Kevin Williamson meditates on the functions of political parties in the context of the Donna Brazile revelation concerning the Clinton campaign and the DNC on National Review:
There is a contradiction within American progressivism, which seeks to make the political process more democratic while pushing the policymaking process in a less democratic direction. For a century, progressives have championed more open primary elections and open primaries, popular ballot measures, referendum and recall processes, and wider voter participation. At the same time, progressives, particularly those of a Wilsonian bent, have sought to remove the substance of policymaking from democratically accountable elected representatives and entrust it to unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies in the belief that panels of experts immune from ordinary democratic oversight could make hard decisions based on reason and evidence rather than on short-term political necessity and popular passions. They regarded the political parties and their infamous smoke-filled rooms as embodiments of corruption and old-fashioned wheeler-dealer politics at odds with the brave new centrally planned world they imagined themselves to be building.
As it turns out, political parties are — like churches, civic groups, unions, trade groups, lobbyists, pressure groups, and business associations — part of the secret sauce of civil society. In much the same way as our senators — in their original, unelected role — were expected to provide a sober brake on the passions of the members of the more democratic House of Representatives, political parties exercised a soft veto that helped to keep extremism and demagoguery in check. Anybody can run for president — but not just anybody can run as the candidate of the Republican party or the Democratic party. Third parties face an uphill battle, but that doesn’t mean that they cannot prevail: The Republican party was a very successful third party, displacing the moribund Whigs. The difference between a republic and a democracy is that republics put up more roadblocks between fools and their desires.
The denuded political parties provide an important fund-raising and administrative apparatus — along with a tribal identity that is arguably more important — but they do not offer much more than that. Instead, we have relatively little in the way of mediating institutions between candidates and the public at large.
And, if this is an accurate view of the Republicans and the Democrats, it means we’re moving from the Age of Policy to the Age of Personality. That never ends well.
But while I find his remark that a fully functioning party should provide a veto against bad politicians appealing, I do not see how this connects to his previous remarks concerning Wilsonians who want to employ experts in making policy. The idea that a bunch of politicians, sans expertise in most facets of modern life, can hope to cope with the complexities of the modern world makes me shake my head in disbelief. Given my own numerous remarks on the defective efforts of amateurs, I could not dare to make any other statement – nor would I wish to.
The solution cannot be to elect a bunch of amateurs – especially the second-raters put forth by the GOP, who respond to the modern world by rejecting it and all of its necessary complexities – but instead learn how to integrate the elected world of republics and democracies with the meritocracy which is scientific knowledge. We used to know how to do this, but we’ve partially forgotten, I think, through the willful rejection of the distilled opinions of the experts because they clash with the ideology of the elected. I state it this way because no traditional political party with which I’m familiar is immune to such rejections.
But Kevin smoothly and slickly uses the phrase … unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies … as if it were a historical and unassailable truth, and it’s not. Bureaucracies can be held accountable, and they can be replaced. Neither operation is easy, of course, but then effective and fair governing is a non-trivial business.
