Tag Archives: election 2024

Burdened by What Has Been

There is a certain reassurance in thundering about the tactical mistakes of a political party. There is vindication in picking out specific flaws, certain quotes that political junkies will laugh at years later. I could turn this post into a tirade about how Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign folded up after amassing decent levels of goodwill through its candidate’s ascension and through a debate with Donald Trump where she easily goaded him into being his worst self. I could grumble about its inability to message on the most pressing issues, and its reliance on old media and a sloppy use of its incredible fundraising haul. There is plenty of ammo.

But Harris’s opponent was a ridiculous figure who also ran a deeply bizarre race, with campaign rallies as performance art and masculinity elevated to a cartoonish extreme. Donald Trump did not win because he ran a brilliant operation, and Kamala Harris did not lose because she ran a terrible one: they ran as fairly predictable candidates in the world of 2024. In basically every functioning democracy, incumbent parties are suffering terribly, left and right. (Congrats on being the sole exception, Mexico.) This is a deeply disappointing explanation to anyone who wants to talk about voter agency and brilliant campaign work and the untold millions of dollars dumped into this race, but, well, we didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree.

That inability to appreciate the context, goofy campaign quotes aside, points to the fundamental struggle of the Democratic Party right now, one that goes deeper than any specific campaign issue. It is run by a bunch of people who have succeeded in the conventional terms of American life and are often blind to pathways outside of it. It is filled with managerial competence, able to get all the right language in a vacuum but blind to the animal forces beyond its narrowed scope. This professionally run machine knows how to cut loose some losing issues (such as basically everything Harris stood for in her ill-fated 2020 cycle campaign) and even candidates (post-debate Biden), but that cutting is almost always in retrospect, when the vague party blob realizes a message or messenger is a loser, instead of building a positive brand from the start. It leaves open the question is what they actually stand for, other than a few broadly popular ideas with everything else stripped away.

More fundamentally, it misses out on the energy of the Trump campaign, the outreach to people who aren’t true believers. It loses itself in policy details and substance-free vibes instead of a deeper attention to trends in American life: how people get their news, what unsettles them most deeply, what it takes to provide hope in a difficult place. On the deeper malaise plaguing American politics, the current Democratic Party has no answers. It had a chance to reach for some this cycle, in a competitive process to choose a successor to Biden, but after the exertion of forcing him aside, everyone just shrugged and jumped on the hype train for a Vice President saddled with his record.

As a Minnesotan I feel obligated to say a few words about Tim Walz, even if some of my state-mates may not love them. I think Walz is basically a replacement level Democratic politician, and his selection was the canary in the coal mine for a risk-averse, vibes-driven campaign. This is not to say he does not have genuine strengths; he can fill a room with charisma and speaks with the throwback down-to-earth style of a politician from a less toxic era. He didn’t do anything to materially cost Harris votes, and the margin of defeat is large enough that no Josh Shapiro fantasy could have swung it, either. But Walz ran as a liberal’s projection of what a moderate conservative voter might like, as if flannel and football could somehow cover for inflation and immigration. His selection was emblematic of the failure to grapple with deeper substance.

Democrats exist within the context they exist. They cannot just say we are not going back and then will it so. Donald Trump tells stories about this context, often kooky and sometimes profoundly harmful for some people, but they also sometimes hint at deeper truths about American life. He has concepts of plans that address these stories, ill-formed but recognizable in their general thrust to the median voter. Liberalism writ large, faced with a populist threat, has little in the way of the coherent story or the platform that is anything more than a laundry list.

I will end with questions, a soup of thoughts that get at this morass, shadows in Plato’s cave. Can economic statistics accurately capture a skyrocketing cost of living and a labor market that demands a lot of people? How does a superpower, its relative power waning but its absolute power still supreme, credibly manage its place in the world? What does it mean to be a young man today, especially a single one? For that matter, what does it mean to be a young woman? What endures in an era of social media ephemera? What gives people their faith in a collective future?

I remain generally optimistic about that American future. The US’s troubles, while real, are small relative to a sclerotic Europe and the demographic time bombs in an East Asia where no one has babies anymore. This country’s vastness, complexity, and dynamism render the red-versus-blue political obsession fairly small, when one cuts out the noise. But someone needs to weave a coherent thread to string through questions like these.

Circulation of Elites

This dude is Vilfredo Pareto. He had a knack for finding patterns in human interaction, including some of the foundational insights into what we now would call sociology, and he wandered into my mind last week as I gazed in stupefaction as two old men lied, conveyed senility, and bragged about their golf handicaps in a competition to control the United States nuclear codes.

One of Pareto’s most useful concepts is called the circulation of elites. Basically, it says there’s a cycle by which vigorous people rise to power, hold it for a spell through a healthy balance of different impulses, and eventually lose that balance and tail off to be replaced by a new elite. The circulation of elites happens in any society, democratic or autocratic, open and free or closed and rigid. Just as some European nations seem to cycle through a new government every few weeks, the Soviets anointed and purged commissars; dynasties rise and then are overthrown, the Roman Empire conquers the world before it declines and falls.

The circulation of elites is a natural life span in any society, and it is reproduced on many smaller scales, much more often trading among competing power brokers and only very rarely taking form as a bottom-up revolution. (And when it does, those tend to be the bloodiest regime changes of all.) “History is a graveyard of aristocracies,” Pareto wrote, tracing how a rising, hungry elite that grabs on to valuable insights can dislodge a predecessor. The change often happens slowly, and then all at once.

