Earlier this week, New York State announced that it was
cancelling the presidential primary that was re-scheduled for June of this year in
light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic effecting the entire globe (and the forgone conclusion that Joe Biden will be the Democratic presidential Nominee by virtue of all other candidates dropping out). To which, Toni Kennedy, one of the Town of
Potsdam’s Councilpersons and an unabashed progressive, posted to Facebook the
following picture with this opening on Monday (27 April 2020):
“Please do NOT blame progressives when Biden loses to Trump.
I’ve tried to be diplomatic about this ever since Sanders dropped but not
giving New Yorkers a chance to send progressive delegates to the convention is
a disservice to democracy and the democratic platform.
You can’t deny us a seat at the table, then blame us for not
unifying. You can’t not make any progressive concessions or do anything to
bring progressives to your side, then blame us when we sit home.
Granted, I’m not saying I will sit home. But many
progressives will and there is no logic in blaming them when you’ve cut them
out of the process.”
Link to the post and comments here: https://www.facebook.com/100000156093334/posts/3494885353859967/
I have many scruples with Mrs. Kennedy in regards to her
politics at the national level[i] and there are several things
we work very closely on locally.[ii] But neither of those are why I am writing
this post. I have a beef with primaries,
and this is a particularly poignant example to pick on.
Let me just offer that primaries are not elections, and by
this I mean they don’t result in the decision of who will assume an office. They determine candidates for a particular
party to run for an election. So why
again should all tax payers pay for a private organization to determine who are
their nominees for running for office? What
I’m getting at here is that it’s my belief that for too long, and for what’s
becoming of increasingly questionable value, we’ve subsidized primaries for the
major parties without much thought. I
offer this because the outcry here is about an exceptionally partisan,
exceptionally internal debate within one political camp, and I think that’s
precisely why we shouldn’t have a primary paid for by the public at large. Feel free to have this debate on your own time
using your own dollars, but save us all the expense of it to settle scores and
bury hatchets.
Now, as for my aforementioned point about utility of
primaries, I am pointing to some excellent writing by Fareed Zakaria,
discussing illiberal democracy and its rise abroad and at home. The following links start with his 1997 essay
in Foreign Affairs, followed by his book where he expands on the topic (and
speaks specifically to the topic of primaries), and concluding with a blog post
from 2016. I believe his case is more
than compelling, that we are losing more and more of our liberal
constitutionalism as we have made sacrosanct democracy, specifically pure
democracy, which populism (left and right) has taken full advantage of to our
serious detriment. And as a further
abject lesson in this, one should reflect on the land reform program and
methods used by the Gracchi in the Roman Republic. Yes, the entrenched conservative elites hold
much of the blame, but so do those breaking the pots in the forum. There were, and are, other ways than to
continue the path of the destruction of constitutionalism through increased
populism to resolve political impasses; I encourage us to take them. First among these would be to seriously
evaluate primaries and their true utility, especially given how many other ways
we can now register input at much less expense without subsidizing a party
system that’s been begging for change since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
To that end, I encourage us to consider forcing parties to
fund their own primaries, full stop. I
can give you many reasons this is a good thing, and among them would be the
much more deliberate discussion that is needed about how candidates are chosen
given the seriously flawed track record that the current process has resulted
in since at least the 1970s. In any
event, for now, I see this as a good move on the part of the state, not just in
terms of cost and in terms of public health, but in terms of putting primaries
into their proper place, not required nor necessarily worthy of tax dollar
support.
[i]
Among them her support for Medicare for All, the above described indignation at
the fact that a non-registered Democrat lost the party contest for the nomination of that party for president, and her unflinching support for said same Democratic Socialist
and his left wing populism.
[ii]
Among them our mutual work on local climate change adaption and mitigation as
well as efforts to adequately support local government programs and initiatives
that serve the greater good in Potsdam.
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