Random political stuff

Afew observations on the political scene:

• Republicans contemplating a run for president need to think twice; more precisely, they need to think about how Donald Trump won their nomination in 2016 with only a minority of primary votes because the majority was dispersed among so many other contenders. Far more Republican primary voters voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him, but his GOP rivals were unable to set aside their personal ambition for the sake of party and country (each assuming that they would be the one to pick up the pieces after Trump imploded).

Democrats didn’t make that mistake in 2020, having the good sense to solidify early on behind a contender, Joe Biden, who could beat Trump, in order to stop another contender, Bernie Sanders, who likely couldn’t have.

It might also serve Republicans well to emulate the Democrats in another respect — by switching as many of their primaries from “winner take all” format to proportionate delegate allocation (as in proportionate to the percentage of primary vote received), particularly in the early, momentum-generating contests (even though Trump will still denounce as “rigged” any approach in which he doesn’t prevail).

• Abortion, post- Dobbs, clearly hurt the GOP in the midterms by mobilizing young people, particularly young women. It wasn’t close to the biggest issue for most voters, but for those for which it was, it was by a huge margin. It also apparently motivated people to turn out who normally don’t, such that the electorate was less “pail and frail” than usual for midterms (less white and old, to GOP detriment).

The extreme GOP position on abortion — banning it in all circumstances, including rape and incest — might be logically consistent (if a fetus is a human being, it possesses the right to life regardless of method of conception), but it alienates more people than the extreme Democrat position (abortion on demand at any point in pregnancy) because Americans care more about preserving legal access than they care about the details, and it is far easier to caricature the GOP position than the Democrat.

The claim that Republicans sought to take away an established right alarmed more voters than the claim that abortion takes a life.

• Equity has been dishonestly redefined by the Biden administration and the broader left to mean not fairness or justice but their opposite in the form of equal outcomes (based on racial proportionality). Getting to those racial proportionality goals requires establishing specific quotas for each group and then using racial preferences to get the numbers to come out right.

Equity defined and applied in this fashion means not equal but unequal treatment because it requires people to be treated differently upon the basis of race, precisely that which our civil rights movement sought to eradicate.

Such racial preferences and quotas also contain an additional, less frequently noted problem — they limit Black achievement by establishing not just numerical floors but also numerical ceilings on hiring, promotion and admission. More specifically, if Blacks represent 13% of the population, they will get precisely 13% of the jobs or law school slots, no more, no less, regardless of merit.

To embrace racial quotas means that, once the quota is met, the “no more Black people need apply” sign goes up.

• There were some interesting theoretical questions raised by the Democrats’ claim that democracy was at stake in the midterms, perhaps most important how democracy can be saved by voting only for candidates from one political party and thereby essentially establishing the kind of one-party state that would be the antithesis of democracy (a contradiction suggesting that the Democratic conception might come closer to the “People’s Republic” variant).

Anyone who has ever taught courses on democracy and its various manifestations knows that certain requirements have to be adhered to, including the holding of regularly scheduled elections with competing parties (and thus options); possession of suffrage by an overwhelming majority of adults; rights of speech, press, and assembly (to allow parties to form and issue appeals); use of the secret ballot (to minimize electoral intimidation); and clear rules for counting ballots and determining winners and losers.

A political system is democratic to the extent it adheres to those expectations; in the sense of being a process, a means for filling public offices, not an end in itself or a route to a particular outcome. An election is not, to put it differently, democratic depending upon who wins, us as opposed to them, Democrats as opposed to Republicans.

A certain “boy who cried wolf” might also be involved here — when Democrats gin up fake threats to democracy in an effort to delegitimize opposition and acquire short-term electoral advantage, they undermine the credibility of such claims, such that if a genuine threat of that nature emerged down the road people might roll their eyes and ignore the warnings.

Just as the accusation of racism loses its potency whenever Democrats use it against anyone who disagrees with Democrats on anything, shouting “threat to democracy” produces diminishing returns over time, especially when equated with any political outcome Democrats don’t like or electoral outcome where they lose.

The real thing (threat to democracy) becomes less threatening when placed in the service of tawdry partisanship.