The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
I began to write this essay the morning after the Iowa caucuses at 6:17 AM. I stayed up last night until midnight hoping to hear the results of the Iowa caucuses. I woke up at 2:02 AM thinking about this coming Sunday’s sermon, which shall be part of an occasional year-long series called Sermons Prior to the 2020 Election. The Feb. 9 sermon is entitled Sowing the Wind and Reaping the Whirlwind.
When I couldn’t get back to sleep, I got up to write half the sermon. When I could not get back to sleep after that, I got up again at 5:28 to take the dog out.
Then I switched on the television news. Still no results. At the moment no one seems to know when – or if – the final numbers will ever be reported.
Predictably, there are conspiraciy theories about hacks by enemies foreign or domestic. Who knows? Will we ever know?
What we may validly deduce, however, is this: the last thing the Iowa caucuses intended to do in 2020 was to end the Iowa caucuses forever. But if that is the result, it will be a very providential occurrence. It also, I fervently hope, will signal the end of presidential primaries altogether.
Only in the later Sixties and early Seventies did both parties agree to hold primaries in each of the fifty states. Prior to that time, party officials themselves met behind closed doors, or at least not wide-open doors, to choose their candidates. The party officials were Members of Congress, the heads of the state and local party organizations, longtime paid party organizers, and so on.
In an effort to make choosing presidential candidates more “democratic,” the parties agreed to allow voters in each state to select the highest vote-getter from that state. In theory it was a good idea. In fact it turned into a distinctively expensive and expansive uniquely American political nightmare.
A strong majority of voters in primaries make their selections for presidential candidates on whom they “like,” and not very much on the issues upon which the candidates campaign, even though the candidates obdurately believe the issues are the rationale by which the voters choose presidential primary candidates.
To express this in an entirely different way, it is amateurs, not professionals, who select the people who become the standard bearers for their respective parties. Smoke-filled rooms no longer determine the winners; it is nameless voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada who determine the early front runners. By Super Tuesday, the nominees are almost always known, although they are not officially “crowned” until the party primaries in the summer of national election years.
The major technological glitch in the Iowa caucuses of 2020 may have given a blissful coup de grace to all that. If so, thanks to the computer glitch, whatever it was.
What a blessing it would be if a major mathematical/technological/computer error has rendered presidential primaries a victim of party oversensitivity to the “will of the people.” The fact is that “the people” have no well-formulated concepts of who the presidential candidate should be for any of our political parties. It is the people who are involved on the inside circle of the party mechanisms who should know who the best candidates are to represent their views and their issues to the people after the party conventions.
The Iowa Democratic Party functionaries, scrambling all night long on Feb. 3-4 of 2020 to do the right thing, have done the nation a huge favor. Three cheers for Iowa! Down with presidential primaries!
(Finished at 7:03 AM on Feb. 4, 2020)
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.