Reconsidering the Smoke-Filled Room

Maybe the League of Women Voters has been wrong all along.

The progressive, wholesome, good government vision of our democracy is that everybody votes, that politicians fund their campaigns with small donations from civically-minded individuals and that nothing happens in a smoke-filled room.

Well, we’ve pretty much achieved all that. Happy with what you’ve got?

Lots of us are voting… out of fear or loathing. To quote Pew Research, “The elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 were three of the highest-turnout U.S. elections of their respective types in decades.” But it’s not because people are excited about their choices. Instead, voters are showing up because they hate or fear the other guys. They’re not voting for their candidates so much as they’re voting to keep the barbarians on the other side of the gate. It’s not about building a bridge; it’s about digging a moat.

Small donors are funding campaigns… and hollowing out the center. Here’s the thing about big money: it wants stability and it’s only really interested in its own interests. PACs and bundled contributions tend to move politics to the center. It’s practical money. But the millions of small donors are people who are motivated by ideology. They’re very liberal or very conservative. In fact, the House members who lead the way in small donors are Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. I try to weed out my inbox on a regular basis and I “text STOP” every chance I get and yet I’m still always hearing from my good friends Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and others. And, ya know what, there’s always a crisis that demands that I chip in $10 or whatever I can afford to stop the horrible things that the other guys are just about to do. To generate lots of small contributions politicians need dynamite and so it encourages them to take ever more extreme positions or to characterize the other side as truly evil. Compromise and nuance does not raise money.

We’ve got a party nomination system that is completely democratic… and it has produced the two most unpopular nominees in history. And it created Donald Trump. That’s literally true because, if the 2016 GOP nomination had been left up to party professionals, there’s no way they would have allowed him anywhere near the ticket. And, on my side of the aisle, we’re stuck with Joe Biden despite growing evidence that he’ll lose. If the choice came down to party professionals meeting in Chicago later this summer there’s no way they wouldn’t nominate someone with better prospects.

Big money and smoke-filled rooms gave us Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Small money and primaries produced Donald Trump in 2016 and may very well send him back to the White House this time.

Give me two centrist parties. One that has relatively more faith in the free market while the other is more confident in what government can accomplish; one that sees a robust place for America in the world while the other is a bit more skeptical about foreign interventions; but both that buy into a sensibly regulated free market, some amount of American involvement in world affairs and the fundamental soundness of classically liberal and middle class values. That’s not what this system is offering us right now, though it’s fair to say that the Democrats are much closer to it, which is why I’m still a Democrat.

You could make an argument that it’s time to get small money out of politics, to reinstate the little room (without the smoke, of course) and to hope that passions subside to the point where more voters stay home because they don’t feel that the next election is the end of the world.

What’s so great about the League of Women Voters?