Thanks for this. Am new to both Substack and Medium.
Your 2021 New America study on Primaries has been ever-present in my thinking since I saw it in mid-2022.
I have been thinking hard about how to break polarization since early in the 2020 nomination contest. And even further back, in late 2015, when I could not get members of my Democratic-leaning discussion group to stop sneering and ask themselves “Why are lots of people supporting Trump?” And feeling their complacent stares when I told them to get out and help me and others work to prevent a 2016 Trump win against a weak insider-favored candidate (essentially coronated like 2024 appears to be).
Clearly, preventing a 2nd Trump presidency is vital. As this essay makes so clear, merely fending off Trump is insufficient if much of the public is ready to toss out the rules depending on who won.
Polarization has causes. I argue that its chief cause was the response of the parties when faced with the need to fund candidate recommendation processes (nominations) using primaries instead of conventions. Their response in the 1990s was to swivel their focus away from voters and towards campaign finance donors. It led to Gingrich’s culture wars. Recent studies show that conservatives tend to be very sensitive to cultural differences; hence responsive to funding appeals based on perceived “threats” stemming from such differences. The Democrats, responded by moving rightward. Cash welfare was gutted; the poor vote but do not donate. Hollowing out our low/semi-skilled industrial workforce (caused mostly because of automation instead of globalization) found no mass of small donors to push back. Donor money flowed to pave the way to the 2008 Great Recession, arbitrary-looking bailouts and tender treatment of the crooks. Donors found little to object to tax-policies that drive wealth concentration. All of this devastated support for the Democrats in rural areas.
Trump was symptom, not cause. Yet many still point at Trump instead of the true culprit, a primary system that was an easy target for abuse by the big donors and the elites of both parties.
You refer to Fusion voting as a help. In other contexts, you also refer to a more effective remedy, Top 5 Ranked Choice Voting. (Note: I have found no reference to a proposal to a method that combines both concepts, but, off hand, it seems doable.) Worthy targets, certainly. But, in the context of hundreds of state and local systems, not easily within the power of a new administration, no matter how progressive. Certainly, these remedies would help. But they have proven hard to sell against the waves of pushback from donor groups quite happy with the status quo.
No, there needs to be a practical, achievable path that the 2024 Democrats can base their campaign on.
You touched on vouchers in a 2016 VOX piece. But I can find no words from you since (unless they were in a podcast).
There is a path forward that is relatively inexpensive, well within the normal legislative power of a unified government (as Biden had for 2 years; perhaps too narrow a mandate to make it happen, but squeezing another $10 billion into the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t sound like it would have been too hard), and immune to reversal by a radical Supreme Court (they’ve already ruled on it in the case of Seattle). And, most important, sellable to the public.
But here is the hard part. It will be sellable only if Biden (or some candidate) comes out and confesses the truth. The truth about how he and both parties have contributed to our dismal state because, since 1992, they could not figure out any other way to get the steadily increasing campaign finance money they needed. I’m currently working on a draft speech Biden should make.
The big special interest donors are nervous about Trump and hoping for Halley. But regardless, they are unambiguously opposed to vouchers – they recognize them to be an existential threat to their current dominance of policy.
In 2020, Gillibrand and Sanders both added vouchers to their platforms but didn’t push them enough to get anyone’s attention. After 2020, party elites and donors asked to go hard at climate change. Ok, needed. I’m as terrified as anyone else. BUT they ignored making the tiny investment in vouchers that would have paved the way toward a government that could set us on a secure path to fixing the problem.
Before the passage of the 25th Amendment, it was unclear if the Vice President actually became the president or just took over the responsibilities. Arguably, the latter interpretation is more true to the text. Yet when William Henry Harrison died in office, John Tyler took the oath of office and became President, a precedent that was followed by several other Vice Presidents. If Tyler's actions were unconstitutional, I argue that they were still correct and democratic, a "bug" in the Constitution that had to be addressed in the moment. In the absence of a clear Constitutional directive, Tyler did what he thought was right, and his actions were justified post-hoc through the amendment process.
