Iowa Blog Post To You

Before I get into this… I’m going to try turning on comments for this one. Substack now allows this for non-paid subscriptions. Feel free to comment. And if it turns out that the commenting is a drag, they will go away forever!

So! This post here was going to be my attempt to draw a high-level parallel between the meltdown of the Iowa Caucuses and Major League Baseball’s sign-stealing mess. It was going to be - like Teen Girl Squad might say - soooooo good.

Here’s the problem. I found that in order to draw the parallel, I needed to explain why the Houston Astros using video equipment and garbage cans to steal signs from the catcher to the pitcher is such a huge deal to so many people. And I found that I couldn’t do it without many paragraphs of explanation. It just wasn’t working.

When I try to write something and it just doesn’t work, I tend to leave it there for a while, thinking that I just haven’t figured out what to do with it yet. So it sits and sits and rots and it takes a long time until I decide to get it out of the way.

My ultimate parallel was going to be how, when there is ample evidence that shit has gone wrong, people are readily going to believe that shit is even more wrong than it might initially appear. Once a cheater, always a cheater - that’s the problem dogging the Astros and Major League Baseball. And the Iowa Caucuses? It’s not just a case of bad software, it must be something far more pernicious, even if there’s no evidence there to prove it.

My argument was going to further go like this: There are two reasons why it is so incredibly important to prevent potential conflicts of interest. One is because conflict of interest can be very bad! And can manifest in subtle ways! But the other reason is because people readily believe that where there’s smoke there’s fire. Even if nothing truly untoward has happened, the appearance of such conflict can damage credibility badly. And two institutions, right now, whose credibility is incredibly strained, are Major League Baseball and the Democratic National Committee.

But, well, I found that really painstakingly building the case was turning into something that even I found boring. It would only resonate very well with the handful of you who are following both things closely, and, uh, if you’re in the middle of that particular Venn diagram, you’re probably not someone who needs my convincing on such matters.

And, finally, it took so long to get here, to my writing about what I’m not writing about, that Iowa now feels like it’s far over the horizon. Super Tuesday is less than a week ago. Two surreal debates have taken place since. And I want to say something else about this Democratic primary process now. Or maybe I’ll talk about things 100 years old. Here goes:

I have preferences. There are candidates I like and candidates I dislike. Everybody has preferences and maybe yours match mine and maybe they don’t.

Three weeks ago, in the immediate aftermath of the Iowa mess, I wrote a post about democracy. Since then I’ve watched the last two debates. They were fascinating, cringeworthy, maddening, instructive… they were a whole lot of things. They are also highly indicative of what’s wrong with our democracy.

It’d be easy to focus on the candidates yelling over one another, on how at this stage of the process it feels like there’s still too many people… but what I think isn’t getting enough attention is how there’s a certain inevitability to where we’re at. These debates are reflective of an overall democratic process which simply is not working, and of an establishment which does not understand what to do about it.

I wrote previously about balance. Consider the notion of a balance between stability and flexibility. Things change, they move around. You want to stay steady, not constantly over-correcting, but, still, correcting. But what if instead of stability, you have rigidity, and it’s preventing you from adapting? What if, in turn, the countervailing force to rigidity isn’t flexibility but chaos?

Anyway, what the hell, let’s talk about 1920.

America was on the precipice of monumental changes, brought on by the automobile and expanded electrification. But America had also just come out of involvement in the First World War, which caused millions of deaths worldwide; was coming off of the influenza epidemic, which - do you all realize this? - afflicted an estimated 27% of the world’s population and is now believed to have killed as many as 100,000,000 people; and on top of all this, the First Red Scare was going on.

This was in the middle of the Nadir of Race Relations. Post-war isolationist sentiment and the Red Scare were both closely associated with extreme anti-immigrant (and anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic) hostility. Between the war, the flu, and the fearmongering, people were scared and exhausted.

It was an election year. The incumbent Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson, was - unbeknownest to most Americans - mostly an invalid, having suffered a stroke in October 1919. The Republican Party looked to be in good shape, but had no idea who it would nominate. Eventually, the Republican king-makers - literally gather in a smoke-filled room in Chicago - settled on Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding, who would campaign - and win - on a slogan of “Not Nostrums But Normalcy”.

