Super Tuesday?

Super Tuesday, indeed.  Do people still say “Harrummph” as they did in the old cartoons?  If not, we need to do something about reviving the custom.  Those of us who have been trying to follow the course of the nomination process in the Democratic Party find ourselves in the curious  position of discerning through the dawn’s early light that the choice has effectively been narrowed down to two geezers.  You have one crabby old man who thinks that the source of most of our ills is a system rigged in favor of “millionaires and billionaires” and one vague old man who says that 150,000,000 Americans have been killed by guns in recent decades.  He is the one who won Super Tuesday and is once again the leader of the pack.  Apparently ours is indeed the age of big data.

A crabby and vague old man like myself will perhaps be especially alarmed by the prospect before us.  We have had many chances to consider the credentials of Mr.  Biden, and I would prefer someone else.  In our household there were once high hopes for Senator Warren, who came in fourth in her native state and third in the state she represents in the Senate.  That means, in practical terms, Senator Sanders, a career politician who in a forty-year career has maintained his progressive purity at the relatively small cost of never achieving much else.  One of my sons, who commands my admiration and respect, is an enthusiastic backer of Bernie; and that alone is enough to make me take him seriously.  For me the first problem is that Sanders claims to be a Socialist, subgenre democratic Socialist; and it is far from clear what he means by that.  The pundit Paul Krugman insists that Sanders isn’t a Socialist, but just likes to say he is.

In the most recent “debate” Mayor Bloomberg (a third geezer) chided Senator Sanders for his Socialism, which he regards as a failed system.  “We’re not going to throw out capitalism.  We tried that.  Other countries tried that.  It was called Communism, and it just didn’t work.”  Mr. Sanders’s riposte was “Cheap shot!”, and indeed there is a whole rhetorical industry devoted to the search for a significant distinction between “Socialism” and “Communism”.  Before going there, as we say, one might point out that the absurd format of these so-called debates does little more than provide an arena for cheap shots.  It also encourages the fantasy, rarely acknowledged by the candidates, of a nearly omnipotent president who can single-handedly, by ukase, achieve free college, emissions reductions, “comprehensive immigration reform” and more or less any other mighty feat that enters his or her head.

Mr. Sanders, though presenting himself as the polar opposite of our current President,  has a similar penchant for impolitic praise of tyrants.  So he has praised the late dictator Fidel Castro for doing some “good things” alongside the bad “authoritarian” things Sanders disapproves of.  Specifically, he organized a literacy campaign.  Since according to the political theory dominant among Cuban refugees and large swathes of the Republican Party, it is impossible that Castro ever did anything good in his life, Sanders is feeling some heat for his attitude.  Such is the Manichaean passion of partisanship.  But I doubt that anyone has performed only evil acts.  Read the story of the Jongleur de Notre Dame.  Hitler, our chosen icon of evil unalloyed, did all sorts of good things.  So did Josef Stalin.  For instance, he won World War II, and you might want to give him some credit for that.

One still has to point out that coercion does not cease to be coercion just because you can tolerate or even applaud its effects.  And coercion is a prerequisite to Socialism.  Among dozens of explications of  Socialist coercion I recommend especially the brief and lucid chapter “Why Socialism?” with which Martin Malia began his magisterial The Soviet Tragedy: a History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (1994).  The bosses of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were unaware that it was a “cheap shot” to call themselves Socialists.

I happen to have been reading Alexis de Tocqueville this week, and he has acute remarks that are relevant here.  Socialism may rightly be called an alien idea in America.  It is a manufactured political theory or what de Tocqueville called a “general idea” in his chapter “Why the Americans have never been as passionate as the French about general ideas in politics.”  He thus amplifies: “The Americans are a democratic people who have always taken charge of public affairs themselves, and we [French ] are a democratic people who for a long time could only dream about the best way to conduct public business.”  Unlike Sanders, de Tocqueville was not terribly keen on the “revolutionary” idea.  Of course his family had actually lived through a Revolution and was probably prejudiced by the guillotining of many close friends and family members in 1794.

It is obvious that Senator Sanders has spent some considerable time dreaming “about the best way to conduct public business.”  I’ll take his word for it that democratic Socialism eschews all authoritarianism, let alone the mass murder that has characterized Socialism’s more notable twentieth-century forms.  But it does take a certain testy audacity, to say the least, to insist—with scant attention to detail and none to costing--upon a behemoth of a nationalized universal health care program the first requirement of which is the destruction of a vast and complicated private insurance system interlaced with most of the nation’s industrial and economic life.

            The purposes for which our government was established are clear enough in the founding documents.  They are “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  This is an agenda of liberation, not the blueprint for the imposition of a “general idea.”  A joke that has survived since the “Red Decade” of my birth has as its subject a Communist agitator orating to a crowd of workers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  “My friends,” he said, “Come the revolution, you will have strawberries and cream!”  But a skeptical kibitzer shouted out: “What if you don’t like strawberries and cream?”  “Come the revolution,” retorted the speaker without missing a beat,” you will like strawberries and cream.”

Enough to Make One Veep

James Gillray on political campaigners (1795).  Plus ça change...

