The people’s choice
Bernie Sanders, who is not a Democrat but a socialist independent, burst into the lead in one poll last week in the Democratic presidential primary.
The Democratic Party doesn’t want him to be its nominee. But it seems that a lot of … you know, people, dang it … do.
Four years ago, Donald Trump, who wasn’t a Republican but a narcissistic personality disorder, won the Republican presidential nomination though the party didn’t want him. The trouble, again, was people.
It all goes to show the brilliant insight in the observation that our political parties have never been weaker, but that partisanship has never been stronger.
What that means is that the contemporary political parties are increasingly irrelevant as cohesive and influential forces. It means they exist mostly as general default affiliations for people who define that affiliation by hating or at least intensely resenting the other party.
Why are you a Democrat? It’s because you have disdain for the abject meanness and hypocrisy of modern conservative Republicanism, most likely.
Why are you a Republican? Most likely it’s because you think modern Democrats are ruining your country.
The modern media orgy producing the instant ubiquity of “breaking news” has made everyone a self-styled individual expert. Social media allows everyone to distribute their own personal political platforms, often taking the form of demonization of those who disagree.
The modern culture has implanted individual choice in place of allegiance to groups. It’s hardly a matter of political parties alone.
People aren’t going to church as much as they once did; instead, they design their own spirituality that allows them to sleep in Sunday mornings.
You watch whatever television program you want whenever you want—on your schedule, not by any network’s dictate. All one needs anymore is a search engine.
So last week I was trying to figure out what to say at Hot Springs Village to the Democratic club in that lovely retirement community. I knew I’d tell them what I always tell Democratic groups. It’s that I’m a not a Democrat but a newspaper opinion writer who tells the truth and thus often sounds like one.
But this time I thought I’d also tell them that the other speaker they’d scheduled on their program was infinitely more relevant to the modern political condition.
Their plan, as related to me, was to hear secondarily—which I thought should have been primarily—from David Couch. He’s the lawyer in Little Rock now active and expert in drafting, distributing and enacting citizens’ initiatives that bypass legislative bodies.
The major accomplishments in recent Arkansas law have come through wholly nonpartisan citizen initiatives—mostly Couch’s—passed by the people’s direct and independent individual choice.
The minimum wage has been raised that way. Medicinal marijuana has been permitted that way. Casinos have been opened that way.
Given an opportunity to govern themselves directly on issues transcending partisan resentments, the people, it turns out, will be pragmatically permissive—at least when it comes to wages, supposed pain relief and a willingness to let people feed the slots if people are going to do it anyway in Oklahoma and Mississippi and deny our state the revenue.
Now Couch is coming with a citizens’ initiative that would take from the parties the decennial redrawing of legislative districts based on new census data and give it to an independent commission that presumably would draw districts logically for the people rather than by gerrymandering for the parties.
Arkansas Democrats like the initiative now because they’re in the distant minority. But there’s always a table to turn someday.
That left me with only two things to say. One was that most of the modern political dysfunction occurs at the national level. It’s that Arkansas Democrats have well-served the state by acceding in their minority to pragmatic solutions rather than embracing obstruction for partisanship’s sake.
Arkansas Democrats could have blocked Medicaid expansion because Asa Hutchinson and Republicans imposed a silly work requirement on health-care service for poor people. But denying health care to 250,000 because 20,000 got thrown off, all for the purpose of a tactical election issue— that’s what Washington would do.
The other was that Democrats, in their general disarray but specific obsession, have only one job. It’s to galvanize their negative partisanship into an effective force to beat the madman, Trump.
Should they seek to do that by motivating their own base to try to replicate Barack Obama’s record turnout? Or should they seek to do that by converting about 70,000 swing voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania who delivered a second-place presidency to Trump because they liked the Democratic option four years ago even less?
Yes.
In this era of choice, that’s a false one.
You need to feed everything you can into the electoral college. It’s about the only group institution left that’s good at thwarting the people’s choice.