American democracy eats itself

Why Henry Ford's fascist campaign lost and Donald Trump's can win - again!

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In the coming months a grim historical irony could play out as democratic righteousness destroys democratic government. Open-hearted, liberal reforms to extend democracy and empower the voiceless may deliver America and the West to the deranged, dictatorial rule of Donald Trump.

In the 1970s, reformers democratised the primaries that decided which US politicians could run for office. They ensured that the candidate with the most votes became the party’s nominee. What could be more democratic than that? The power of the “men in smoke-filled rooms” was broken for good.

That phrase was coined by Raymond Clapper of United Press at the 1920 Republican National Convention  Delegates could not decide on a candidate for president. As Clapper described it, cigar-chomping Republican power-brokers retired to a smoke-filled room at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago and decided that Warren Harding was their man. The obscure senator duly became the Republican candidate and then US president.

“Men in smoke-filled rooms?” How those words reek of ancient prejudices. Just men. No women. All of them white men, you can guess, and hardly any of them from the working class. And as for the “smoke-filled rooms.” Are you serious? The old ways of doing politics were a veritable health hazard.

Yet, now more than ever, America needs them.

The Republican party ought to stop Donald Trump from running. He incited a mob to storm Congress and threatened the US constitution. For all the US far-right attacks on “elites” and “Republicans in name only,” there is no party establishment with the power to intervene. For as long as Republican primary voters want Trump to be the Republican candidate, no force in the party can stop them.

As for the Democrats, the abolition of smoked-filled rooms has left them and the United States dangerously exposed. The party ought to have women and men with the power to ensure that Democrats can do whatever needs to be done to stop Trump. They should be asking now whether the voters will reject Joe Biden because they think he is too old to be president, which to be frank, he is.

Biden is 80 and will be 86 by the time a second term ends in January 2029. Anyone who has cared for an 86-year-old knows that is too old to be president of the United States or of anything else for that matter. Meanwhile his vice president, Kamala Harris, is fantastically unpopular – only about a quarter of Americans think she is doing a decent job.  Trump will run on the slogan of vote Biden and get Harris when Biden dies. Given that three quarters of Americans don’t want Harris, there’s a distinct possibility that the tactic will pay off.

No one is challenging Biden for the Democrat nomination because a contest would divide the Democrats and help the Republicans. It is also clear that potential rivals think he is unbeatable. Fair enough. But what if that calculation changes? What if Biden has a stroke or a heart attack in 2024? What if, as the election approaches, it’s clear he can’t campaign or the polls say he can’t win but Biden won’t stand down? What if it is equally clear that Harris is a liability who should be thrown overboard? There is no mechanism for fixers to move in and impose candidates who can beat Trump whether party activists like them or not.

Progressive American writers complain that the focus on Biden’s impending dotage is unfair. The excellent Brian Klass, whose newsletter is well worth subscribing to, points out with commendable bluntness that  Donald Trump “is a 77 year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him, and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power.”

How in these circumstances is it fair for the media to talk about Biden’s fitness for office?

But anti-fascism isn’t about fairness. It is about winning, and the mechanisms do not exist to ensure that the Democrats can beat Trump by any means necessary.

The gatekeepers have abandoned their posts. The smoke-filled rooms have emptied. And, in their absence, the inability of political parties in the US and to some extent in the UK as well, to contain threats to democracy brings out a truth about politics illuminated in "How Democracies Die”,  by the American political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, which was one of the best intellectual reactions to the Trump movement.

“An overreliance on gatekeeping is in itself undemocratic,” they write. “It can create a world of party bosses who ignore the rank and file and fail to represent the people. But an overreliance on the ‘will of the people’ can also be dangerous, for it can lead to the election of a demagogue who threatens democracy itself. There is no escape from this tension. There are always trade-offs.”

The story of how American democracy allowed its enemies to use its own procedures to subvert it is worth telling because it makes us question basic assumptions. (And that we must always do).