In theory, the 1920 election was the most democratic in American history up to that time, because it was the first time women could vote. In practice, though, the country was so fucked up that it’s hard to credibly say that anything which went down that year especially qualified as democratic. Harding, a candidate who hadn’t been at all vetted by the general public, essentially won by fiat.

Well, we all know how it went. Harding proceeded to administer over what is commonly held to be the worst presidential administration of the 20th Century, one absolutely riddled with high-level corruption. The Ku Klux Klan exploded in popularity, especially in states like Indiana and Oregon. Harding died in 1923, giving way to Calvin Coolidge, who didn’t preside over the same corruption but who was the man who declared “The business of America is business” and gave corporate America whatever it wanted. The 1920s weren’t a time of “normalcy”, because what passed for “normalcy” pre-war didn’t exist anymore. The automobile and radio ended all that. Rather, “normalcy” in effect just meant plundering. And that plundering eventually culminated in the Great Depression.

“Make America Great Again” is the other side of the coin from “Not Nostrums But Normalcy”. Instead of a bland slogan from a bland politician designed as sort of a political sedative, it’s a brash statement from a brash politician designed as sort of a political amphetamine. In both cases though the idea was to blunt certain change in favor of other change. Normalcy - which included nativism - was largely a screen for a corporatist agenda. MAGA - which is even more explicitly nativist - is similarly a screen for a corporatist agenda. The fall back on nominal structural rigidity readily allows for a corporatist agenda to proceed. And we know where that can eventually lead.

The Democratic Party in the 1920s was very different from the Democratic Party today. It does feel as though there’s something similar going on with the internal debate, though. In 1924, the Democrats were bitterly split, and after over 100 ballots at their convention, compromised on John W. Davis, who got skunked by Coolidge. In 1928, one of the factions came into ascendence and nominated Al Davis - the first Catholic major party nominee - but he was solidly defeated by Herbert Hoover.

Warren Harding, going into 1920, was nobody’s particular idea of the eventual Republican nominee. Donald Trump, going into 2016, was entirely unwanted by the erstwhile Republican king-makers. But although they came to the nomination in very different ways, the party closed ranks around them, and the Republican ranks remained tightly closed around Coolidge and Hoover in subsequent elections as well.

The Democrats? They were a mess in 1920, a joke in 1924, and only starting to figure it out in 1928. It took the onset of the Depression and the political maturity and ultimate emergence of arguably the most brilliant politician of the last century for the Democrats to figure out how to close ranks. And when they did, they closed ranks around a man who was far ahead of the party as a whole in understanding that government needed to change - that what had passed for stability had actually been rigidity, as evidenced by the Hoover Administration’s complete ineptitude at changing course at all to meet the worst economic crisis in the country’s history.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood many critical things. He understood that he needed the entire party - including its unsavory elements - behind him. He understood that he would not have all the answers immediately and would need to be able to pivot. He understood the need to project confidence. He understood the need to lead, and when necessary, drag the party along with him. And he understood that the American democratic experiment hung in the balance.

FDR was no radical. He was a pragmatist, with relatively conservative instincts. But he readily understood that you cannot put out a forest fire with a bucket of water. He also understood that even if the river is right there, and has enough water to put out the fire, that it took government to mobilize getting enough people with enough buckets. And if the fire kept raging, you needed to keep finding new ways to douse the flames.

If you, like me, see the parallels to 100 years ago, then you are probably thinking, explicitly or otherwise, about what FDR brought to the table, and are horribly dismayed to see that instead we may be headed for a repeat of 1924.

All that said:

The only major Democratic candidates who demonstrate a sufficient intellectual understanding of the situation at hand are Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. I know Sanders supporters with disdain for Warren. I know Warren supporters with disdain for Sanders. Please, drop it. They both get it. Their prescriptions are different but what’s especially important, I think, is that they both truly get this critical aspect of what FDR got: If the fires keep raging, you’ve got to find new ways to douse the flames. And look: Our planet is on fire. We can’t just bring buckets to a planetary fire.

This is not exactly the post I set out to write. I had not exactly actively been thinking about John W. Davis this week. But, that’s META-SPIEL for you.