A month ago, for the fourth of July holiday, my husband Jim and I attended a party at a friend’s house in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. He has a pool. The weather was lovely. We had a great day.
Naturally, at one point, the conversation turned to the upcoming elections and which of the candidates we were supporting for the Democratic nomination.
Several names were mentioned: Buttigieg, Harris, Warren. There were some Sanders supporters there, too.
And then one guy asked, “How does the candidate get chosen?”
I wasn’t sure what he was asking, so I didn’t answer right away.
So then he asked again, “I mean, how does it get decided who will be the Democratic candidate?”
And so I realized that this was a serious question. He really didn’t know.
So I explained that starting in February next year, there would be a series of state-by-state elections. Winning candidates would earn delegates according to the percentage of votes each received. The process would end at the Democratic convention in Milwaukee in August. If a single candidate had won more than half of the delegates that person would be the nominee. If no candidate had a majority, there would be some bargaining and perhaps multiple rounds of voting until a single candidate emerged as the nominee.
To be charitable, the primary process is complicated; I didn’t mention super-delegates, for instance. And Jim pointed out that choosing the party nominee by popular elections is a relatively new innovation.
But it wasn’t those complications that had this guy confused. He just didn’t know. 40 something years-old; he had lived through numerous presidential elections. He just hadn’t paid attention. Maybe he voted in the Presidential elections, or maybe not. Maybe he even voted in the primaries, he just didn’t remember or really care, or anyway care enough to remember from one election to the next how this whole business of American citizens choosing American presidents actually worked.
I like the guy. There’s no requirement that a citizen understand how elections work. No requirement that an American citizen participate in our American democracy. Although, is it really democracy if citizens don’t participate?
The host of the party was a guy who makes a living designing furniture that his company sells to high-end hotels. The manufacturing is done in China. He travels to China several times a year to meet with the owners of the factories and check on production. So I was curious to ask the guy how the tariffs that Trump has imposed on Chinese imports affected his business, and to get his perspective on the situation in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, protestors have been pushing back against a government proposal that would allow the mainland Chinese government to reach into Hong Kong and extradite any person that the Chinese government wanted to put on trial for a crime, potentially even for crimes like protesting the Chinese government.
My friend said that shifting trade policies had always been a part of the cost of doing business internationally. He resented the tariffs but he didn’t seem to think that the current administration’s meddling in free trade was much different from previous incidents over the last 20 years since he’s been doing business with China. “It’s always something,” seemed to be his attitude.
As for Hong Kong, he said that situation didn’t concern his business at all. His furniture is manufactured in mainland China. But his guess was that the people of Hong Kong might win this round of protests. The Chinese government might withdraw its pressure. They could afford to give in, for now, because eventually, he said, China will win. Hong Kong will lose.
But in the even longer term, he said, nothing lasts forever. Xi Jinping, the leader of Communist China, will eventually lose power. Most likely he will lose power to someone else in the party and the changeover in personnel at the top will make very little difference. But nothing lasts forever, and eventually, even the party itself will lose power.
What keeps the communist party in power in China, he said, is that for decades the government has provided economic prosperity and a measure of personal freedom in China. And the deal that the government has made with the Chinese people is essentially this: we will create the conditions where you can make as much money as you want to make, and we will stay out of your personal life, and, in exchange, you will not protest our decisions or question our power.
And so, for the last 50 years or so, the government has delivered on its promise of providing economic prosperity. And as long as a citizen doesn’t protest the government the Chinese people are fairly free to live however they like. My friend talked about China’s permissive attitudes about things like sex and alcohol use, for instance.
The government controls access to information. Religion is tightly controlled. Because things like information and religious institutions can pose a threat to the government. My friend says that when he watches international cable news in his hotel room the news feed is always 15 minutes delayed and when it looks like the station is about to broadcast some story the Chinese government doesn’t want its people to see the screen simply goes blank for a few minutes, and then a little later it comes back on, having moved on to the next story, with no explanation.
