I haven’t seen much occasion to write for this blog in the last month. Each day seems to bring reports of new frightening (or sometimes merely foolish) moves by the Trump Administration and their enablers in Congress and in State governments. At the same time, each day also brings reports of another setback for the Administration in the courts and further evidence that his policies are likely to cause economic damage that will further erode his support. I think we have increasing evidence that the Supreme Court will not merely roll over for the worst of Trump’s excesses—even though they appear ready to endorse many of them—but it remains unclear how effective adverse SCOTUS rulings will be in blocking those excesses
It is hard for me to imagine this uncertain state of affairs lasting for four years, but it is also hard for me to see what could end it, short of successful imposition of fully authoritarian governance by the Trump regime (and while this is certainly possible, I don’t see clear evidence that we are moving in that direction) or a successful coup that removes him and his inner circle from power (and I see even less evidence of that being imminent—although I imagine any competent coup plotters would be taking pains to avoid such evidence becoming public.) So I wait, converse online with like-minded folk, contribute to the funds supporting the many current legal fights against the Administration, and hope that our votes next year and in 2028 will make a meaningful difference and that our core political freedoms will last until then.
In the meantime, I have continued to think about how we might change our system to save ourselves from future Trumps (if or when we have the opportunity to make such changes.) This was the main topic of my initial blog post in January, but since then I have had some time to reflect on it and on the weaknesses of each of the possibilities that I considered. In this context, I would like to offer a some “new” possibilities—perhaps no more realistic than the others, but I think avoiding at least some of their weaknesses.
One of these possibilities is in essence a synthesis of two of the ideas I wrote about earlier—that more informed agents should have responsibility for choosing party candidates, and that a representative group of eligible voters might be empaneled to consider the candidate choices in depth before making a choice on behalf of the citizenry as a whole. In this version, major party political nominating conventions would be replaced by random samples of potential voters (aligned with the appropriate party) who would be empaneled to spend 6-12 months becoming educated about the issues and the candidates before choosing a candidate. These would then become the candidates competing in the general election.
This would be consistent with the democratic ideal that those who govern us represent “the people”, and would give the final choice to the electorate as a whole. At the same time, it would ensure that the contenders were chosen by a subset of the people who had been compelled to learn something about what what they were doing. Perhaps they would also take their responsibilities more seriously than do primary voters since they would be part of a relatively small group (hundreds?) making a choice together, rather than lone individuals in an electorate of millions who know that their single vote will not affect the outcome. This would require major changes in how our political parties operate, but would probably not require any Constitutional changes.
An alternative would reduce the role of the political parties and allow for the representation of additional points of view while preserving the goal of presenting only well-vetted options to the general election. In this case, the panel or panels considering the candidates would include members of ALL parties as well as those with no partisan affiliation, and rather than yielding a single choice for each of two major parties, the voting would be structured to allow perhaps four or five leading candidates to be presented to the electorate as a whole in a general election, with either ranked choice voting or what Amartya Sen has called “approval voting” used to select the final winner. This would improve the prospects for election of “consensus” candidates who might not be the first choice within either party, but would be likely to be more difficult to implement and might require Constitutional changes.
It is also possible that one or both of these approaches could be “piloted” by a (well-funded) private organization. Such a pilot would not immediately change the candidate selection process, but it would provide a concrete representation of what a changed process might look like. Additionally, with appropriate “marketing”, the results of such pilots might influence at least some actual voters who may not attend to the guidance of “elites” but may be more open to listening to people “just like them” who have had more time to consider the candidates. While still aspirational, creation of such a pilot program may be more feasible in the medium run than radical changes in the institutions and mechanisms that yield our actual candidate selections.
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