Progress, however defined, is rarely an unalloyed good. The Law of Unintended Consequences is as unforgiving as Murphy’s.
One downside to blogging while employed is too little time for the sessile act of reading printed books. A downside to blogging even more is so much time spent online that it is even harder to sit still with a book. So, now it’s audiobooks while exercising. Recently, “I Alone Can Fix It” (2021), “Exit Right” (2016), and currently “How Democracies Die” (2018).
Early in that third one, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt recount how our two major parties once held a tight grip on their presidential nominating processes. Smoke-filled rooms, while limiting grassroots input, provided a gatekeeper function to keep out fringe candidates. But post-1968 reforms created the primary process we see today. More democracy is good, right? Except when it’s not.
Levitsky told NPR’s Dave Davies:
Well, the belief among political scientists – and I think it was true for a while – was that winning primaries was hard. This was particularly before the days of social media, when you needed the support of local activists. You needed the support, maybe, of unions in the Democratic Party. You needed the support of local media on the ground in each state in order to actually win primaries. You couldn’t just get on CNN and expect to win a primary somewhere in the West because of what you – or what you tweeted.
You had to have some kind of an infrastructure on the ground. I’m talking about the 1970s, 1980s, even the 1990s. And so the belief among political scientists was you still needed the support of party insiders to win the primaries, to win – to cross the country and accumulate enough delegates, winning state by state by state. You really needed to build alliances with local Democratic or Republican Party leaders, committees, senators, congresspeople, mayors, et cetera.
That became less and less true over time in large part because the nature of media – the rise of social media and the ability of outsiders to make a name for themselves without going through that process, without going through that invisible primary. So Donald Trump demonstrated, you know, beyond any doubt in 2016 that at least if you have enough name recognition, you can avoid building alliances with anybody, really, at the state or local level. You can run on your own. You can be an outsider and win.
Social media was good. Until it wasn’t. Eliminating smoke-filled rooms was a democratizing good. Until Donald Trump. The upside to no gatekeepers is more democracy. The downside is demagogues.
Richard H. Pildes this morning examines how political fragmentation inside traditional parties the rise of scores of new ones has democracies floundering (New York Times):
Large structural forces have driven the fragmentation of politics throughout the West. On the economic front, the forces include globalization’s contribution to the stagnation of middle- and working-class incomes, rising inequality and outrage over the 2008 financial crisis. On the cultural side: conflicts over immigration, nationalism and other issues.
Since the New Deal in the United States and World War II in Europe, the parties of the left had represented less affluent, less educated voters. Now those voters are becoming the base of parties on the right, with more affluent, more educated voters shifting to parties on the left. Major parties are struggling to figure out how to patch together winning coalitions in the midst of this shattering transformation.
The communications revolution is also a major force generating the disabling fragmentation of politics. Across Europe, it has given rise to loosely organized, leaderless protest movements that disrupt politics and give birth to other parties — but make effective government harder to achieve.
In the United States, the new communications era has enabled the rise of free-agent politicians. A Congress with more free agents is more difficult to govern. Even in their first years in office, individual members of Congress (like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ted Cruz) no longer need to work their way up through the party or serve on major committees to attract national visibility and influence.
Fragmentation “reflects deep dissatisfaction with the ability of traditional parties and governments to deliver effective policies.” And at the same time makes it more difficult to deliver.
I’m not one of those who believe that when “The Democrats” fail to deliver everything on progressives’ wish list it is because, as supposed corporatist stooges, they secretly want to fail despite all the long hours of legislative wrangling. It is not that there aren’t a few members of both parties in bed with corporate sponsors. You know who they are. But few of us as kids got everything we wanted for Christmas, yet didn’t tag Santa with a corporatist agenda.
Under present circumstances, with the narrowest of Senate margins and with a couple of wild cards gumming up the works, it is going to be tough for Democrats to give me everything on my wish list. But I didn’t expect that of Santa, either. Nor did I attribute that to his foul motives.
This is one difficult puzzle to solve, with no single key to solving it. “Democracies must figure out how to overcome the forces of fragmentation to show they once again can deliver effective government,” Pildes writes. It is not clear just now that they can. And if they do, there will be unintended consequences. There always are.