You have to understand. Most people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured and so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.
-Morpheus, The Matrix
I could be talking about… all this… that happened Tuesday, over the last weekend, or over the last month or so, but I’m going to talk about something else that seems to be unrelated but actually touches upon exactly how this country got so fucked up.
There was a recent article on The Nevada Independent website showing how the state’s Democratic Party establishment is speaking out against a ranked choice voting reform that is on the ballot for this year. In his statement to the Independent, Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak said the initiative was “a rushed constitutional change that would make our system more confusing, error-prone and exclusionary.” Senator Jacky Rosen said that it would “make casting a ballot more confusing and time-consuming, lead to increased errors that cause eligible votes to be thrown out, and disproportionately impact communities of color.”
Not only is this a really patronizing attitude in and of itself, it actually plays into the “Great Replacement Theory” of Tucker Carlson and other professional racists, who state that the liberals are out to undermine America’s system of government with an influx of brown, “obedient“, easily led immigrants who need voting to be as easy as possible. For Republicans like Carlson, the fact that they want to make voting a more complicated pain in the ass than a do-it-yourself colonoscopy is exactly the point, because they don’t think voting is a right for all but a privilege of the select. Voting should be left to those square-headed folk of good Nordic stock who grasp Western concepts like analytical thinking.
The Democrats might indeed have a point about how the change would make casting a ballot more complicated, but the actual wording of the initiative isn’t that hard to figure out: “The general election ballots for partisan office shall be designed so that the voter is directed to mark candidates in order of preference and to mark as many candidates as the voter wishes, but not to assign the same ranking to more than one candidate for the same office.” In and of itself, that’s hardly different from the process Nevada Democrats themselves used for the Nevada presidential caucus in 2020. Reading deeper, the establishment’s objection seems to be the creation of a new Section 17 in the state Constitution’s Article 15, stating “A person may become a candidate at the primary election for a partisan office regardless of the person’s association with a political party, or lack thereof.” Further: “Any registered voter may cast a primary ballot for any candidate regardless of the political party affiliation of the voter or any political party preference indicated by the candidate. The primary election for partisan office does not serve to determine the nominee of a political party or political group but serves only to narrow the number of candidates whose names will appear on the ballot at the general election for partisan office.” In effect, this would mean that the “primary” is no longer a partisan event but the first stage in a runoff system election process.
Which I’m pretty sure is what’s got the Democrats’ undies in a wad.
For both the socialist Left and corporatist Right, freedom of choice only counts if you pick the result they like, and if you don’t, they’d rather you have no choice at all.
Now, Sisolak and the other Nevada Democrats may indeed be the best choices we have available, but that’s not because they are ideal or even good. It means exactly that- they’re the best choice we have available because the selected alternative is so poor. That would be the case regardless of whether we had a ranked choice system now. For example, in the Nevada Governor’s race, the Republican primary includes Joe Lombardo, who will be retiring as Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff this year. That’s a non-partisan office. I think that by and large, Lombardo was a pretty good Sheriff and on paper would be a fair choice to be Governor. However he’s running as a Republican and feels obliged to go full Trump robot on all the political buzzwords and catchphrases, and playing ¿Quien es mas macho? with points like “Joe Lombardo is the only candidate in the race for Governor who has carried a gun every day for the past three decades“. So if he weren’t a Trumpnik, I might have voted for Lombardo, but as long as he and his party continue to believe in performative idiocy over governance, I have to go for Sisolak.
But that gets to the point I want to make: Most sheriffs are politically conservative or at least “law and order”, but their races are non-partisan. Nobody votes for sheriff on the question of whether they think George Soros wants to encourage abortion on demand so that trans people can adopt the abortions and then teach the abortions critical race theory.
Why is this craziness incentivized? Because of the political party system, specifically the modern primary system.