I feel roughly the same way about your question on an urgent military threat, and in this case the argument is much clearer. The President is the Commander-in-Chief and takes an oath to protect the nation from threats. If the threat were urgent, failure to act would be a failure of the oath of office. I have trouble foreseeing why responding to the threat would be unconstitutional given the President's broad powers here (even habeus corpus doesn't apply in time of "war or public danger," which Lincoln exploited to arrest political enemies during the civil war). But if such a scenario presented itself, I feel that any such prohibitions are likely to be further "bugs" in the Constitution from which the higher mandate of self-preservation of the republic takes precedent.
I suspect in most reasonable scenarios people think of for this question, it would be an action that they would support amending the constitution to permit post-hoc. A possible version of such an amendment would be an emergency powers amendment. Many modern democracies have laws or constitutional provisions for emergency powers precisely because military conflict often requires setting aside some of the regular rules of governance. Granted, abuse of such provisions is how most authoritarians seize power, but this is one of those difficult facts that makes democracies hard to do right.
Does this attitude make me support undemocratic norms? I don't know. There are certainly lines I still wouldn't cross. I would not, for example, support a violation of the War Powers Act even if the President considered the threat existential. Nor would I consider it permissible to continue the course of action after an explicit prohibition by a court order. But overall I would still describe myself as staunchly pro-democracy even with the belief that the president should probably seize power in some of these scenarios. Yet by the question you asked I would not be. I'm not convinced the survey is drawing the right conclusion for this question specifically.
Thanks for this, Lee. Interesting (terrifying) how support for democracy wavers based on the party in power. I like to think that my support is consistent -- the military power question is the only one I feel like I'd be willing to support, and my support for that (and lack of support for the others) goes both ways. But it's easy to say that from behind my laptop as I sit on the couch wearing sweatpants.
I honestly feel like Democrats are actually the ones who opened the Pandora's Box here, with "Not My President" in 2016. Certainly no January 6th by any means, but, in the light of where things ended up three years ago, not a great precedent to set. And Is say that as a liberal who wants the Democrats to do better, to hold firm in the face of whatever, to "go high" when they "go low."
Maybe I should just be bothered to follow the link to the report, but what was the n for your study?
Should your sentence: "Overall, our report finds them supportive of democracy than partisans. " be "Overall, our report finds them more supportive of democracy than partisans."?
Hi Lee, the idea that a Republican-ish party of any stripe is going to turn over its ballot line to Joe Biden or any other Democrat seems fanciful at best. The history of fusion shows that it has mostly been ineffectual in impacting the two major parties, but where it has impacted it has been as a vehicle for minor parties of the left or the right – not the center or moderate – to use their ballot line to pressure one of the two major parties for some accommodation. Can you point to some historical examples in which a MODERATE minor party was able to use fusion in an effective way? Even in New York, where there historically has been a Conservative Party and a Liberal Party (i.e. beyond Republicans and Democrats), their influence has been so minimal that only political nerds can remember that they ever existed. About the only successful use of fusion in recent years has been the Working Families Party in New York, but that example illustrates the historical point, i.e. a left minor party trying to impact one of the two major parties. With fusion being banned in 42 states, and with the US Supreme Court having already ruled in 1996 that prohibiting electoral fusion does not violate the First Amendment, your strategy of using the courts to overturn these bans would appear to have a slim chance of succeeding in any significant way. And even if modestly successful, this strategy would take decades because the courts are the slowest pathway of all. Forget “doom loop,” this is your “dream loop,” LOL. As we previously discussed: https://democracysos.substack.com/p/does-fusion-voting-offer-a-new-horizon
Thanks for this. Am new to both Substack and Medium.
Your 2021 New America study on Primaries has been ever-present in my thinking since I saw it in mid-2022.
