Days after the 2018
Congressional elections in the U.S., the Minority Leader and soon-to-be Speaker
of the House of Representatives, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, declared, “Healthcare was
on the ballot and healthcare won.”[1]
As the new Democratic-controlled House worked on a budget the next Spring, Pelosi
was still insisting that healthcare was what that election was about. Perhaps
she based her statement on exit polls in which most voters claimed that they
had voted chiefly the basis of candidate positions on healthcare. This does
mean, however, that the voters voted on healthcare,
for as only a choice of candidates could be made, the voters were left with inferring or even hoping that the favored candidate would act on, or at least stay
with, his or her position on the issue. I contend that the next leap in the theory
and practice of representative democracy could be to no longer keep an
electorate, the popular sovereign, limited to selecting among candidates.
I don’t believe that the
American voters, as a group—perhaps just of the minority of eligible voters who
cast votes—do very well in assessing candidates and making a judgment.
According to CNN, “Who the candidate is, really, plays an absolutely critical
role in the presidential decision.”[2]
Did the voters who had voted for Richard Nixon have even a clue regarding who
the man really was (i.e., a criminal)? Did the voters who voted for Don Trump
know enough about his personality to make a good judgement? I am not qualified
to assess the mental health of those men. I doubt that voters who have very
limited, even superficial information on a candidate via the media, and perhaps
a bit more information, albeit mostly on policy, from listening to a full
speech, can viably include whom the candidates really are in the voting
judgment. Not even U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s sharing of a bad economic
experience during her childhood tells us much about whom she is underneath. At
the time, an editor at CNN referred to the personal sharing as a glimpse into Warren
herself and what was motivating her
to run for the federal presidency. “At root,” the editor continues, “people
usually vote for president based on a belief that the person they are choosing ‘gets’
them in some fundamental way.”[3]
Can we assume that Warren identified with, or had compassion for, poor people
several decades after her family’s economic plight? Time and a drastically
changed financial situation can both change a person. It was possible that the emotional sharing on prime-time
television before a live audience could have been impacted by the nature of
this medium of delivery (i.e., by enabling acting). After all, “that retelling
of [Warren’s] childhood [was] a staple of Warren’s stump speech,” which, by the
way, the vast majority of the presidential electorate will not have heard by
election day. So to just get nominated by a major party, a candidate, at least in
the 2020 campaign season, had “to be able to perform when the bright lights
come on and everyone is watching.”[4]
What an audience gets from a candidate under the bright lights is likely to be
superficial from the standpoint of whom the person really is.
From the Nixon-Kennedy debates
in 1960, even Nixon’s pale, sweaty face was not enough for the audience to
conclude much about the man himself. Could all of his crimes in office have
been predicted? That his “checker’s speech” was generally deemed to clear him
of corruption in voters’ eyes suggests that even in the face of a candidate’s
checkered past, the American electorate (and the media) was naïve. Is it asking
too much to suppose that voters watching the Trump-Clinton debates in 2016
could have suspected how Trump would behave personally while in office (putting
aside the question of corruption)? I think so.
So why has the American
electorate been limited to selecting candidates, giving them the power to go
back on policies that they have advocated during a campaign? In other words, if
the electorate has not known the candidates (e.g. what makes them tick), it
seems foolish for elections to rely so much on voters selecting candidates,
who, because they are unknowns underneath, cannot really be relied on to follow
through on their campaign platforms.
Because popular sovereignty,
the authority of a people as a whole, supersedes a government’s sovereign in a
representative democracy, the people should be able to expand their active use of their sovereignty over
that of their government by including their judgments on major public policies,
or “issues,” in voting. For example, the
voting electorate could say yea or nay on whether Medicare should be expanded
to all as a single-payer system, and whether health insurance should be
entirely private. Hopefully the American electorate would not be schizophrenic
in answering yes on both! Whereas the
private health-insurance industry may have an inordinate influence on elected
legislators due to lobbying and campaign contributions, even on policies in
which a clear conflict of interest exists, an electorate could restore its
primary influence by expanding ballots to include decisions on broad policies,
which the elected representatives would
then implement. Should Congress and
the president implement a tax cut (the details to be worked out by the
officeholders)? Should taxes be raised or spending cut, or both, to reduce
budget deficits? Congress and the president would still have substantial power
(i.e., discretion) in implementing such broad policies. The American electorate
could even have re-elected George W. Bush in 2004 and voted to end the war in Iraq. The president would have had to
abide by the vote on his prize issue. So
the expansion in the exercise of popular sovereignty would need the protection
of law—most properly a constitutional amendment.
The reduced reliance on voters
assessing candidates and judging between them would be beneficial in itself,
given the difficulties in knowing the candidates themselves, and the expansion in the electorate’s sovereignty would
re-prioritize the electorate over its representatives
tasked with implementing broad policy directives. I would even say that
American voters would be better at making broad policy judgments than picking candidates. I submit that American democracy
has been designed to counter or even block what an electorate is best at, while
funneling all of its influence through what it is worse at!
Especially in cases in which
the electorate is large, the proportion of which that really knows the
candidates is small. Hence the Electoral College in the U.S., where the
electorates of the states elect a small number of electors to vote for
president. Unfortunately, that has not worked since the beginning, as parties
took over the College. The Anti-federalist stance that most governance should be
done at the state level where the districts are smaller than at the federal
level was justified by the belief that voters in a small district tend to know
the candidates better than do voters in a very large district. The U.S. went on
to become a very large district, with over 310 million people by 2015. How many
of those people could possibly have the real story on Hilary Clinton or Don
Trump?
By the twentieth century, even the state level
could have been considered to be too big, yet no state adopted a federal system
made up of what Europeans call regions or provinces. Interestingly, the E.U.’s
principle of subsidiarity pushes decisions to the state or local level if feasible; the people are literally
closer to their state governments that that of the E.U. The states in both empire-scale unions could improve
democracy by federalizing themselves. Meanwhile, federal elections in both
unions could be widened both conceptually and in practice to include judgments
on policies, which voters are able to make, so as to take the pressure off the
importance of selecting the better candidate. The percentage of eligible voters
might even increase if voting on policies is found to be more interesting than
just voting on candidates. If I am correct, the office-holders have been
allowed to have too much power at the expense of their respective electorates,
which have had too little, whether unwittingly, voluntarily, or beguiled/pressured
by their own agents.
See Essays on the E.U. Political Economy and Essays on Two Federal Empires. Both are available at Amazon.
[1] Kimberly Leonard, “Nancy
Pelosi: ‘Healthcare was on the ballot and healthcare won,” The Washington Examiner, November 7,
2018.
[2] Chris Cillizza (CNN’s Editor-at-large), “Elizabeth
Warren Just Had Her Best Moment of the 2020 Campaign,” CNN.com, March 19,
2019 (accessed same day).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