Political journalism, though specializing in the vacuous, abhors a vacuum. It rushes toward whatever specks of matter become visible at the horizon of the void.  Hence this week it’s all about Congressman Paul Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential candidate-elect.  As careful observers will have noticed, Gladly Lerne Gladly Teche is a radical blog that eschews all issues trivial and superficial in its beeline towards the essential.  I do not intend, therefore, to join the gaggle in a discussion of Mr. Ryan’s possible actuarial and accounting prowess, his presumed behavior, cliff side, to little old ladies in wheelchairs, or the arcana of tax law as it relates to living in a “listed” historical house.  Instead, I want to wonder aloud why Americans are so careless with their democracy.  This topic occasioned my only attempt ever to publish an op-ed piece in the national press, four years ago.  The pain of rejection left permanent scars.  Fortunately the editorial board of Gladly Lerne Gladly Teche is more visionary.

            The hypocrisy surrounding vice-presidential “picks” is egregious.  The chosen person, we are told, stands “one heartbeat away” from the presidency, and thus must have the potential to lead at a moment's capricious notice.  In fact the person is chosen to “balance the ticket,” “help out with the blue-collar vote”, “appeal to women,” “attract evangelicals” or serve some similar function helpful to the aims of the presidential candidate.

            The heated nature of our presidential campaigns creates at least a plausible illusion of democracy in action.  We really are allowed to choose between two contenders.  The outcome is seldom a foregone conclusion, and sometimes it is a real nail-biter.  Even the process by which the presidential contenders emerge has some democratic features, however attenuated.  But the process by which vice-presidential candidates are chosen is one that Louis XIV might approve.

            At the moment, Mr. Romney, Mr. Ryan’s sole elector, has not even been nominated for president by the Republican Party.  We may judge this a mere technicality; but it underscores the blatantly undemocratic nature of the process of selecting vice presidents.  To show how it can be anti-democratic as well as undemocratic we need look no further than the history of the current incumbent.  I have never met Mr. Biden, but I am inclined to like him.  His classical pseudo-proletarian bonhomie is attractive, and there is a humanizing quality to his frequent verbal gaffes.  He has some admirable goals and seems to work hard to achieve them.  Sam Rayburn, Mister Democrat to his generation, was famously reported to have told John Nance Garner that the vice-presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm spit”—in which “spit” was actually a cowardly journalistic substitution for what Rayburn had actually said, what Shakespeare had called the gilded puddle that beasts would cough at.  Well, Mr. Biden proves that it is worth a bucket of warm spit.  But how does he come to stand “a heartbeat away from the presidency”?

Sam Rayburn with osculating veep

Vice President John Nance Garner: FDR never kissed him
 

            Though elections may suggest, vaguely, people the voters want to be president, they are usually less clear in identifying people they don’t want.  But this generality is contradicted by the political history of Vice President Biden.  He twice ran for the presidential nomination, first in 1988, and again in 2008.  In 1988 his candidacy foundered on the exposure of his plagiarism of his own biography!  He had lifted it from the campaign propaganda of British Prime Minister Neil Kinnock.  There is no space here for the details, though I can recommend them to the genteel reader, who is likely to find therein an amusing gloss on the current flap about “You didn’t build that!” Candidate Biden, having been caught in an act of intellectual dishonesty for which most of my academic colleagues would severely discipline, perhaps even expel, a sophomore undergraduate, chose to drop out.

Even Kinnock thought it was funny

             

Twenty years later cultural amnesia had done its healing work, and Mr. Biden once again entered the lists in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary.  Here he faced such awesome competitors as Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and the little known but incandescent Barack Obama.  Biden did not get to first base.  It is debatable whether he made it as far as the batter’s box.  His fatal compliment of his rival Obama as “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” was widely suspected of crypto-racism by fellow Democrats.  His showing in the polls was abysmal, though he was slightly ahead of fellow single-digiteer Stephen Colbert, the comedian.  (Is it relevant that Colbert was not actually a candidate?)

            The electors of the Democratic Party in 2008 took quite a while to decide on the person they wanted to be their president.  On the other hand they reached early agreement on some they did not want, Senator Joe Biden conspicuously among them.  One may fairly point out that Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain, who showed considerable staying power in their primary campaigns and gained large numbers of actual votes, enjoyed more democratic legitimacy to stand “one heartbeat away from the presidency” than did Joe Biden.

            Within the context of a system of presidential politics savaged by the symbiosis of the power of Big Money to buy unlimited advertising time and an electorate sufficiently ignorant or indifferent as to form its political decisions on the basis of thirty-second television commercials, the undemocratic mode of anointing vice-presidential candidates will not seem a matter of high priority.  Yet it is odd that nobody even mentions it.  Is our current system really so superior to that of my sixth grade homeroom?  There the person with the second number of votes was vice president.  That imitated the original scheme of our national government, incidentally, under which each elector in the Electoral College cast two votes: most votes, president; second most, vice president.  I am not sure John Adams was a bad vice president just because George Washington didn’t pick him.  Though we are short on bipartisan solutions, we are long on bipartisan problems.  Perhaps the return to a little built-in bipartisan cooperation wouldn’t hurt.