Presidential Politics, Two Months Out
My last blog post, dated July 4, noted President Biden’s very poor performance in a late June debate with Donald Trump. I speculated that Biden might repair his position in the race if this or that or something else happened. None of those possibilities materialized. As everyone knows, something else happened: Biden dropped out and endorsed Kamala Harris. Mrs. Harris quickly took control of the Democratic National Convention. Many polls show the race to be breathtakingly close.
Again: not in Oregon or most states. Oregon is safely blue; its electoral votes will go to Mrs. Harris. In Oregon, I can safely vote for a protest candidate or write in a name (a way of saying I don’t like either major party candidate) without worrying my vote might affect the outcome. At least four of our six Representatives in Congress will be Democrats. A large majority of seats in the House—at least 250 and perhaps as many as 350—are “safe” seats for one party or the other. Many Representatives face greater electoral challenges in their party primaries than in the general election. In primaries, when it’s an intra-party fight, candidates tend to kowtow to extremists, the highly motivated single-issue voters on the edges of their party. In the general election campaign, the candidate then moderates her views to appeal to voters in the middle. But in a “safe” seat, the candidate needn’t moderate much.
That paragraph wandered away from presidential to congressional politics. Perhaps this little essay isn’t really about the presidential race, but about a larger topic.
Politics, as I wrote in The Virtue of Civility in the Practice of Politics, is the art and science of making group decisions. Electoral politics, and government in general, makes certain kinds of decisions for large groups of people. Family politics, church politics, office politics, union politics—there are many other groups that must make decisions, and in each case those decisions can be made well or poorly. Most of us can think of poorly made decisions in businesses, families, or schools. The goal of politics at every level is better decisions; at least that’s what I wrote in 2002, and I still believe it.
Superficially, people often agree that politics ought to aim at better decisions, but they treat their political opponents as mere obstacles. We often act as if the goal of politics is winning, perhaps believing that we already know which policy ought to be adopted, which direction we should go. I still believe that the goal of politics is not winning, but better decisions.
Too often, candidates describe their opponents as thoroughly wrong, as selfish, as stupid, or as willfully evil. Sadly, this kind of campaigning may “work,” in the sense that it leads to electoral victory. But what happens when the slanderer takes office and turns to the actual work of government? If we have made the political opponent into an enemy, how do we cooperate across party lines?
Mr. Trump has not pledged to accept the outcome of the election if he loses. Instead, he repeatedly warns that Democrats will promote voter fraud, and the election will not be fair. The only possible “fair” outcome, in his mind, results in his victory. If Mrs. Harris wins, we will almost certainly see multiple legal challenges to results in several states. I worry that we will also see violence and threats of violence from Mr. Trump’s most extreme supporters. But my main worry is the underlying polarization and incivility, not Mr. Trump himself. Age will soon remove Mr. Trump from the political scene, but “trumpy” campaigning may continue.
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