A year ago I read an article in the Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch celebrating that Joe Biden being forced out of the Democratic nomination represented the reassertion of the principle that “nominations belong to parties, not to candidates”. Rauch argued that “for most of U.S. history…Americans saw the party, not the individual candidate or the particular office, as the locus of political life”, nurturing and directing politicians and ultimately controlling who ran for office on their ticket, from President all the way down to dog catcher, from the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms”.
Contrary to popular belief, the decision-makers did not and could not override or ignore public opinion; they wanted to win, after all. What they could and did do was blend public opinion with other considerations, such as who could unify the party, govern after the election, and advance the party’s interests…And here’s something else they did: choose qualified candidates…Although the machines of yore could be insular and corrupt – traits no one wants to go back to – they reliably screened out circus acts, incompetents, rogues, and sociopaths.
By 2016, however, in a process started when the Democrats put more weight on the primary process following the contentious 1968 nomination fight – which initially resulted in George McGovern’s landslide loss in 1972, leading to party insiders clawing back influence in the “invisible primary” – “the public saw the parties as vehicles for candidates at best, and as useless and corrupt intermediaries at worst”. In Rauch’s telling, the revelation in the hacked DNC e-mails of the party putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders would, in times past, have gotten a shrug: “Of course the Democratic Party favors the candidate who is actually a Democrat. That’s why it exists!” While the Republican Party has effectively become a cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump, the Democrats continue to exert influence over the nomination, lining up behind Biden in 2020 and forcing him off the ticket in ’24, showing that “both man and party” can “put the institution ahead of the person. That is how American politics is supposed to work.”
Rauch argues that the weakening of the role of party professionals has fueled our present-day dysfunction, creating bitter divisions between factions that put furthering their ideology ahead of the national interest. Americans may “have lost their memory of parties that behave like institutions, not just platforms or brands”, but the demonstration that “a political party can act independently and wisely to serve the national interest at a crucial juncture” can point the way forward. Our democracy, in Rauch’s telling, worked because party bosses had the perspective to ignore the screeching of ideologues and choose the candidate that could best appeal to the broadest cross-section of the electorate, that could actually win an election.
You know, like when they stopped Sanders from dooming the party to certain defeat and chose Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination, as the best choice to win the election, as opposed to the Republicans who fell victim to the Trump insurgency that would surely doom them in November.