I Do Not Need to Defend Myself for Believing That Political Candidates Should Be Chosen Democratically

primaries are the immune systems of political parties

Some people really had opinions about my brief flash of unhappiness over the process through which Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president - a coronation which did not require her to receive a single vote from an actual, normal Democratic voter. (It remains the case that she has never received a single vote from any voters outside of California, ever, in her political career, which some might suggest represents a wee bit of risk.) I remain disgusted but not surprised by the Democratic party and its machinations, where not even the smallest fig leaf of democratic process survived Harris’s blitzkrieg approach to the nomination. (That is, having it handed to her by her friends in elite Democratic circles.) And I think Democrats are essentially rerunning 2016, where their loyalty to the Clintonite center-right political machine compelled them to nominate an incredibly flawed candidate in a race in which any generic Democratic governor or senator almost certainly would have won. The party never learns. And so we have the confluence of strategic idiocy and rank elitist control. Well: I decline to obediently get onboard the way that (for example) the entire New York Times Opinion section has. Let me explain.

It’s not really about Kamala. As was to be expected, there was a loud response from a certain vocal faction of Democrats who have relentlessly policed any perceived slight against Kamala Harris, for years, saying that of course I immediately complained about the first Black woman presidential candidate of a major party!, but Kamala is a secondary part of the problem. The major problem is that I think the Democrats have essentially abandoned any pretense that the voters get to choose their candidates, which is part of a larger bad dynamic where the party is increasingly ruled by an utterly unaccountable aristocracy of cutthroat neoliberals. This is intertwined with the deepening gerontocracy problem in American politics, in which the only way senescent political leaders leave the stage is in a coffin. This trouble with elite overriding of popular sentiment is far bigger than Kamala Harris. I assure you that if everything had happened in the exact same way, but Mayor Pete was the one selected by the Politburo, I would be just as unhappy about it.

But also nobody thinks she’s the candidate most likely to win. Even many of the people who believe that we had to nominate Kamala will quietly concede that if we had absolutely no other priority higher than beating Trump, we’d nominate Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, or perhaps Tim Walz or Mark Kelly - swing or red state governors who can distance themselves from the unpopular elements of the Biden administration; credibly claim not to have known the degree of Biden’s cognitive impairment; plausibly play the role of sensible stewards of government; and demonstrate a proven ability to attract independents and Dem-curious voters. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris was in the Biden administration, obviously must have known the degree of his infirmity, and (have I mentioned this before?) has never received a vote for anything outside of California. The chin-stroking types dismissed the chance of a Bernie Sanders presidency, despite his excellent polling numbers head-to-head against Trump, because he was supposedly too susceptible to attacks as a crazy Vermont socialist. But is a San Francisco liberal really any less vulnerable to that kind of attack? And of course Harris has had a number of really painful gaffes in her career, seems to lack strong political instincts, withdrew from the 2020 primary before any votes had been cast to avoid the embarrassment of finishing fifth or sixth…. Call me crazy, but I think it’s legitimate to point out just how deeply risky her candidacy is. I don’t care how ruthlessly BlueAnon attacks anyone who points that risk out.

If this is a racist and sexist nation, nominate with that in mind. One of the bizarre elements of progressive rhetoric right now is this combination of beliefs:

1. We have to defeat Donald Trump at all costs

2. This country is filled with racism and sexism

3. We have a moral duty to nominate a Black woman for the presidency

Doesn’t make a ton of sense, right? “At all costs” means that you put everything else aside, including the importance of representation in identity terms. And yet half of what gets published in support of Harris’s bid is straightforward identity politics, arguing that she’s the right person because it will finally hand women the most powerful office in the land and serve as a beacon for young Black children and show that we’ve fully moved on from the rampant bigotry of Trumpism…. None of that is putting the defeat of Donald Trump first; all of it privileges within coalition values over attracting voters from outside of the coalition. If it’s true that we’re a deeply racist and sexist nation, as most Harris supporters believe, then it follows that she’s facing serious electoral weaknesses because of that fact! Of course this isn’t absolute, I do believe it’s getting better, and these bigotries can be overcome - Barack Obama did twice, and rather handily. But then, Barack Obama is one of the most gifted politicians of our time and has always possessed an intrinsic ability to project a soothing and safe persona. Kamala Harris… is not one of the most gifted politicians of our time.