How this circulation happens can be radically different, and the ease with which they happen is the difference between a stable, peaceable society and a bloody, chaotic one. Because the churn is always happening, a society needs methods to bring in new talented people and shed off those whose time has gone. It needs to break down the inherited status, clubbishness, and groupthink that can pervade in an entrenched elite. The most stable societies create pathways for talented people to rise and create institutions where no one person can stay at the top forever.

In the United States, that structure that does this has come to be known as a meritocracy. Meritocracy can be something of a dirty word these days; it is often woefully incomplete in practice, and even the best and brightest will sometimes fail at the greatest tasks before them. But it is still probably the best on offer, and on a global scale, a relative ability to keep the circulation going is more important than the absolute fluidity of a social order. A strong meritocracy sets a standard for achievement, creates its own internal ethical codes that filter out some of the most erratic people, and builds the norms and expectations necessary for a lot of people to live in relative peace. As a child of the American system I can poke holes at its incompleteness and internal flaws all day, but I still see the value it provides.

The beauty of a well-functioning democracy is that it provides a fairly responsive and usually nonviolent mechanism for circulating elites and forcing them to display some aptitudes to gain power. The American elite has always shown some capacity to circulate, and while the process can be lurching, it is often better here than in other places.* Leaders who suck get voted out of office, and if their replacements suck they also get voted out of office. The American two-party system, for all its flaws, creates two opportunities to bring forth new talent, both within each party and through rotations of power between them.

This is no less true today. Donald Trump certainly circulated an elite when he blew up a party that had become unresponsive to the electorate. He stabbed at the heart of the zombie Reaganism that was still carrying the Republicans through a world far removed from the one where Reagan built his majority. The fallout from that shift is still taking shape, and beneath all the Trumpian will to power the right is in a fascinating state right now as it invites in new critiques of the American state and tries to figure out what it stands for.

At the top, however, the Republicans are now overdue for another churn. The party has now put forward the same presidential candidate three elections in a row, a deeply divisive man now 78 years old, and the only reason we are not talking about his decline is the much more evident decline in the guy on the other side. The Republicans now exemplify the oldest of the Greek critiques of democracy: the ease with which a system stripped of any other mediating powers can degenerate into mob fervor and the charisma of a strongman. The more this party becomes a vehicle for one man and his family, the less likely its story is to have a happy ending.

The Democratic Party, more of a competition among competing interests than its counterpart, has proven a bit more structurally resilient. In 2020, a fractured field stopped its squabbling and got in line behind the guy best suited to dethrone Trump at the time. The party has a deep bench of interesting rising figures, including a bunch of Rust Belt governors who have directly attacked the causes of the 2016 failure, who could circulate up if given the opportunity. But the Democrats are still subject to the inertia of an old elite that can cost them dearly, both in the decision to line up behind Hillary Clinton because it was “her turn,” and now in the slow-motion train wreck of Joe Biden’s campaign that never should have been. Last week’s debate was, perhaps, an egregious enough peak to wake people to this fact, but it will still take true courage and inventiveness for Democrats to do what they have to do and find a new candidate.

Great people can shape history, but their moments come and go in a heartbeat, especially if they themselves do not change with the times. Knowing when to stand aside for someone new can take uncommon humility, or at least a clear-eyed understanding of one’s role and realistic chances in a broader drama. Ideally, a system should never let it come to that. But we are where we are, and anyone who wants to avoid increasingly ugly transitions of power had better root for some circulation of elites.

Image credit: By Unknown author – [1] [2], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68615041

* Lengthy comparative politics student footnote: Some very autocratic societies can seem stable, but rarely do they come to happy endings. Despots can rule for a very long time through enough fear and control, but when they do finally fall, it can get brutal, as the Arab Spring showed. Imperial dynasties are some of the longest lasting regimes in human history, and while the monarchs and emperors make their divine claims, the brilliance of these systems lurks in the shadows of great palaces. Imperial China owed its stability to a deep bureaucracy that did circulate regularly, often forced by the castration of its most important functionaries. The absolute monarchies of Spain and Portugal ossified quickly, while the nimbler Brits created a system for regular changes in the Parliament behind the monarchial figurehead, and thus an obscure island built the greatest empire ever known to humanity. They even gave up that empire without a serious internal collapse, which, whatever else we may say about its colonial legacy, is a remarkable achievement.

Party systems can also do their own filtering and circulating, and single-party states can lock in the control for a spell. In the early-to-mid twentieth century, Mexico developed what Mario Vargas Llosa called la dictadura perfecta, the perfect dictatorship, in which the Revolutionary Institutional Party (what a name) just ran the show by tacking left and right with the mood of the country, careful to pay off just enough interest groups to keep everyone passably happy. Post-Mao China functioned in a similar way, as the ideology fell out of the Communist Party and the country exploded on to a path of remarkable growth.

But this single party road runs the risk of capture by either inflexible interests or a single strongman, and with no competing party to offer a realistic alternative, there is less of a check on these instincts than in a competitive democracy. Mexico’s regime eventually broke down, toppled by its own cruel reactions to a radical left and as it went broke trying to cover all its bases, though certain legacies of that era, like the single-term limits on office holders, are now saving graces for Mexico’s very imperfect democracy. China is now abandoning its ideological fluidity under Xi Jinping, a shift that is both worrying for short term global stability but in the long run leaves me much more bullish on the American position vis-à-vis its greatest geopolitical rival. Xi may do a lot of damage in the near term, but he is systematically weakening his party’s ability to adapt to changing realities, including his own eventual passing.