So I woke up this morning to read a diary arrogantly informing me that I was being arrogant to expect a voice in a party primary despite being a political independent:
Registered independent voters do not seem to understand something about political parties: it takes a lot of work to build one. In particular, the Democratic Party is the sum effort of millions of people over the course of a hundred plus years. We haven’t always stood for the same positions and values over those years but we have put in the work.
Party members canvass, research, organize legislative efforts, stuff envelopes, collect signatures, raise money, get out the vote, pool resources, maintain voter data, reach out to media, and compete against the collective efforts of all its opposition. They also nominate candidates for office.
It’s the height of arrogance to skip all the work and still feel entitled to rights within that party. No, if you aren’t allowed to vote on our nominee because you didn’t register to vote as a Democrat, you are not disenfranchised. Don’t say that you are. Don’t cry about “democracy” or demand “reform” over your choice to be independent.
Let’s get a few things straight.
First, as long as we have a system that effectively excludes candidates from all but two major parties, all American citizens deserve to have a voice in whom those parties select as their candidates for office, regardless of whether or not they participate as party footsoldiers. Otherwise, we have no meaningful voice in the democratic process until all the important decisions have already been made by others and winnowed down to two choices—or just one choice—that may or may not be satisfactory.
Think about what this means if you live in a place, as I do, where a single political party dominates the entire electoral landscape. Here in Chicago, thanks in large part to our machine history, the Democratic primaries are effectively the final word. Most Democratic candidates here run either unopposed or without effective opposition. By the argument of the poster of the other diary, Chicagoans who don’t “canvass, research, organize legislative efforts, stuff envelopes, collect signatures, raise money, get out the vote, pool resources, maintain voter data, reach out to media and compete against the collective efforts of the opposition” have no right to take part in the government of their city and county, except by ratifying the choice that’s already been made for them by others.
Second, even within the party apparatus, the ability to choose candidates is not necessarily free. Because of their proximity to power, political parties are adept at working the levers to privilege their members and, especially, their leaders against opponents not just in the other party but within their own. Access to rulemaking power amplifies tendencies toward corruption and amplifies the effects of corruption over time: as a machine becomes more secure against challenges, it becomes bolder in its behavior, in how it rewards its allies and punishes its enemies, and the bolder it becomes, the more barriers against democratic challenge it constructs. All ballot access laws, however seemingly reasonable their justifications, are to some extent a manifestation of this tendency. Their purpose, simply put, is to deny citizens equal access to public service.
Third, partisanship elevates loyalty over more honest and fundamental virtues such as fairness, kindness and competence. A good envelope stuffer or door knocker is not necessarily a good mayor, alderman or judge, nor is a willingness to do grunty campaign work the same as having good taste in candidates. Having observed how the Cook County Democratic Party rewards personal and partisan loyalty over all else, including basic decency, I’ve ceased to value loyalty per se as a virtue; if you ask me whether loyalty is important, I need to ask, “Loyalty to what?” before I can answer.
Fourth, partisanship puts a straitjacket on voters’ judgment. When I lived in Albany, N.Y., another city with a history of machine politics, and covered local government as a journalist, I heard stories of how challengers to incumbent officeholders would knock on doors to solicit votes only to be told by residents, “Sorry, I’m voting for the Democrat.” Mind you, this was in a Democratic primary election. All the candidates running were registered Democrats, and many of them were bona fide enevelope stuffers, signature collectors and money raisers. But to these residents, only the incumbent, with his stamp of approval from the party regulars, was “the Democrat”; every other Democrat was some I-don’t-know-what.
In short, political parties that have long enjoyed access to power and privilege are not free institutions, nor are they built to produce the best possible candidates for public office, nor to make the most possible progress toward platform goals. They are self-perpetuating organisms that build up immunities to ward off what they construe as noxious influences—and they often construe efforts toward virtuous reform as a noxious influence. Why would any decent person pledge loyalty to such a thing over his or her own responsibilities as a thoughtful democratic citizen? And why would any decent person defend the measures they take, such as closed primaries, to fight off challenges, including challenges from within, when these challenges are often precisely what’s needed to restore people’s fundamental right to participation in their government, either direct or through freely chosen representatives, and to free and fair elections?
Every person is entitled to express his or her individual political will, both in word and by vote. For this will to be expressed meaningfully, each person has to be offered a genuine choice—not a Coke-or-Pepsi choice, but a choice that allows one to say, “This is the person I want for this job,” not merely, “This is the person I object to least, though none of them is really satisfactory.” By closing primaries, you’re coercing voters into expressing themselves falsely from the get-go—you’re saying, “Before you can have a voice in this process, you have to choose one of these parties and limit yourself to what it offers. You have to accept its limitations on what it’s going to decide you may be offered, even if there are others within the party who’d like to offer you something different and possibly even better. And if you don’t accept these terms, we’ll make the decision without you anyway, so you may as well go along with it.”
Is it any wonder that the number of voters identifying themselves as independents is at an all-time high?
Yeah, organizing is hard work. Organizing an independent or insurgent campaign is, if anything, much harder than organizing within the cozy confines of a political machine. A well-entrenched party regular hardly has to lift a finger to get elected or reelected—people will vote for him simply because it’s easy and familiar. An independent or insurgent will have to scale artificial obstacles every step of the way, constructed by insiders who’ve turned our elections into an incumbent protection racket. Closed primaries are a tool of this racket, a way of coercing voters and would-be candidates into operating within rules that have been carefully written to repel challenges to the comfortable status quo. That anyone can defend these mechanisms and claim to be “progressive” says to me how far we’ve fallen since the Progressive Era, when the idea of eliminating corruption in government was taken seriously.