I’m going to let you in on a little secret: it’s a presidential election year! I know, I know — it’s easy to forget what with our media’s propensity to cover politics like horse races and the carpet-bombing of our social media accounts, airwaves and local TV channels with campaign ads. What’s more (and this is a complete aside) American elections last nearly an eternity. Measured by candidacy declaration to Election Day, the 2016 US presidential election lasted 596 days. The 2020 election will last 1,194. Japan? 12 days. Canada? 36 Britain: five to six weeks. You get the picture.
It’s all messy and partisan and thoroughly rankorus, but as Winston Churchill noted, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others!” So whilst I have a propensity to bemoan the state of things, I thought a more useful activity would be to note some titles that would help us better understand our republic’s wild politics!
First, let’s take a look at parties — not so much Democrat or Republican or American Solidarity or Green — but the idea of parties. They are foreign to the Constitution and were unwanted at our founding. To this querying end, the library offers the audiobook People and the Ballot: A History of American Party Politics by University of Notre Dame professor Joshua Kaplan. This dives into the ‘why’ of parties and the historical and modern role they play in our political environment.
Next there’s the Electoral College, which is a unique feature of the American democratic system. In basically any other representative government with a president or similar government official that is elected by the people, the person who receives the most votes wins. That is not how our system works, and Electoral Dysfunction: a survival manual for American voters by Victoria Bassetti (324.6 Bas) dives deeply into our peculiar system elucidating its fascinating history as it endures despite the fact that a solid majority of America’s citizens (63% at last Gallup poll) would like the constitutionally-enumerated College stricken from our system.
How about a broader view of democratic government as it plays out over the world? Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s vivid, earnest, and accessible Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (321.8 Ric) takes a look at our early democratic experiment and tracks its evolution as it spreads throughout the world. In a time when people actively wonder if we’re witnessing the decline of democracy — think Tim Snyder’s On Tyranny (321.9 Sny) and The Road to Unfreedom (320.53 Sny) — it’s a hopeful look at where we’ve been and to what we aspire.
I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t recommend a classic, and even though it’s arduous, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (320.973 Toc) is still a remarkable work of political and philosophical thought. Somehow his 1831 observations about our then relatively nascent country continue to prove prophetic from his prediction that we’d tear at one another over the issue of slavery to worries over industrialism leading to wealth concentration, to the great power struggles of the 20th century, and all throughout the important reminder that a system such as ours is uniquely vulnerable to unethical citizens because our laws and customs aren’t immutable and the masses get, in time, what the masses want.
By all means, let us research the candidates and their positions and cultivate our convictions, but hopefully these titles have piqued your interest in what lies beneath all the partisan jockeying. Allow me close with a quote from Tocqueville to encapsulate these last thoughts as well as give you something to ponder for a minute or a lifetime: “I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.” In leaving behind monarchy, heredity ceased to be the defining factor of rulers and has been replaced by ambition, and one hopes, by some other positive attributes. The story is still unfolding, and we have the good fortune to be here in the thick of it!
Paul Utterback, a reference and local history assistant at the Crawfordsville District Public Library, contributed this column.