I have been thinking hard about how to break polarization since early in the 2020 nomination contest. And even further back, in late 2015, when I could not get members of my Democratic-leaning discussion group to stop sneering and ask themselves “Why are lots of people supporting Trump?” And feeling their complacent stares when I told them to get out and help me and others work to prevent a 2016 Trump win against a weak insider-favored candidate (essentially coronated like 2024 appears to be).
Clearly, preventing a 2nd Trump presidency is vital. As this essay makes so clear, merely fending off Trump is insufficient if much of the public is ready to toss out the rules depending on who won.
Polarization has causes. I argue that its chief cause was the response of the parties when faced with the need to fund candidate recommendation processes (nominations) using primaries instead of conventions. Their response in the 1990s was to swivel their focus away from voters and towards campaign finance donors. It led to Gingrich’s culture wars. Recent studies show that conservatives tend to be very sensitive to cultural differences; hence responsive to funding appeals based on perceived “threats” stemming from such differences. The Democrats, responded by moving rightward. Cash welfare was gutted; the poor vote but do not donate. Hollowing out our low/semi-skilled industrial workforce (caused mostly because of automation instead of globalization) found no mass of small donors to push back. Donor money flowed to pave the way to the 2008 Great Recession, arbitrary-looking bailouts and tender treatment of the crooks. Donors found little to object to tax-policies that drive wealth concentration. All of this devastated support for the Democrats in rural areas.
Trump was symptom, not cause. Yet many still point at Trump instead of the true culprit, a primary system that was an easy target for abuse by the big donors and the elites of both parties.
You refer to Fusion voting as a help. In other contexts, you also refer to a more effective remedy, Top 5 Ranked Choice Voting. (Note: I have found no reference to a proposal to a method that combines both concepts, but, off hand, it seems doable.) Worthy targets, certainly. But, in the context of hundreds of state and local systems, not easily within the power of a new administration, no matter how progressive. Certainly, these remedies would help. But they have proven hard to sell against the waves of pushback from donor groups quite happy with the status quo.
No, there needs to be a practical, achievable path that the 2024 Democrats can base their campaign on.
You touched on vouchers in a 2016 VOX piece. But I can find no words from you since (unless they were in a podcast).
There is a path forward that is relatively inexpensive, well within the normal legislative power of a unified government (as Biden had for 2 years; perhaps too narrow a mandate to make it happen, but squeezing another $10 billion into the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t sound like it would have been too hard), and immune to reversal by a radical Supreme Court (they’ve already ruled on it in the case of Seattle). And, most important, sellable to the public.
But here is the hard part. It will be sellable only if Biden (or some candidate) comes out and confesses the truth. The truth about how he and both parties have contributed to our dismal state because, since 1992, they could not figure out any other way to get the steadily increasing campaign finance money they needed. I’m currently working on a draft speech Biden should make.
I just posted a short summary about the path to Campaign Finance Vouchers on Substack: https://michaelfoxworth.substack.com/p/achilles-heel-of-control-by-big-campaign I plan to publish more, but until then, there is an embedded link to a YouTube video that leads to more detail.
The big special interest donors are nervous about Trump and hoping for Halley. But regardless, they are unambiguously opposed to vouchers – they recognize them to be an existential threat to their current dominance of policy.
In 2020, Gillibrand and Sanders both added vouchers to their platforms but didn’t push them enough to get anyone’s attention. After 2020, party elites and donors asked to go hard at climate change. Ok, needed. I’m as terrified as anyone else. BUT they ignored making the tiny investment in vouchers that would have paved the way toward a government that could set us on a secure path to fixing the problem.
Before the passage of the 25th Amendment, it was unclear if the Vice President actually became the president or just took over the responsibilities. Arguably, the latter interpretation is more true to the text. Yet when William Henry Harrison died in office, John Tyler took the oath of office and became President, a precedent that was followed by several other Vice Presidents. If Tyler's actions were unconstitutional, I argue that they were still correct and democratic, a "bug" in the Constitution that had to be addressed in the moment. In the absence of a clear Constitutional directive, Tyler did what he thought was right, and his actions were justified post-hoc through the amendment process.
