Tag Archives: nominating conventions

What The Democrats Must Do

10 Feb 2026 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
A group of four individuals dressed in early 20th-century formal attire, including hats and coats. The group consists of two men on either side, a woman in the center, and another man on the right. They are posing outdoors, with trees visible in the background.

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The Democratic Party is, at present, the only political organization in the nation capable of defeating Trump.  In the last election, voters looked to the Democrats to rise to the occasion, and Democrats let us down.  I’m looking for signs that the party as a whole has absorbed the lessons of 2024, but so far its leaders don’t seem to see the need to unite and act in concert; they don’t seem to realize how ideologically broken and blown they are.

The Trump era will end when his many opponents unite in a disciplined way around an adequate, innovative ideology. An “adequate ideology” would map out an alternative path to achieving prosperity and security for American citizens, while reviving a sound and balanced federalism. Given Americans’ grave dissatisfaction with both political parties, success depends on peeling away support from the Republicans, while embracing ideas that will induce independents to join a majoritarian coalition.

    As we all know, Trump’s outrageous style of governing tends to dominate the national discourse, leaving little room for the growth of this oppositional vision. Living in the Trump era is like having a neighbor blasting your least favorite music 24-7 while you are trying to write beautiful poetry. Instead of writing your master-work, you are screaming at the neighbor to stop with the noise. Trump distracts you from your own virtues, your own manners, and, especially, your own ambitions. Instead of figuring out how to restore civic trust and reform Congress, you are talking about Greenland, Venezuela, and—the newest distraction—the Epstein files. We’re all spending a lot of time thinking and talking about matters that are tangential to the survival of American self-government, even as Trump is diminishing our capacity to govern ourselves and knocking down the pillars of civil society.

    It’s very difficult to ignore and look past Trump, but the only way to vanquish him and his Republicans is to treat their actions as irrelevant to the nation’s future. It’s necessary to dream a constructive and counterfactual dream. If Trump were not in power, what could the future of the United States be? Democrats must retreat to a tranquility chamber together and dream that dream. They mustn’t be haters, critics, or skeptics: they must recall the good deeds that American government has done. They must extol everything that’s still good and sound in American society, and they must map out how its people can propel this country to a new modern high.

    For, where do ordinary voters fit in to the American equation any more? Individuals are increasingly extraneous in a technological mass society that, in the form of “the AI revolution,” is bifurcating the nation’s economy into a hyper-capitalized empire run by an investor class, who are engrossing all the goodies, at the majority’s expense. This out-of-control juggernaut is flattening the lives and hopes of a vast range of workers and property-owners. Media companies are turning our lives into data mills at the expense of our privacy and freedom to associate—to act, to argue, and to organize.

    Meanwhile, since Kamala Harris’s undemocratic nomination, voters recognize that their traditional power to choose their own party’s leaders, and to bring those leaders to heel, has somehow disappeared. The process the Democrats relied on to anoint Biden’s successor was an untoward event that the party’s leaders have yet to reckon with or formally acknowledge. They owe the voters and state-level pols an apology. The elite of the Democratic Party should reform its convention rules and restore delegates’ freedom to choose a representative presidential nominee. Every effort should be made to be a party that runs on commitment not cash. Reliance on the collective will and power of the people must be restored.

    Ideologically, Democrats cling to a globalist perspective out of step with the most pressing problems facing the US now. Trump’s vision for this country, no matter how antagonistic to its founding principles, prioritizes nation-state survival and acknowledges that changing demographics and other geopolitical conditions (such resource scarcity) threaten the integrity of the US, both as a republic and the world’s biggest economy. Democrats have yet to accept and get in front of trends that are transforming attitudes toward national security and identity all across Europe and the western world. Western liberalism must survive, but to do so it must take on a nationalist form, mindful of the special circumstances (including property ownership, cultural homogeneity, and limited government) that have historically been productive of personal liberty. Democrats have yet to accept that we are no longer in a period of boundlessness: we are in a period of consolidation.

    Whether we like it or not, borders will be closed; trade alliances will be confined to countries that are ideologically similar to ours; immigration policies will be more discriminating; and the quest for natural materials and energy will grow ever keener and more problematic, given the overcrowding and degradation the planet is suffering. Democrats are not practicing realpolitik, though. They’re stuck in a reactive, defensive mode, clinging to the ideals of FDR and LBJ, still fighting for the Great Society. Democrats are fighting battles that they’ve lost already, when they should be totting up their losses and stomaching the ideological tradeoffs they must make to attain solid majorities in the states and take control of Congress again. To do so, they must look past the superficial traits of identity and concentrate on what will enhance the dignity and security of all Americans, without respect to living condition or creed.

