An editorial earlier this year in the Wall St. Journal asked:  “A question to ponder is whether today’s soundbite-driven primaries are selecting for the qualities that Republicans, and Americans, really want in a President.”

In the past I’ve argued for closing the primaries to all but card-carrying party members on the grounds that only party members have any business choosing their nominee.  As things stand in Tennessee (which isn’t an outlier), anyone can vote in either primary, leaving them open to manipulation by fair-weather friends and mischief-makers.  Hey, been there, done that.  In the 2020 primary, refusing to vote for Trump and knowing that a vote for any other Republican was a waste, I voted for Bernie Sanders, just for the fun of it.  And remember Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” in 2008, when Maha Rushie encouraged Republicans to vote in the Democratic primaries for Hillary Clinton to delay the inevitable nomination of Barack Obama?  I understand the logic and impetus behind the primary system; it is more democratic than any other means of nomination.  But now I’m beginning to wonder if it has been so corrupted that primaries are no longer tenable.

The current awful situation certainly points to that being the case.  No need to recite the particulars; you know them already.  Trump hasn’t quite sewn up the Republican nomination, but everything points to it, in spite of the fact that he is manifestly unfit for the Presidency.  His supporters would much rather fight than govern, anyway.  Governing is boring and corrupting; fighting is exhilarating and clarifying.  The Democrats are welcome to all that stuff about actually running the country, especially since their incompetence and overreaching provides the Trumpistas more reason to continue the brawl.  The sane corners of the Republican Party can only look on helplessly because the populists have the votes and are happy to use the internet to rake in small donations that add up to big bucks to provide more fuel for the outrage machine.

Meanwhile, on the other side of this nightmare, the Democrats are hell-bent on nominating a superannuated, venal, half-addled sack of talentless ambition dressed up in a skinsuit.  And Kamala Harris.  Go figure.  The sane corners of the Democratic Party are just as terrified as their counterparts on the other side because their nutjobs are in control, driving the nation hard left and screwing up by the numbers.

“The proof is in the pudding.”  When the political system is producing such reprehensible candidates as Trump, Clinton and Biden, then there is a terrible problem with the political system.  When sane non-Trumpist, non-woke elected officials are so terrified of being “primaried” by extremists that they adopt extremist positions to ward them off, then there is a terrible problem with the political system.  When compromise, the absolutely essential element of American governance, has become unthinkable because both sides see it as collaboration with the enemy, then the political system has gone completely off the rails.

There have always been nutjobs in government, the equivalents of today’s Rashida Tlaib, Matt Gaetz, Bernie Sanders and Marjorie Taylor Green.  There have always been grifters and back-bench incompetents, votes for sale to the highest bidder, and souls for sale for power.  The problem is, the ideologues, grifters, incompetents and power-mad demagogues are now in control.  That indicates a political system in the last stages of crisis and near the point of collapse.

But that doesn’t mean a nation in collapse; rather, it means that the political system is nearing the point of rethinking and renewal.  And that, I think, will require a realization that we have gone too far toward small-“d” democratization and need a return to small-“r” republicanism.  The nation is, as Benjamin Franklin so succinctly put it, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”  Too much democracy, in the form of open primaries, 24-hour news channels, continuous public opinion polls, endless internet-enabled, small-dollar fundraising, and permanent campaigns turns out to be a bad thing, even for, perhaps especially for, democracy itself. They raise the temperature too high and leave it there, keeping the body politic at a constant boil, unable to do anything except try to escape the heat while simultaneously keeping the lid on.  The impossibility of the task has been driven home in the last decade-plus as governance has become an afterthought to politics.

Small-“r” republicanism will require a deliberate dialing down of the temperature; much easier said than done, with so many livelihoods depending on the constant boil, particularly in the media.  It will require that primaries be closed or done away with altogether in favor of state conventions.  It will require that national parties become germane again, taking back the power and money that devolved to political action committees (they seemed like a good idea at the time, but turned into monsters).  In my dreams and a few other places, we would replace the 17^th Amendment, which requires popular election of Senators, with an amendment that requires that state legislatures elect Senators; the reasons for this being an improvement are pretty involved, so suffice it to say that it would be.  It would require that compromise return to its position of central importance, and that leaders be given the time, space and forbearance by their political supporters to wheel and deal and debate out of the public eye, reaching the difficult solutions that no one loves but that all but the fanatics can live with; and we ignore the fanatics as they rage madly at the machine precisely because they are irrational fanatics who deserve to be ignored.

Is all this too much to hope for?  Nah.  The United States was too much to hope for, and we got that up and running.  This, by comparison, is a piece of cake.  The question is, are we as smart and wise and committed and brave as our Founding Fathers?  Are we up for it?

That, I am very sorry to say, is an open question.

• Kenneth D. Gough © 2023