That is, if you’re aligned with a major party, you have to vote for their candidates if for no other purpose than to stop the other party from winning. And that means that your choices are really made for you in the primary round, so the people pushing certain candidates can just push the most partisan, “red meat” issues to display ideological loyalty, the most partisan, red meat voters are the ones who are more likely to show up for the primary (since it’s only that party voting on its own candidates), and they basically dictate the course for everybody in the general election. Even if you would have in the past voted for a non-Trumpnik, non-Q candidate in the general election, if you’re a Republican, you HAVE to vote for Ms. Jewish Space Lasers, cause what else are you going to do, let the DEMOCRAT win????
Why? Because those ideological fanatics in the Republican Party are the ones you can count on to show up and vote no matter what. And so the party has catered to them more and more over the years, and as they did so, the fanatics realized their pet issues (like abortion prohibition) were being given lip service by a party establishment that (correctly) assessed that those dreams were unpopular with the rest of the country. And so they started pushing more and more candidates who were taking positions that would have been rejected by earlier Republicans, and those candidates started winning primaries, and in “safe” districts, that means they won office. That’s why when Trump ran in 2016, all the establishment Republicans refused to really organize against him, because that would mean pissing off their “base”, since he was directly appealing to it. And once Trump did get nominated for president, every Republican had to go along with his idiocy, even the ones who knew better. And since he was the official candidate, all the stuff he said that would have gotten him laughed out of a Libertarian or Green convention as being too immoral or impractical suddenly became the respectable mainstream position.
And as a result, a major-party system that conservatives like William Buckley intended to be a screening mechanism to keep the Birchers, Randians and other crazies out of conservatism instead became the very mechanism by which the crazy became the governing majority, at least on that side.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is still capable of screening its ideologues to keep them from positions of real power (just ask Bernie Sanders), and while that is on balance a good thing it also means that the Democrats are, ironically, more conservative in the general sense than the Party of Trump, which say what you will, actually changed with its base. And that desire for control I think plays into Sisolak’s apparent fear of reform.
Perhaps with the Biden Administration’s other problems, the only way Democrats think they can win this year is to frame the election as a choice between the two parties. In other words, rather than objectively assess whether incumbent Democrats are doing good jobs, just point out that the Republicans would be so much worse.
I guess some of them still haven’t figured out that that didn’t work in 2016.
I would prefer an old-style, center-right party that reflects the practical, “common sense” attitude that I think most Americans prefer. I had thought that was the Republicans, but if they ever really did have a constructive approach to government, they threw it out long ago. I had thought it was the Libertarians, but right now they’ve decided to join the Republicans in COVID-land.
It might be better to just throw out political parties altogether and make all races, including federal races, nonpartisan in the way judges’ elections and most sheriffs’ races are. That’s not quite the same as banning political parties. You can’t stop freedom of association. We also cannot directly control people’s minds and get them to engage in what one party or the other considers to be goodthink. What we can do with government and specifically with elections is to create incentives and disincentives.
Specifically, we need to remove the incentives that make it so easy for ideological nutjobs to get into office by catering to a few while discouraging the participation of the general public. Right now the Republicans are the ones who are most consciously engaged in creating the political system they want because they are the ones who have both the desire to change a system they see as being against them, and the position to do something about it. Democrats are only just starting to realize that their status quo ante is not the best and perfect and permanent state of affairs and that the incentives they created are being turned against them.
With all the various roadblocks and complications that Republican-run states are putting in the way of voting, mainly to stop Democratic constituencies from mobilizing, it should be clear that Republicans are turning Democrats into a “third” party by doing to them what Democrats and Republicans have done to the Libertarians and Greens for years. And it’s testimony to the institutional bias of establishment Democrats that they won’t react appropriately or even acknowledge the issue. Now, some of them have, which is how you have ranked choice voting in other states (including Alaska and Maine, which are more Republican-friendly), and open primaries in California, which has hardly hurt Democrats’ dominance of the state.
We are reaching the terminal point in the duopoly’s downward spiral, and giving people more choices may be America’s only way out. Of course that would require Democrats to both acknowledge the problem and give up some of their control over the process. So we can’t be surprised that some in the party of “choice” want to put a stop to it.