    Prevailing over Trump requires advocating for border control and for new immigration policies that are stricter yet fairer to all involved. It means restoring the substance of ordinary Americans’ power over their representatives. And it means doubling-down on resource conservation and asserting Americans’ common right to essentials such as land and water that data-center developers and other corporate interests are engrossing with frightening speed.

    Whether Democrats are high-minded enough to reshape American politics in the people’s interest, though, remains to be seen.

    Image: Delegates, including
    Elizabeth Dunster Gibson Foster of Washington State,
    at the 1916 Democratic National Convention in St. Louis, Missouri,
     from this source.

    Inside the Wigwam

    17 Jun 2016 By in History Tags: , , , , , ,

    The Wigwam, GOP convention 1860 Chicago(Courtesy of Library of Congress)
    Nominating conventions came into being in the 1830s, after Andrew Jackson and his ilk turned party politics into a more egalitarian affair.  The elite caucuses that had once chosen presidential candidates gave way to more inclusive mass gatherings where delegates styled themselves as representatives of the people.  By the time the Republican Party formed in the 1850s, nominating conventions had become significant political events in the life of the country.  Journalists, artists, and photographers documented the appearance and actions of the delegates and the spirit and style of the gatherings.

    This particular artist’s drawing shows the meeting of the Republican Party in Chicago in 1860, when the young anti-slavery party nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency.  The Republicans went to the trouble to build a special hall for the convention, a vast domed wooden structure that they called the Wigwam.  (It stood at the corner of Lake and Wacker and was reportedly destroyed by fire in the late 1860s.)   Notably, the illustration shows a mainly female audience crowding the galleries to follow the proceedings.  (Women would not gain the right to vote until 1920.)

    Faced with the likelihood that the federal government would sanction the spread of slavery into the West and strengthen its legal underpinnings everywhere in the US, those participating in the Republican convention believed it to be an event ‘on which the most momentous results are depending.’  ‘No body of men of equal number,’ the convention chair proclaimed, ‘was ever clothed with greater responsibility than those now within the hearing of my voice.’

    The Republicans, though only a northern regional party, were intent on dislodging the dominant Democratic Party, which they did that November, against all odds.

    Image from this source.

     

    The Un-Democratic Party

    25 Feb 2016 By in Candidates and Campaigns Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

    Voters milling around on the street where election results are being announced.

    It’s fascinating that, though Bernie Sanders has won one primary election and only narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton in two others, Democratic party rules give him next-to-no chance of becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.  These circumstances justified the headline of Monday’s lead article in the New York Times: ‘Delegate Count Leaving Sanders With Steep Climb.’ Continue reading →

    When Nominating a President United a Party

    31 Jul 2015 By in The Party System Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

    Party leaders calling on Theodore Roosevelt at home following his nomination for president.
    This photograph provides a measure of how much our style of choosing presidents has changed.  In 1904, when this picture was taken, there was no doubt whatsoever of the power of political parties to select their presidential nominees.  In the century since, both parties have lost that control.

    Admittedly, the star of this picture, Theodore Roosevelt (in the white vest), was immensely popular, and the incumbent.  His rise had been dependent, however, on his skill in gaining support of the major powers in his party–the political bosses who controlled large blocks of delegates, and the senior officeholders whom the bosses supported.  A presidential hopeful had to take into account established figures and personally win them over.  The months leading up to a convention were a period of intense jockeying, as hopefuls and their friends made the rounds, trying to gain traction within the organization.  No way could a candidate hope to become president without the party establishment, because the power to select a nominee really lay, not with voters, but with their delegates.

    Ultimately, delegates to the conventions chose the nominee.  They could change their votes during the balloting if they pleased, and such changes were often necessary.  This process forced the people who were most invested in a political party to come to an agreement about competing nominees and decide which of them best served the party’s interests.  In the process of rejecting candidates, the party also closed off undesirable ideological directions it might have taken.  (Both the Democratic and Republican parties curtailed the independence of delegates after the tumult of the 1960s, gutting the conventions of their essential purpose and drama.)

    Young Roosevelt understood that his individual destiny was interdependent with that of the GOP.  Early on, he labored to prove his loyalty to the Republican Party, despite his Progressive leanings and reputation for being an impetuous renegade.  He recognized that, whatever his personal talents (which proved to be considerable), he needed the vast organizing structure of the party to propel him upward.  After angling for years to get the party where he wanted it, the party finally acquiesced.