No, there was not a real Democratic primary. I and others have complained over the years about the “this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, it’s happening and it’s good” tendency in American politics. This is where some political faction or constituency responds to a given critique or concern by denying that the described problem exists, repeatedly, until said problem becomes so undeniable that they are forced to pivot to saying that it’s good, actually. I’ve previously nominated the rise of social justice illiberalism on campus as a paradigmatic example: some of us said that these impositions on free speech and academic freedom on college campuses were sure to spread, others said that what happened at college didn’t matter and nothing was going to spread, again and again, until that brand of social justice illiberalism became ubiquitous across elite culture, at which point they stopped denying that those ideas were spreading and instead asserted that they were spreading and that was good. I’m experiencing something like this same whiplash when it comes to the supposed 2024 Democratic presidential primary: people are simultaneously insisting that a real primary was held, so what are you complaining about, but also of course a sitting president wasn’t forced to go through a genuine primary process, that would be crazy. I find it very aggravating!

I promise you, Democratic leadership made it very clear behind the scenes that any credible challenger to Biden would have been fucked for life by the party apparatus had they joined the race. You know how Nancy Pelosi just shivved Biden, rather effortlessly, ending his political career? Yeah. They can do that kind of thing. Dean Phillips is a largely-anonymous back-bench Congressman who’s also immensely wealthy - in other words, someone who had nothing to lose by launching a vanity campaign. Marianne Williamson is someone I have a lot of respect for, but she has clearly never been taken seriously by the Democratic party and had zero shot at the nomination. A real primary would have entailed real choices, and the fact that the Beshears and Shapiros and Gretchen Whitmers and Gavin Newsoms sat this one out, despite the fact that Trump is in many ways a very beatable opponent, reflects an understanding that you can’t have a successful career as a Democrat if you don’t play ball the with the village elders. They’d rather wait until 2028 than risk the wrath of Nancy.

Ross Barkan, one year ago:

Biden has the entire party establishment on his side. The D.N.C. has formally endorsed him, which means that the organization, in addition to rubber-stamping a primary calendar that is far more favorable to him, will not sponsor any debates. Normally, this wouldn’t matter much; incumbent presidents enjoy such deference. But Biden is already the oldest president in history and would be 86 if he finishes a second term. Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Democrats don’t want him to run again (though this doesn’t mean they won’t vote for him). His approval ratings consistently hover around 40 percent.

Whoops!

It’s an insult to say that the Democrats held a real primary. Nobody thinks that. Everyone knew it wasn’t a real primary. Hardly anyone bothered to vote. Florida, the third-biggest and arguably most politically important state in the country, canceled its primary to almost no controversy. The total number of all ballots cast in the primary, in a country with 50 states and more than 330 million people, was equal to half the population of Texas. Biden received less than a third as many votes in the primary as there are registered Democrats in the country, and twenty states don’t require or report partisan affiliation for registered voters! Did you ever turn on CNN and see “Democrats: The Decision 2024” on the chyron? Did you chew your nails waiting for the results from New Hampshire to come in? Were there any debates? Was there any chance, in a million years, that Dean Phillips or Marianne Williamson would even meaningfully challenge in a single state? No! Because it was never a primary! No one ever thought it was a primary! Please don’t insult my intelligence. You can argue that Biden was handed the nomination because he was the president and that’s what parties do, OK. That’s true, parties do that. But please, drop the pretense that there was some sort of rigorous Democratic primary process here. There wasn’t. And for the record, it’s bad that parties just hand sitting presidents the nomination now, because…

Primaries are the immune systems of political parties. You know how we’re in this big terrible mess because Joe Biden looked too infirm and compromised to win a presidential election? You know how everybody’s been freaking out for a month about it? Well, there was one way that we could have averted this disaster: holding an actual fucking primary. Had there been a primary, Biden’s weakness would have been made apparent months ago. Had there been debates, Biden’s vulnerability in that format would have been unmistakable. Had there been a primary, all of these decisions about how to replace Biden could have been made not just with democratic legitimacy but with the added data that a primary provides, with the knowledge of who performed better and who performed worse. I’ve said before, the fact that Harris looked so feeble after she was attacked by Tulsi Gabbard in the last primary cycle - attacked quite effectively, I might add, simply with an accurate representation of her record as a prosecutor - is the kind of thing that primaries reveal. They weed out weakness. They give us more understanding of how candidates perform on the trail and under pressure. We’ve been robbed of that information.

