Electing a president: too much democracy?

Here is my column published in the 13 September issue of Christian Courier:

In the 1986 mid-term elections in the US, something occurred in my home state of Illinois illustrating the dangers of excessively democratizing a political system. In the primary election in March of that year two followers of extremist Lyndon LaRouche, an anti-semite who believes, among other things, that the Queen is the head of an international drug-smuggling ring, won the Democratic nominations for Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State. Were Illinoisans in an especially nettlesome mood that year, ready to throw their support behind a fanatical political agenda? Not at all.

US ballots are exceedingly lengthy and, to vote intelligently, Americans must educate themselves concerning scores of individual candidates. Party labels mean little, particularly at the primary election stage, when voters are responsible for narrowing the choice among possibly four or five candidates for each post. Given the difficulty in learning enough about each candidate, it is clear that many voters opt for those whose names sound safe, even if they know nothing else about them. In Illinois that year Democratic voters chose “LaRouchies” Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart over state senator George Sangmeister and Chicago alderman Aurelia Pucinski for their respective posts. The reassuring sound of Fairchild’s and Hart’s surnames gave them an advantage over the more obviously ethnic names of their opponents. Democratic Party leaders were appalled, but they were stuck with these two candidates, because the voters had spoken.

As a result of reforms instituted in the late 1960s and early ’70s, voters were empowered at the expense of party officials, ostensibly to break the control of the old urban bosses, such as Chicago’s late mayor Richard J. Daley. All of this sounded good at the time, and it was difficult to argue with something that would more thoroughly democratize the political process. However, the major effect of these reforms was to eliminate a valuable preliminary filtering mechanism that would ensure that a party’s candidates were qualified for their posts and stood within the mainstream of its political commitments. Often ill-informed voters were in effect being asked to make executive decisions better made by a smaller body.

It is no accident that, since the Democratic and Republican Parties made primary election results binding, Americans have chosen a series of presidents with little or no national or international experience. They have typically been governors of states who have won election by campaigning against Washington rather than for it. Once they have attained to the presidency, they have often been less than adept at co-operating with members of Congress and foreign leaders. Jimmy Carter was the first of these, his presidency marred by a series of unskilfully-handled foreign and domestic debacles climaxing with the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81. George W. Bush is the most recent, pursuing foreign and defence policies that have unnecessarily alienated US allies while failing to apprehend the principal mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.

Given that the United States is a superpower, whose every action on the international stage has global ramifications, the rest of the world has an interest in the process whereby a president comes to office. If it is not true after all that more democracy will cure the ills of democracy, and if excessive democratization puts relative neophytes into what is arguably the most powerful office in the world, then the two major parties badly need to revisit the process whereby they nominate a presidential candidate, leaving it to the voters to make only the final and not the initial decision.