    The ritualistic mating game they had played was epitomized in the nominating committee’s formal call on Roosevelt after the convention.  They visited Roosevelt at his home on Long Island, Sagamore Hill, where he personally received them and demurely accepted their invitation to be the party nominee.  The character of the event was not unlike an at-home wedding.

    The accommodation that he and his fellow Republicans achieved gave Roosevelt the personal glory he craved, while benefiting the party, which, by organizing itself around Roosevelt, soared to new levels of popularity.  In the general election that pitted him against Democrat Alton B. Parker, Roosevelt won every state in the North and the West, including Missouri, which hadn’t gone Republican since the 1860s.  His margin of victory was 2.5 million popular votes, the largest in American history.

    Roosevelt forgot what he knew about interdependence later in life.  Having declared that he would never again run for the presidency, he yielded his place to William B. Taft, who retained the White House for the Republicans in 1908.   In 1912, Roosevelt made a disastrous decision to run against his party, splitting it and effectively giving the presidency to Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats.  It was that party’s first presidential victory since before the Civil War.  Roosevelt’s go-it-alone mentality and determination to defy the stolid power of the parties betokened the ill-conceived and divisive presidential bids so prevalent now.

     Image: from this source.

    Woodrow Wilson Casts His Ballot

    26 Oct 2012 By in Reading old photographs Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

    Woodrow Wilson Casts His Ballot, 1912 (Courtesy Princeton University Library via Flickr Commons)

    I’d been looking for an excuse to write about Woodrow Wilson when Monday’s presidential debate, with its exchange over “horses and bayonets” and the WWI navy, came along especially to encourage me.

    An interesting cache of photographs put online by the Woodrow Wilson Library includes this one of Wilson casting his ballot in the presidential election of 1912.  Wilson, then governor of New Jersey and the Democratic candidate for president, won the election in a landslide.

    The photograph, with its mesh ballot receptacle, handwritten records, and air of social intimacy, casts doubt on some time-honored political verities.  How free and fair were the elections conducted with this “technology”?  Did our elective process, so often derided as “broken,” really work better in an earlier day?

    In 1912, most black Americans were barred or discouraged from voting.  Community norms and party interests inflected how election rules were applied.  Until the ‘Australian’ ballot was universally adopted, casting a vote was a social act, not granted any privacy.  And party loyalty was the grease that kept the machinery running: for much of the nineteenth century, “voting” typically meant nothing more than delivering to the poll a ballot that your party had already completed for you.

    Wilson’s ascent coincided with a move toward a more participatory democracy.  In 1912, US senators were still elected, not by the populace, but by the state legislatures.  A Constitutional amendment changing that would be ratified the next year.  The nominating conventions of 1912 were historic, because they were the first to include delegates chosen, not by party operatives, but by popular votes cast in the nation’s first presidential primaries.

    *     *     *

    A scholar-statesman not unlike Barack Obama, Wilson, a noted professor of political science and former president of Princeton University, spent just two years as New Jersey’s chief executive before catapulting to the presidency.

    His path to the White House was more than a little unlikely.  The 1912 election pitted him against three other candidates: the Socialist Eugene Debs, incumbent President William Taft, and former president Theodore Roosevelt, the latter two representing the Conservative and Progressive wings of the Republican Party, respectively.  Only deep divisions within the Republican Party enabled Wilson, the first Southerner to be elected to the White House since Zachary Taylor, to succeed.  Wilson had been a dark horse in the fight for his party’s nomination, triumphing over the favorite, James Beauchamp Clark, a popular House Speaker, in the eleventh hour.

    Wilson’s agenda was progressive and sophisticated, but the fractious political environment prevented him from realizing many of his cherished visions, dealing him some notable humiliations instead.  In 1913, John McCutcheon drew this cartoon drubbing Wilson’s first-year performance, yet in the succeeding years Wilson presided over many liberal reforms (e.g. women’s suffrage) and fiscal innovations (e.g. the income tax) that shape our political landscape today.  While Wilson’s approach to the Great War was adroit, he suffered a rebuke heard round the world when a Republican-controlled Senate jettisoned US participation in the new League of Nations and refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles.  (Unbelievably, Wilson was the first US president to make an official trip abroad when he traveled to Europe to negotiate the Treaty in 1919.)

    Image: Wilson voting in New Jersey, from this source.

    Stephen Colbert on the recent attacks against the 17th Amendment here.