It is sort of amazing to me the degree to which the governing establishment has become openly, downright brazenly, undemocratic. It proves the saying the “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The Democratic Party has 715 “superdelegates” who are free to cast their votes for the nominee of their choice at the convention; who are not answerable to the voters in any way. Granted, they usually vote for the candidate who has the greater popular vote, and they are a smallish minority of the 1200 or so votes needed for nomination, but why do they exist at all? Why does the party establishment feel the need to have a not insignificant number of votes controlled by the establishment, and able possibly to thwart the will of the voters?
Further, why has the party establishment chosen to make public that the overwhelming majority of those superdelegates have already chosen in favor of the establishment candidate and against the challenger, if not to create a discouraging atmosphere with which to reduce participation of voters who might otherwise champion the challenger?
The Republican Party establishment is even more energetic in its effort to thwart the will of its voters. It may well be that stopping Donald Trump would be a worthy cause, but that is not what democracy is about. He is receiving by far the greatest majority of votes, and the party establishment is openly seeking ways to deny him the nomination no matter what choice the voters make at the polls. They have even gone so far as to openly discuss rigging the nomination process (they call it “brokering”) at the convention to deny the choice of the voters if that choice turns out to be Donald Trump.
Someone once said that we had a democracy if we could keep it, and clearly we have not kept it, because the governing establishment no longer even pretends that the votes of the governed class really count. They no longer pretend that public opinion matters, and no longer bother to make the lies that they tell us believable.
I think the Dem superdelegate change happened in the late 60's, when their nomination went to pot and Nixon was elected. They wanted to tighten up central control, so they did. And of course, ms clinton is the establishment candidate (as she was in 2008, but the emergence of mr obama threw that on its ear, no one wants to diss the minority candidate). So she is the dem darling now and they're trying to make it happen without being too openly brazen about it, which is pretty obvious.
ReplyDeleteThe Rub side, well, they just don't want Trump up there and then lose. And polls /conventional wisdom says he will lose no matter who the Dem nominee is.
No it's not truly a democracy, but then Obama is not declaring martial law and himself president for life either, like in so many other countries.