This kind of government control over the public aspects of Chinese life is part of the deal. The government doesn’t meddle in personal lives. And the Chinese people are free to make as much money as they can. And so they keep their side of the bargain, too. They live their lives, make their money, and don’t bother about national politics, or which leader of the communist party happens to be in charge. And if the television screen showing international news suddenly goes black for a few minutes they just shrug their shoulders and wait for it to come back on.
So it seemed to me that my host’s story about politics in China, was also, in a way, the explanation for my other friend’s ignorance about how the primary process works to choose the Democratic party’s presidential nominee in the United States.
My friend doesn’t really pay attention to the political process because politics doesn’t really matter too much to him. The things he cares about are the basic things that all people care about. Leave me alone to run my own life. Let me have my little pleasures like sex and drinking. Guarantee that there’s a certain amount of economic prosperity generally, even if I only get a little while others get billions. And then I won’t bother too much about which political party is in power, or which interchangeable individual is sitting in the oval office.
A week or so after that pool party, there was an editorial published in the New York Times (a newspaper not available by the way in China, says my friend) where a woman named Jessie Kanzer wrote about raising her two children in the United States, compared to her own experience as a child in Russia. She talks about the kids, age two and a half and four and a half, running wild around a Warby Parker store under the bemused eye of the clerk. And then she says, speaking about her liberal neighbors:
“I’m not sure they can understand what it’s like to live without freedom. They didn’t receive warnings from the KGB, the precursor to imprisonment. They never lost family members to government work camps. They got to explore, to rebel, to make up their own minds. Our children have the luxury of individuality.
My childhood was vastly different from Charlie and Gigi’s. It’s as if I came from another planet. At day care, I got yelled at for talking, or for lying on my cot with my legs immodestly splayed, or for not finishing my soup. I was scouted for gymnastics when I was 4 — you couldn’t just choose to participate in a sport. My coaches would sit on me to perfect the shape of my splits.”
Jessie Kanzer, The New York Times
But the freedom that this woman is talking about is not the kind of freedom that’s under threat in Hong Kong. Social rules about talking, displaying the body, eating, are not rules an authoritarian government cares about. Those kinds of freedoms are part of the bargain that the Chinese government cedes to the people. In China, Russia, and the United States, you make your own social rules, as human communities always do. If you get yelled at for not finishing your soup, that’s not the Russian government, that’s the Russian people managing your behavior. The freedom that you don’t have in China, or in Russia, and the freedom that the government cares about is the freedom to criticize the government or if you don’t like the government strongly enough to vote them out of power.
Jessie Kanzer doesn’t see that she makes just this point in her editorial in the New York Times. Her next paragraph is this:
“At home, my parents were loving but firm; societal expectations prevailed. I was potty trained in infancy, taught always to be polite — “Please” and “Thank you,” “Have a nice day.” I chewed with my mouth closed.”
But those are precisely the kinds of life choices the Russian and Chinese governments don’t care about. They give it to you and to your community to determine social norms, but for that social freedom and for economic prosperity, in exchange, you get the KGB and work camps if you protest, and you get television stations that only broadcast stories that praise the government.
And in the U.S., it’s precisely because the U.S. government doesn’t tell my friend that he must be polite in public and chew with his mouth closed under threat of law, that he finds he’s able to ignore the question of how candidates get chosen for the presidential election. He would care about the election if it had consequences at the level of his personal life. But the right to participate in democracy itself? – eh, that’s a freedom he’s willing to give up. When freedom only means freedom to run wild around a Warby Parker store, or when the social freedom to talk back to your teacher in preschool gets confused with the political freedom to talk back to your representative in Congress, then the threat to democracy becomes real.
Last week we had the second round of Democratic party presidential candidates debates. Two nights. Twenty candidates. Plus four more who are running but didn’t qualify for this round of debates. Here they are, all twenty-four, arranged as a rap poem:
Delaney, de Blasio, Castro, O’Rourke
Biden, Ryan, Buttigieg, Bullock
Klobuchar, Booker, Inslee, Moulton
Harris, Sestak, Messam, Warren
Gabbard, Gillbrand, Williamson, Bennet
Sanders, Steyer, Hickenlooper, Yang
One point I’m listening for as I consider the candidates, is how each of them talks about the underlying health of our democracy. And that’s what I wanted to talk about this morning. In the United States, until recently, when we talked about politics it was enough to talk about political issues only: health care, immigration, economic inequality. But now our U.S. democracy itself is under threat. Without a healthy democracy none of our talk about issues will matter. Now we need to talk not about political issues, but the issue of politics itself.
