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.
