Jonah Goldberg with one of his classic broadsides against our broken primary system:
People hate on “smoke-filled rooms” because they think such venues give the rich and powerful undue influence over the nominating process. That is surely the case, though it did produce some pretty good presidents. It also produced some bad ones, though the blame for their failures can rarely be put at the feet of Fat Cats and Robber Barons. But the brief against smoke-filled rooms leaves out the fact that primaries are steamy garbage dumps for the same forces. The “money primary” and the “media primary” aren’t pristine processes either. Indeed, the primaries provide a form of “democracy washing” the influence of big money and rampant demagoguery—by the candidates and their donors and media boosters. What the primary system does is cut out the gatekeepers, the institutionalists, the small-r republican figures who care about the integrity of the party, the salience of various unsexy issues, and this thing called “governance.” When the party is in control, it still cares a lot about winning, but it also cares about the long-term viability of the party, its issues, and down-ballot candidates. Congressmen who want to get reelected might want a more boring presidential candidate that will put the party above his own ego and self-interest.
When some, like Jonah, want a return to smoke-filled rooms, the democracy-above-all crowd screams that with elites and gatekeepers between The People and their choices, it’s some kind of tyranny. What they fail to appreciate is how patently undemocratic the existing primary system is.
“Democracy washing” is such a great term to describe the current system. Pure, popular-democracy primaries give us a simulacrum of choice, without the underlying reality. If we don’t slog through the messy horse-trading and argumentation of the old 1880 style Jonah writes about during Garfield’s time, we trade better results for the ability to pretend The People are in the driver’s seat.
The patient slog through debate and argument is the process of better results simmering in the oven. Sure, we can bake the ribs in the toaster, but let me know how those turn out compared to giving them time to braise.
Like many things in our immature culture, we get so preoccupied with processes looking the way we want them to that we never do the mental trade-offs to determine if we’re getting better or worse results. Or if the thing we think is happening is even happening in the first place.
(The link to the article might be paywalled. But take that as tip to subscribe to The Dispatch.)