The American political system works. Of course it works. That’s what a system — a thing that once set up keeps running — does.
But it doesn’t necessarily work the way we want it to. It doesn’t inevitably advance the common good or make America a better nation. It doesn’t consider such things. It can as easily make the world worse as make it better.
This explains something of America’s current pain and fear for the future and the polarization that follows them. The system just keeps running, and we get what we get. And what we get, we may not want.
Witness, I submit, the present presidential campaign.
We Americans have been raised to believe that we can trust the system and things will work out well enough. Look at all the relieved editorials when Trump’s attempts to overthrow the election failed because all the courts said no.
But it doesn’t always work, and it can fail very, very badly, and in a way that could be permanent. We can’t trust it the way we thought we could. Look at the two candidates.
You probably really like one and really dislike the other. You may well think one will save America and the other will destroy it. Most Americans will agree that something went really wrong to give us either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. I take that as the consensus view that the system crashed.
How did we get Trump, the least likely president in American history? In 2015, he decided to run for the Republican nomination, in what might have been a publicity stunt or a lark or a chance to get the adulation he needs. For reasons unknown — but which if known would probably be discouraging — he jumped to an early lead in the polls.
Then he came in a close second to Ted Cruz in the Iowa caucuses, and the political media duly certified him as a serious candidate. The juggernaut was rolling. (In a move that the nation should have taken as a warning, Trump tweeted, “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.”)
Think for a second about why the Iowa Caucus has such importance, when it means little.
The caucuses only choose delegates who then choose the state’s party’s delegates to the party’s national convention. It shouldn’t have the effect it does.
It’s an artifact of the past and a product of the candidates’ and the media’s need to have a political event. (I remember watching the preposterously dramatic Wolf Blitzer a few months ago.) Completely irrational, unrepresentative of America, but it can make or damage a candidate. That’s the system working.
The other candidates could have stopped him, but they were all playing the angles, trying to figure out how to edge out the others and make themselves the sole alternative to Trump, while also not alienating his supporters. No one stepped aside, so Trump trod on all of them.
Then, of course, being politicians, they all made their peace with Trump, and in the political world making peace means pretending you like him and think highly of him. It means becoming a cheerleader because your path to power runs through him. That is the system too.
In the election, Trump had the luck to face Hillary Clinton, who was not the nation’s most likable candidate and one who thought she had states like Pennsylvania in the bag and didn’t campaign hard enough to actually win them. Trump drew the political equivalent of an inside straight and found himself the president of the United States.
The system worked, as a system. As a system producing a virtuous and competent leader, not so much.
And how did we get Harris? Ambitious and gifted at politics, she’d made her way to the Senate, but success in California does not necessarily mean success anywhere else.
Naturally enough, she ran for the Democratic nomination for president, and bombed.
Almost no one seemed to like her as a possible leader. She looked like a senator for life. The Democratic establishment threw the nomination to Joe Biden, as it had to Hillary Clinton, to make sure Bernie Sanders didn’t get it.
Biden needed a vice president who would satisfy Democratic constituencies and — he’s been in politics too long to take any risks — too unpopular to threaten his run for reelection. And there was Harris, the sidelineable vice president from central casting.
Then, as Biden’s mental problems got worse to the point they couldn’t be hidden anymore — problems Harris certainly knew about — and the party leaders decided to move him out, their only choice for a candidate was the vice president.
If Biden hadn’t debated, he’d still be the candidate.
That’s the way the system works. And except for those who don’t think much of either candidate, almost every American thinks it worked as badly as it could this year, producing candidates one of whom wasn’t just bad but dangerous.
Americans disagree about who’s the danger, but they agree that the election will make or break our nation. And that’s the way the system works.
