Are the American People Smart Enough to See Through the Political Theater?
“If the law is on your side, argue the law. If the law isn’t on your side, argue the facts. If neither the law nor the facts are on your side, yell loud and bang on the table,” goes an old adage among trial lawyers.
The equivalent in politics is: “If you can’t run on your record, run on your policy proposals for the future. If you can’t run on your record or your policy proposals, call your opponents ‘weird’ and try to make the election about likability and racial identity.” That’s clearly what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are trying to do.
It won’t be the first time in America politics that an election turned on personalities. Remember when Barack Obama said that Hillary was “likeable enough“? Brilliant move: damning with faint praise.
Or consider George W. Bush. Born to a wealthy New England family that came over on the Mayflower, son of a president and grandson of a U.S. senator, Bush graduated from one of the country’s most exclusive prep schools, Phillips Andover, then attend Yale College (his father and grandfather’s alma mater) and Harvard Business School. He bought a pickup truck and moved to Texas and sold himself to the public as a “good ol’ boy.”
Some Republicans claim that the American people are “smart enough to see through“ all this political theater.
Our Founders were not so sure. They knew the writings of ancient political philosophers including Plato and Aristotle about “demagogues,” people who would appeal to people’s basest instincts: “a well-known class of politicians who obtain power through emotional appeals to prejudice, distrust, fear and vilification.” As a protection, they gave us not a “democracy” but a constitutional republic with checks and balances against the whims of the electorate. These included the election of senators not by the people but by state legislatures, a feature of the original Constitution overturned by the 17th Amendment.
More importantly, the Founders provided that the voters would not elect the president and vice president. Rather, they would vote for electors, who in turn would select the president in an Electoral College. At the Constitutional convention, one of the wisest of the Founders, James Madison, described this system as “a multilayered system of “successive filtrations” … whereby the people or the people’s representatives in each state selected “electors” as their representatives to vote for these high-powered offices in closed-door, dispassionate state conventions.” Unfortunately, the Electoral College never worked the way it was intended, and today in most states, electors are required by law to vote for the candidate who got the most popular votes in their state, rather than to apply independent judgment.
No, I am not advocating a return to our aristocratic roots with limited popular suffrage and governance by an elite of “Platonic guardians,” although I have observed that the Guardians bear a striking resemblance to Woodrow Wilson’s vision of the bureaucrats in the administrative state. On the contrary, I favor eliminating the Electoral College so that everyone’s vote would count equally with everyone else’s rather than a few thousand votes in swing states choosing the president for all of us. That could be done without a constitutional amendment if states merely changed their ordinary laws to require their electors to vote for the candidate who won the most popular votes nationwide rather than in their state, a proposal called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which has been approved by 15 states and the District of Columbia.
What I do hope is that the voters in those swing states will choose wisely in the upcoming presidential election, which is one of the most important in our history for the direction of the country, rather than based on which of the candidates likes Diet Mountain Dew better, or whether vice presidential candidate Tim Walz did or did not carry his military weapon “in war.”
I must confess that I am biased because JD Vance was a student of mine in a seminar at Yale Law School entitled “Conservative Critiques of the Administrative State.” In that course (which I am no longer allowed to offer), I tried to expose our left-leaning student body to the voices of conservative writers not otherwise often heard in academia today. I got out JD’s paper recently and reread it. Let’s just say that JD is a fast learner.
READ MORE:
For Kamala Harris ‘Weird’ Is the New ‘Deplorable’
JD Vance and the Bipartisan Itch to Tax Behavior
What Does JD Vance Actually Believe About Abortion?
The post Are the American People Smart Enough to See Through the Political Theater? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.