I don’t believe the United States is likely to become a Chinese or Russian style authoritarian government in the next few years, but I do see our democracy under threat, and increasingly so, and in many ways. And as democracy weakens it does increase the possibility for an authoritarian government take over.
I’m worried that a lot of Americans, like my friend at the pool party, are happy to take the bargain that’s offered in China, and increasingly here in the U.S. Give me a comfortable level of economic prosperity, leave me alone to live my own life and enjoy my simple pleasures, and I won’t care too much about who’s in power in Washington or how they stay in power.
I’m appalled at the recent Supreme Court decision on Gerrymandering whereby the Court abdicates responsibility for ruling on the fairness of congressional district boundaries. It is the Court’s role to protect cornerstone principles of our democracy such as the principle that politicians should fairly represent the people governed. Allowing state legislatures to draw their own boundaries without oversight allows the party in power at re-districting time to further entrench their power against the will of the people.
When the President instructs the people in his Administration to ignore subpoenas issued by Congress, it subverts the House’s constitutional power and the rule of law…
When the Electoral College regularly allows the President of the United States to be elected while losing the popular vote…
When the leader of the Senate manipulates voting schedules in order to time which President gets to nominate a Supreme Court justice…
When a state legislature controlled by one party, possibly through Gerrymandered districts, realizes that their party is about to lose a governorship due to the impossibility of gerrymandering a state-wide vote, and so then responds by stripping the incoming governor of as much legal power as possible…
When the Supreme Court rules that corporations are people, and that cash donations to politicians are protected political speech…
When the Supreme Court in Shelby County vs. Holder ruled that state and local governments don’t need to obtain pre-clearance from the Federal Government to change voting laws, even when those state and local governments have a clear and deliberate pattern of enacting voting laws that unjustly suppress the votes of minorities, and then, in the wake of that Supreme Court Ruling many state and local governments do, immediately, enact laws that suppress the vote, even to the extant, in Georgia last year, where voter suppression may have altered the result of the Governor’s election from a win for the democrat Stacey Abrams to the Republican Brian Kemp.
When, in sum, one of our nation’s two main parties has engineered multiple ways to retain power despite representing only a minority of US citizens then our democracy is under threat.
It isn’t fair to criticize the Chinese people for accepting the bargain of authoritarian government. They had no choice. In Hong Kong they are rejecting the bargain, but it is an offer they are increasingly unable to refuse.
But my friend at the pool party, and Americans in large numbers are passively accepting the bargain. While Americans are focused on their personal economy and freedom from government interference in their personal lives, the larger system of democracy and the larger freedoms our democratic system guarantees are being eroded.
“Those who govern are there for you, it is not you who are there for them,” wrote Walt Whitman, born 200 years ago this year.
Our nation is suffering because our leaders have figured out that in a manipulated system it’s possible to stay in power by convincing only a thin core of voters to be merely happy enough in a narrow portion of their lives. It works for those in power, yet even those voters who put them there get so little from this bargain. It’s tragic. And meanwhile millions of Americans go without healthcare, live on the street, can’t afford the education required for today’s jobs, suffer discrimination based on race or gender expression, lose access to reproductive health services. We all drive on broken roads and unsafe bridges, live in fear of gun violence, are anxious about the threat of foreign wars, suffer through droughts or powerful storms due to human caused climate change
But this isn’t a sermon about political issues. It’s a sermon about the issue of politics. All of those issues could be better addressed, reversed, solved, if our democracy itself were stronger. If we cared as much about our politics as we care about political policies.
When we hear a candidate’s promise of personal economic security and permission to live your life as you please, as though that’s’ all that’s required of government, as though that’s all that we should expect from democracy, as though America and Americans require nothing more than a paycheck and a six-pack, before we say yes to that offer, we must remember what more is really at stake, what more we might be losing, that there is a deeper and more sinister side to that bargain.