I feel roughly the same way about your question on an urgent military threat, and in this case the argument is much clearer. The President is the Commander-in-Chief and takes an oath to protect the nation from threats. If the threat were urgent, failure to act would be a failure of the oath of office. I have trouble foreseeing why responding to the threat would be unconstitutional given the President's broad powers here (even habeus corpus doesn't apply in time of "war or public danger," which Lincoln exploited to arrest political enemies during the civil war). But if such a scenario presented itself, I feel that any such prohibitions are likely to be further "bugs" in the Constitution from which the higher mandate of self-preservation of the republic takes precedent.
I suspect in most reasonable scenarios people think of for this question, it would be an action that they would support amending the constitution to permit post-hoc. A possible version of such an amendment would be an emergency powers amendment. Many modern democracies have laws or constitutional provisions for emergency powers precisely because military conflict often requires setting aside some of the regular rules of governance. Granted, abuse of such provisions is how most authoritarians seize power, but this is one of those difficult facts that makes democracies hard to do right.
Does this attitude make me support undemocratic norms? I don't know. There are certainly lines I still wouldn't cross. I would not, for example, support a violation of the War Powers Act even if the President considered the threat existential. Nor would I consider it permissible to continue the course of action after an explicit prohibition by a court order. But overall I would still describe myself as staunchly pro-democracy even with the belief that the president should probably seize power in some of these scenarios. Yet by the question you asked I would not be. I'm not convinced the survey is drawing the right conclusion for this question specifically.
Thanks for this, Lee. Interesting (terrifying) how support for democracy wavers based on the party in power. I like to think that my support is consistent -- the military power question is the only one I feel like I'd be willing to support, and my support for that (and lack of support for the others) goes both ways. But it's easy to say that from behind my laptop as I sit on the couch wearing sweatpants.
I honestly feel like Democrats are actually the ones who opened the Pandora's Box here, with "Not My President" in 2016. Certainly no January 6th by any means, but, in the light of where things ended up three years ago, not a great precedent to set. And Is say that as a liberal who wants the Democrats to do better, to hold firm in the face of whatever, to "go high" when they "go low."
Maybe I should just be bothered to follow the link to the report, but what was the n for your study?
Hey, Lee --
Should your sentence: "Overall, our report finds them supportive of democracy than partisans. " be "Overall, our report finds them more supportive of democracy than partisans."?
Looking forward to your reply.
Thanks!
Hi Lee, the idea that a Republican-ish party of any stripe is going to turn over its ballot line to Joe Biden or any other Democrat seems fanciful at best. The history of fusion shows that it has mostly been ineffectual in impacting the two major parties, but where it has impacted it has been as a vehicle for minor parties of the left or the right – not the center or moderate – to use their ballot line to pressure one of the two major parties for some accommodation. Can you point to some historical examples in which a MODERATE minor party was able to use fusion in an effective way? Even in New York, where there historically has been a Conservative Party and a Liberal Party (i.e. beyond Republicans and Democrats), their influence has been so minimal that only political nerds can remember that they ever existed. About the only successful use of fusion in recent years has been the Working Families Party in New York, but that example illustrates the historical point, i.e. a left minor party trying to impact one of the two major parties. With fusion being banned in 42 states, and with the US Supreme Court having already ruled in 1996 that prohibiting electoral fusion does not violate the First Amendment, your strategy of using the courts to overturn these bans would appear to have a slim chance of succeeding in any significant way. And even if modestly successful, this strategy would take decades because the courts are the slowest pathway of all. Forget “doom loop,” this is your “dream loop,” LOL. As we previously discussed: https://democracysos.substack.com/p/does-fusion-voting-offer-a-new-horizon
Excellent research. Very sobering.