Political Scientists Knew This Was Going to Happen

Berkeley Professors Polsby and Wildavsky warned in the 1980s that presidential primaries would give rise to demagogues

“The best-laid schemes of mice and men go oft askew”

Robert Burns, 1785

As you know, I am a proponent of reform as the secret sauce that saves imperiled democracies from decline into corruption and authoritarian rule.

After years of study, research, and writing, I have also come to the conclusion that the American presidential primary system adopted in the early 1970s constitutes the fatal flaw in our democracy that opened the doors of the Oval Office to a demagogue-cum-authoritarian like Donald Trump.

What’s far more instructive, however, than my opinion—saddled as it is with the burden of rationalizing retrospection—is that of Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky, two political scientists at Berkeley who first published their landmark book “Presidential Elections” in 1964.

Since then, “Presidential Elections” has been revised and updated sixteen times, most recently last year. By scholarly consensus, this work of political science is considered to be one of the most insightful texts ever written on electoral pathways to the U.S. presidency.

Yet, let’s turn back the clock. It’s not the 2023 edition that is of interest to those of us today who are seeking to understand what went wrong in 2016.

Instead, let’s look at the warnings of Polsby and Wildavsky contained in the 1988 book.

This edition is far more illuminating because hindsight muddles the truth. The “historian’s gaze”—or, in this case, the “political scientist’s gaze”—is altered by presentism, that is, the tendency of human beings to interpret past events through the lens of contemporary values, beliefs, desires, and longings, often quite righteously.

The 1988 edition of “Presidential Elections” issues a siren call against the proliferation of primaries as a means of selecting presidential candidates specifically because this alteration of the process, while well-intentioned, strips political party leadership of the power to thwart demagogues.

As Robert Burns penned in his famous poem “To a Mouse” in 1785:

The best-laid schemes of mice and men
Go oft askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

Similar was the opinion of Polsby and Wildavsky in 1988 in their evaluation of the evolution of the presidential nominating process from a party system to a primary system. By 1988, too many states, in their opinion, had adopted primaries, threatening the power of parties to exclude demagogues from the general election.

At the time, many talking heads were clamoring for a national primary, or universal state primaries in series. The authors strictly counseled against this on grounds that parties and conventions would loose control over presidential nominations.

As you know, the nation did not heed their advice. Today all power is lodged in primaries. The delegates who show up at the quadrennial party conventions are handcuffed to primary outcomes.

In the 1988 edition of the book, Polsby and Wildavsky argue that no reform of the presidential nominating system will more severely weaken parties than universal primaries.

Then, they cut to the chase, explicitly advising against the disempowerment of parties in this way for the vital reason that denuded party structures would be unable to block the rise of demagogues. As they wrote in 1988:

A national primary might also lead to the appearance of extremist candidates and demagogues who, unrestrained by allegiance to any permanent party organization, would have little to lose by stirring up mass hatred or making absurd promises.

In the event that this shift in power were to take place, they warn, “demagogues” may well come to replace parties:

The fact that under some primary systems an extreme personality can take the place of a party in giving a kind of minimal structure to state politics should give pause to the advocates of a national primary.

The historic party convention system, on the other hand, protects against demagogues:

On the whole, the convention system of the past discouraged these extremists by placing responsibility in the hands of party leaders who had a permanent stake in maintaining the good name and integrity of their organization.

Hazard to remove gatekeepers from the process, they urge, and the consequence will be the rise of unfit candidates and political campaigns “stressing personal publicity”:

[A primary system] encourages prospective candidates to bypass regular party organizations in favor of campaigns stressing personal publicity, and it provides for no peer review, that is, consideration of the criteria of fitness to hold office, which can best be applied by those who actually know the candidates, who have themselves a heavy investment of time and energy in making the government work, and who know that they may have to live at close quarters with the results of their deliberations.

In the absence of what they call the “anchorage” of political party vetting of candidates, demagogues will sway the people often by appealing to “feelings of ethnic kinship”:

Set a drift from this anchorage, as they are when faced with an intraparty primary election, most voters have little or nothing to guide their choices. Chance familiarity with a famous name or stray feelings of ethnic kinship under the circumstances seem to provide many voters with the only clues to choice.

American education of the electorate about presidential candidates is inadequate, they continue. Therefore, especially in the period after the mass introduction of television in the 1960s, primary voters will be subject to manipulation by the “news media”:

If we value political parties, which reformers often profess to do, then we must hesitate to cut them off from the process of selecting candidates for public office, to deprive them of incentives to organize, and to set them prematurely at the mercy of masses of people whose information at the primary stage is especially poor.

The presidency is simply too important, sensitive, and powerful to be put at risk. It demands rigorous vetting to exclude unfit candidates:

In short, we believe that as long as there are many things we demand of a president—intelligence as well as popularity, integrity as well as speaking ability, private virtue as well as public presentability—we ought to foster a selection process that provides a mixture of devices for screening according to different criteria.

What should these devices be? Who should do the vetting and screening of presidential candidates? What should the role of voters be? Party leaders? Delegates to conventions? How should delegates be selected if not in primary elections?

These are life-and-death questions in the third decade of the 21st century. Today’s presidential primary system has revealed its defects, fostering demagoguery, authoritarianism, and bloodshed far worse than that imagined by Polsby and Wildavsky.

Our democracy is not going to figure itself out, nor magically reform itself. Therefore, it’s up to us, you and me, to take up the mantle.

First, we must determine what is causing our democracy to spiral downward; second, we must strategize what to do about it; and third, we must implement changes that right the democratic ship of state, above all by blocking demagogues and authoritarians from seizing the helm.

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