hour for several days running.  There is a tremendous expenditure of hot air and helium balloons, but the main upside would seem to be some overtime hours for some folks who could use it, the people who have to sweep up the debris from the Convention Center and adjacent streets.  The Covid crisis is likely to lead to a certain amount of unfortunate long-term social change.  Perhaps we shall all be wearing surgical masks until Judgement Day.  We ought to welcome a few beneficent changes, such as the silent demise of the political nominating convention.

            Of course, they may not go quietly.  Financially improvident city governments—many of them the proprietors of lavish and underutilized public arenas--will continue to proclaim their importance, as may the top echelons of the political parties themselves.  It seems likely that Mr. Trump considered the choice of convention venue a political act of some weight.  He appeared to be exercising his own weird southern strategy.  He started out in Charlotte, and when that didn’t work retreated four hundred more miles down the meridian, to Jacksonville.  When that fell through he simply gave up, but my theory is he still wasn’t quite far enough south.  I suspect that President Bolsonaro would have accommodated the Republicans in São Paulo.

            The debates are a different matter, actual debate being a necessary and appropriate aspect of democratic governance.  And both parties seem to regard them as a necessary exercise.   The Republicans are animated by vain hope while the Democrats tremble in plausible fear.  The Republican hope is that Donald Trump might after all rise to a complete and correct declarative sentence with a definable subject in grammatical agreement with a definable predicate.  The Democratic fear, of course, is that their candidate will reveal himself as an amiable gaffer who would have trouble keeping accurate score in a shuffleboard game in a Florida nursing home.

            Debate has a long and distinguished history in the progress of human intellection generally.  From the legal proceedings of the ancient Romans to the disputations of the Schoolmen to the oratory of the Whig and Tory parliamentarians the thrust and parry of argument and counter argument has been one of the principal methods of intellectual progress in important fields, especially politics.  In our own country think of debates at the Constitutional Convention or those between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln.  To this very day speakers in the British Parliament continue to prove that the exchange of ideas can be at once raucous, witty, artful, and substantial.  But of course the journalistic events sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates are not debates They are difficult to account for from the generic point of view: serial press conferences perhaps, or sequential brags, but not debates.  All an audience remembers of them are theatrical moments, notable gaffes or put-downs.

            The first of the televised debates, that between Kennedy and Nixon, set the trend.  Though there was at least a feint at the engagement of ideas, savvy commentators immediately recognized it as a beauty contest that Nixon lost mainly because of the televised appearance of his five-o’clock shadow.  This debate also initiated another trend.  What the supposed debaters actually said would be subordinated to interpretations of what they had said offered by celebrity journalists.  Recent experience suggests that the deportment of candidates is less important than the deportment of the debate moderators—all of them journalists.  As is true of the conventions, there are of course whole industries lobbying in favor of the debates, and obscure educational institutions love to host them to boost their “visibility”.  But that they advance the cause of intelligent democracy is, let us say, debatable.