On Reforming American Democracy

Reforming the presidential nominating system is the bulls-eye. No area of reform is so essential to our well-being—not by a long shot.

Try as I may, I cannot divert my attention away from the dangers of the U.S. presidency. My abiding interest is reform of our democracy aimed at arresting its further slide into the pit of demagoguery, corruption, and authoritarianism.

I am, to be sure, thankful for reform successes like the Electoral Count Reform Act as well as for critical reform efforts like the For the People Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. I hope and pray they eventually pass.

Still, I view these as sideshows to the central drama of American democracy today. 

That drama is a tragedy-in-waiting due to the dysfunctional nature of our presidential nominating system. In Act I, Trump or another authoritarian demagogue declares himself or herself a candidate for president of one of the major American political parties. Then the campaigning begins.

In Act II, that candidate receives not a majority of the votes in a party’s presidential primaries but only a plurality of the votes—and wins. And not only this anti-democratic shortcoming. The votes of “the people” in the primaries are, for the most part, activist votes tabulated from low-turnout elections.

The result is that average voters are not represented and moderate candidates split moderate votes and extremist candidates, like Donald Trump, win. In the 2016 primaries, for example, Trump clinched the primary victory with a highly unrepresentative 5 percent of the U.S. electorate.

By the end of Act II, the demagogue has secured the requisite plurality of popular votes necessary to control the votes of the delegates who proceed to the sham quadrennial presidential nominating conventions.

That’s Act III. The conventions are sham because they are composed of glitter and gold and grandstanding with no actual power to make a difference to the party or the nation. At the conventions, delegates are “bound” to cast their votes in favor of the assigned candidate even if it seems likely that such a candidate will trash and burn the Constitution.

This state of political party disempowerment is, as a reminder, a recent innovation undertaken in the name of “more democracy” in the early 1970s. Since then, convention delegates have been little more than puppets operated by the low-turnout, plurality-vote candidate who won the unrepresentative party primaries.

Is this an intelligent presidential nominating system, or is it rather an invitation to political suicide? My view is that any such unrepresentative system that possesses no built-in checks and balances to prevent the rise of demagogues and authoritarians to executive power is indeed a ready noose for a laissez-faire democracy.

In Act IV of the American tragedy, the demagogue wins the general election for president. Here again, this happens because are no checks and balances to avert the outcome.

The Constitution’s Electoral College was originally designed to block the rise of demagogues and authoritarians. Yet, like our political parties and presidential nominating conventions, the Electoral College system is powerless to save the American experiment from its known “worst enemies.”

In Act V, the demagogue assumes the power of the Oval Office and begins the work—or continues the work, in the case of Trump—of overturning the republic through conspiracy theories, lies, intimidation, lawlessness, corruption (including of the military), and violence. 

This scenario of democratic collapse, so common in history as well as in the experiences of many existing democracies, is a clear and present danger to American democracy today.

All this explains why I cannot take my mind off the U.S. presidential nominating system as the chief source of our political dangers.

Inverting the prism of pessimism-optimism, it is also why I believe that reforming the presidential nominating system is the brightest beacon of hope we have for restoring safety to our democracy.

Currently I am working on seeing two books through to publication: How to Save Democracy: Advice and Inspiration from 95 World Leaders (March 14, 2023) and Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution (June 4, 2023).

After that, I will return to this theme with gusto.

Reforming the presidential nominating system is the bulls-eye. No area of reform of American democracy is so essential to our well-being as this one—not by a long shot.