Don’t let me down, America. I’ve been extolling U.S.-style open primaries for as long as I’ve been in politics. I’ve written papers declaring that they are the surest defense against oligarchy. They tilt the balance from executive to legislature, I tell anyone who’ll listen; they disperse power. Ordinary people are wiser than politicians.
Now, I find that people come back at me with a smug five-word put-down: “Bernie Sanders. And Donald Trump”.
Look, I get that you’re fed up with politicians. No doubt yours can be as tedious, narcissisitic and wrong as anyone else’s. But, trust me, most countries would gladly swap their legislators for America’s. Why? Because primaries weed out the duds. In TV debates, in front rooms, on local radio, at rallies, the cranks get exposed. Not always; but often enough for the system to work.
The same is not true in Europe where, to get yourself elected, you generally have to appeal to only a few dozen party activists. Indeed, in much of Eastern and Southern Europe, candidate lists are drawn up solely by the party leader, meaning that any halfwit can get chosen provided he is loyal enough or obsequious enough.
My faith in primaries had already taken a bit of a battering. Two big parties on this side of the Atlantic recently widened the electorate when choosing their leaders. France’s Socialists ended up with Francois Hollande; Britain’s Labor Party with Jeremy Corbyn, whose latest gaffe — though, frankly, they are coming so thick and fast that it’s hard to keep up — was to refuse to sing the national anthem at a service to honor the pilots who defeated fascism in World War II.
In fairness, though, neither primary was fully open. Both parties invited members of the public to become registered supporters in exchange for a small fee. In both cases, you could argue that a properly open primary would have swamped the extremists who took advantage of the offer.
There is wisdom in crowds. The phenomenon that makes Wikipedia reliable is the same as the one that makes market economies successful. Crowds are not always right; but they are smarter, on balance, than self-selected groups of experts, prone as they are to groupthink and confirmation bias.
Edmund Burke, the father of Anglosphere conservatism, put it as well as anyone ever has:
“Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”
Sometimes, the grasshoppers get their way. The bailout boondoggle, for example, was widely supported by pundits and politicians, but opposed by large majorities in every opinion poll. More often, though, the oxen impose themselves, which is why socialists have struggled to get elected in America — except, obviously, for Bernie.
I’m not sure which is more alarming: The idea of that the Occupy Movement has occupied the party of Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland and Harry Truman; or the idea that the GOP might go in a single generation from Reagan to Trump. Sure, they may both have been TV personalities and former Democrats. But the Gipper understood how to be anti-establishment without being a crass, foul-mouthed narcissist.
I get that people don’t want “politics as usual.” People never do. The anti-politician candidate is becoming quite a cliche: Think of Monty Burns, the plutocrat in “The Simpsons,” campaigning to be governor by repeatedly telling crowds: “We’ re gonna send a message to those bureaucrats down there in the state capital!”
There is nothing daring about reviving the ideology that was pushed over when they knocked down the Berlin Wall. There is nothing exciting about picking a guy whose appeal rests on having had his voice beamed into living rooms. It’s not even modern. Pappy O’Daniel, who hosted a popular radio show in Texas in the 1930s, used his fame to become that state’s governor and senator. He was colorful but ineffective, and is now remembered mainly because of the parody in the Coen Brothers film, “O Brother Where Art Thou?”
Oh, brother. Do I need to remind you that America has a $18 trillion debt? Is this the moment to shrug in disdain, to moan that it’s all too complicated, to vote for the snake-oil salesman just to annoy the stiffs?
A democracy, as the old chestnut has it, gets the politicians it deserves. America deserves better.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
