Taki's Mag

Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney declared his intention last week to seek the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 2012. Between now and next summer’s convention, he’ll trip along the Yellow Brick Road that he must imagine will lead him to the White House. That means fifteen months of making promises no one expects him to keep, chomping on fried chicken in Alabama and dim sum in San Francisco, coining empty slogans, pandering to people he would never invite to dinner, kissing a few thousand drooling babies, and, if he is astute, keeping his hands off the posteriors of the free labor that flocks to his colors.

Yes, ma’am, it’s election time in America. It’s the longest season of the quadrennial calendar, and Mitt will tack on an extra three months if he takes the nomination. The going rate for the full campaign must be about $50 million a month. Those with access to the hundreds of millions it takes for advertising to fool the voters are either up and running or making it clear they’re about to be: Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, and someone from Utah named Jon Huntsman. I assume no Democrat will be brave or foolhardy enough to challenge Obama.

Republican primary and caucus voters will be asked by all of the candidates to trust them to overthrow the last guy for whose banter we fell. This is what Americans call democracy, and it is no recipe for putting the most qualified, public-spirited, and honest people into office. It instead guarantees chicanery, mediocrity, and larceny.

Why does Mitt Romney excite us less for 2012 than Harold Stassen, who sought the Republican nomination eight times without coming close, did in 1964? At the ’64 convention at the Cow Palace near San Francisco, I remember delegates sporting jocular lapel buttons that said, “Stop Stassen.” Perhaps Mitt will achieve similar status if he persists every four years in his quixotic quest to make himself leader of the free world. A few people talk about Jeb Bush, as if two Bushes in the White House had not already created a surplus. I’ll leave Sarah Palin to Tina Fey, and most of the others couldn’t run a gas station. If Obama fell under a bus, the Democrats wouldn’t field a much better roster. American democracy is competing with the dollar for loss of value.

The 2012 Republican nomination derby, with its lame horses and crooked jockeys, will drag on for the next fifteen months of ennui, deception, and occasional scandals. The crown won’t go to anyone who cannot or will not pay the entry fee. It debars those who will not guarantee their financial backers rich rewards and bailouts from the public purse or soften up the public with promises of chickens in every pot. Thus, the voter is offered only those with the morals of US Congressmen or Colombian drug dealers. And I’m being unkind to the Colombians. Does it matter that the finest thoroughbreds are never in this particular race?

It’s some time since I read Plato’s Dialogues, but I recall Socrates saying that it was possible to judge a candidate’s worthiness for office by the determination with which he resisted it. The wisest thing William Tecumseh Sherman ever said was, “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.” If he had not been the butcher of Georgia and murderer of America’s indigenous population, that statement alone should have qualified him. Instead, the Republicans that year (1884) nominated the great statesman James Blaine. Remember him? He lost to Grover Cleveland.

America’s commercial form of democracy was endorsed by a Supreme Court decision last year that assured big capital’s right to choose our nominees. The 5-4 verdict in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission does for the republic what the Dred Scott decision achieved for the Union. This system of funding candidates does not allow good people to come forward. It encourages the opposite. It enables politicians who agree to anything to get into office—whether through appointing unethical financiers to oversee the economy; granting government contracts to companies whose corrupt practices and shoddy products would send their managers to the penitentiary in a sane society; guaranteeing AIPAC twenty-four-hour access to the Oval Room and billions of dollars for Israeli settlers to do to the Palestinians what Sherman did to the Indians; and paying the taxpayers’ annual tribute in gold to weapons-makers. Candidates agree to do all this harm merely to put their names at the bottom of that illustrious list of placemen that includes Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding, and Bill Clinton.

Corruption and mediocrity, as Tocqueville noted, always lurked within popular democracy. Placating the mob was unlikely to achieve excellence. Plato batted around the contradiction between popular government and good government, coming down—as both Karl Popper and I. F. Stone wrote—hard against democracy. As most people forget, the word “democracy” derives from two words whose Greek origins mean “mob” and “rule.”

No one was more aware of this than British parliamentarian and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, who helped extend the franchise to the very mob to whom he refused to pander. As a Whig Member of Parliament, he fought hard for the Reform Law of 1832 that opened the way to universal male suffrage. The electors of Leeds then asked him to represent them in the next elections. He wrote to one of them in August 1832:

The practice of begging for votes is, as it seems to me, absurd, pernicious, and altogether at variance with the true principles of representative government….The practice of canvassing is quite reasonable under a system in which men are sent to Parliament to serve themselves. It is the height of absurdity under a system under which men are sent to Parliament to serve the public. While we had only a mock representation, it was natural enough that this practice should be carried to a great extent. I trust it will soon perish with the abuses from which it sprung.

Alas, the practices of sending men to Parliament, as well as the House of Representatives and the Senate, to serve themselves and their financial benefactors did not perish. If such practices do not vanish soon, democracy will.