And, if you’re a big Harris partisan, you should be mad that she never got that chance! You should want her to have been given another crack at the primary process so that she could have rewritten the ugly 2020 story and demonstrated that she’s the best woman for the job. You should want her to have had the chance to silence the doubters and prove that she was the choice of ordinary Democrats. Now, win or lose she’ll likely never face a real primary again.

Something could have happened at the convention. Was any outcome going to be ideal, after Biden’s withdrawal? No. Should there have been some process through which Harris had to be chosen over real rivals at the convention? Yes! I can’t tell you what the right kind of contested or brokered convention would have been. But the 1968 Democratic convention was contested, as was the 1976 Republican convention. Neither of the candidates who emerged won the general election, but the parties and candidates survived the process, and had McGovern and Ford been better candidates they would have won the presidency. And FDR took the Democratic nomination in 1932 in a famously hectic convention process, after which he became the first and only person to be elected President four times. You can say that nobody appears to want to contest the convention, but again this simply speaks to my entire complaint here - the Democratic party has made itself totally inimical to internal grassroots democracy and breaks with party leadership, to the point that ambitious Democrats feel that they can’t possibly buck what Pelosi/Schumer/Obama/Jeffries/the ghost of Dianne Feinstein want.

The party decides in other countries/the party decided in the past. Yes, I am aware that in many countries in the world, candidates are chosen by parties without any kind of democratic primary process. I am aware that old men in smokey rooms used to choose presidential nominees. But… so what? Is that the system that we’ve been using during my lifetime? And, most importantly, is there a systematic rule-bound process through which we returned to the rule of the smokey room, this year? No, to both. I don’t like it regardless, because I like democracy. Yeah, in other countries where there are many more viable parties, among whom parliamentary seats are divided, party choice makes somewhat more sense. But that’s not true here, so it’s irrelevant. Yeah, sometimes unaccountable party insiders are good at ruthlessly choosing nominees who have the best possible chances of electoral success, putting results ahead of sentiment. But Democratic insiders have been shitting the bed when it comes to that kind of strategic thinking lately, haven’t they? And again, if you to say that rule by party poohbahs is the better system, you have to have some sort of organized and fair process through which you switch to it, not just a bunch of hideously wealthy and out-of-touch party elites putting their heads together and deciding that it’s Kamala and that there will be no dissent allowed.

You need to move on and do better than “support my candidate or you’re a racist and a sexist,” because that didn’t work last time. Unsurprisingly, I’m already getting “you’re just mad because you hate Black women.” To which I would say, first, that does not work on me, personally, and has never worked on me. I don’t give a fuck about your opportunistic and cynical accusations of racism and sexism. Second, that approach was flogged relentlessly by the “I’m With Her” crowd in 2016, and it was doubly disastrous - it was toxically effective within the coalition, leading to a brutally ugly primary and widespread post-primary disillusionment among young Bernie Sanders voters, and was totally ineffective outside of the coalition, as it turns out that laid off machinists in decaying Rust Belt cities are not particularly moved by being told that they need to vote for the Democrat or else they’re racist. It’s an absurd farce of an argument, it led to a really toxic atmosphere within the Democratic coalition for a long time, it’s utterly politically inert, and it makes you look weak, like you don’t have a positive agenda that you can use to persuade people. Kamala Harris has glaring flaws as a candidate and no record whatsoever of earning votes outside of California. The K-Hive calling people racist can’t change those facts. But she can make the case for herself and you can support her, substantively, by doing real politics.

Representative Joyce Beatty told the NYT, “you’re going to skip over the most qualified and vetted person — our vice president — who happens to be female and a person of color?”

That just sounds weak, Congresswoman. Do better than that. Get new material, guys. Get new material. You’re gonna need it.