How American Democracy Thrives . . . Or Dies
The course I am teaching at Vanderbilt with Nick Zeppos coincides with the 2024 presidential primaries
Today Nick Zeppos and I will hold the first class of our spring semester honors course entitled “How American Democracy Thrives . . . Or Dies.”
The timing is uncanny, as well as opportune, since our deep dive into the cardinal features of healthy democracy coincides with the exhibition of the greatest dysfunction of all in American politics: our presidential nominating system.
The current system, adopted by ill-advised reforms in the early 1970s, fed an authoritarian demagogue into the presidential pipeline in 2016. It repeated this gross negligence in 2020. And today we are bracing for the third season of this perilous roadshow.
The first Republican caucus will take place in Iowa a week from today, on January 15, and in six months the Republican National Convention will wrap up its gala of speeches and pretended delegate voting in Milwaukee.
As you know, expectations are running high that a sufficient number of hamstrung delegates will once again nominate Donald J. Trump as the Republican candidate for president.
That is to say, unless a miracle happens in the first few days of the Republican convention, some 2,365 delegates in Milwaukee will be ironclad "bound" to presidential candidates according to bizarre and, in many cases, anti-democratic state primary election formulas that disable them from voting their consciences in perhaps the most high-stakes presidential nominating convention in all American history.
Literally, this means that if Donald Trump shoots someone on Fifth Avenue in April or May, as he himself claimed he could do and not lose followers in early 2016, the delegates bound to him by primary elections will have no choice but to cast their votes for him as the next president of the United States.
Yes, this is true. It’s shocking, depressing, and exceedingly dangerous to our democracy—yet entirely true.
How did we arrive at this self-destructive dead end in our democracy? The answer is the well-intentioned but disastrous reforms of the presidential nominating system that took effect in the early 1970s. Those reforms stripped delegates of all power to block the ascent of demagogues and authoritarians. Those reforms killed off one of the most essential checks and balances within our democratic system and, in doing so, opened the gates to the death of our democracy itself.
Without those reforms, woefully ignorant of history, Donald Trump would never have been nominated in 2016. Today he would be nothing more than a sham real estate tycoon from New York City. Instead, due to the changes, Trump is a roaring mortal menace to the republic.
Elsewhere over the next six months, you will be reading about the state-by-state circus of caucuses and primaries that the media loves so much and profits so handsomely from.
Here on American Commonwealth, I will be giving you something different. I will be critiquing and criticizing our presidential nominating system as you witness it unfold in real time. I will be providing you with historical context and background as well as the pros and cons of how we currently select candidates.
And, not least, I will be calling for reform of our dysfunctional system—if not something far more radical—as the best pathway forward for protecting our democracy from further pillage at the hands of demagogues and authoritarians.
I will also be updating you on the political science course, because education moves mountains in a democracy and because I want share with you the key points I learn from these young people who I know will challenge me and thus make me a more effective writer and advocate for change.
Thank you for reading. I especially want to give a shout-out to those of you who support my work with a small annual paid subscription. Your generosity empowers and galvanizes me.