Nostalgia For Smoke-Filled Rooms: How The Political Moment Revived Calls For Elite Control

Following the debacle that was the 1968 Presidential Election, reforms within the Democratic Party created the primary system with which we are currently struggling today. These reforms, spearheaded in part by eventual nominee George McGovern, were meant to give the voters a voice over party officials who had, in the past, pressed their thumbs on the scale and given their preferred candidates as nominees for president. It is conventional, understood history that McGovern’s efforts would lead immediately to his failed candidacy - Richard Nixon handedly won reelection in one of the largest blowouts in political history - and that the system has been on shaky legs ever since.

There’s no arguing the primary system is imperfect. Scheduling of white supermajority states like Iowa and New Hampshire at the very beginning has proven…problematic. Fundraising has been key while the actual job of president doesn’t involve that particular skill and the reliance on it in the primary often damns minority candidates and insurgents who might gain traction in later states. And now, in the era of twenty-four hour news, the feeding frenzy on debates, early results, prognosticating, and irresponsibly making declarations of winners and losers and emerging trends has created a circus that is nothing short of dangerous to our political system.

But it is the emergence of Donald Trump that has most set off the alarms. Since his capturing of the nomination and the reins of the Republican Party in 2016, pundits and experts have called, both openly and surreptitiously, for a return to the smoke-filled rooms of old. There was Ross Douthat’s embarrassingly terrible and racist eulogy for the rule of White Anglo-Saxons. On any number of podcasts political scientists and pundits have talked among themselves about a shift back to the party-dominance system, arguing that system had its benefits and surely would have avoided nominating Trump. Books have made the argument. Newscasts and opinion shows dive into the topic regularly. It’s become just commonplace to hear calls for a return to a top-down system where political elites choose their candidates and Americans are left to choose between the two choices.

And why?

Because of a classist, often racist belief that American voters are simply incapable of grasping the complex intricacies of self-governance and need an enlightened race of powerful, educated, monied elites to guide their hands.

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A quick aside.

Richard Milhouse Nixon, the 37th President of the United States of America, is the subject of nearly infinite scorn and derision as one of the worst and easily one of the most corrupt executives in the history of the country. The Watergate Scandal that brought him down has become synonymous with the kind of unchecked corruption the Founding Fathers of America were so concerned with, but it’s his many other crimes that often get forgotten that need some examination.

It has become accepted fact that, heading into the 1968 President Election, Nixon attempted to sabotage then-President Lyndon B. Johnson’s peace talks in the Vietnam War, an act of treason that almost assuredly led to more U.S. deaths and continued destruction.

In 1969, months after taking his oath of office, Nixon got dangerously drunk in the White House and, while out of his head inebriated, ordered a first-strike nuclear attack on North Korea. That attack was only scuttled as his subordinates ignored his order, essentially committed a small-scale coup, and let Nixon sleep off his drunk.

There are any number of other crimes as Nixon, a dangerous, paranoid, demagogue, retrofitted the United States government into a weapon to be used against his enemies, including a secret intelligence division and armies of paramilitary thugs.

And here’s the thing: Richard Nixon was vetted MULTIPLE times by the Republican Party.

Beginning in 1946, Nixon received the Republican stamp of approval for his run for Congress.

Three years later, in 1949, Nixon became a senator for his home state of California.

Then, three years later, he was chosen as General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Vice-President despite numerous fundraising scandals that had already revealed his criminal inclinations.

In 1960, he was chosen as his party’s standard bearer by one of those smoke-filled rooms.

Eight years later, they chose him again.

And then four years after that.

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One of the defining stains in American history is the argument over who deserves to vote and who deserves to decide the future. Despite myths otherwise, the founding was predicated on limiting democratic power and ensuring that a ruling class of elites, peopled by the most powerful and wealthy white men in the country. The drafting of the Constitution, in large part, was a response to democratic uprisings that worried the powerful that their control and wealth might be endangered.

Each successive generation featured its own arguments about self-governance. The Senate was a chamber for the elite ruling class exclusively until the 20th century. As America grew into an empire, politicians took to the floors of Congress arguing that only white men were capable of self-governance and thus other countries and people of color needed managed and dominated lest they destroy themselves. Of course, the horror of Jim Crow is the horror of disenfranchisement and subjugation.

The argument being made now, while rooted in the noble cause of preventing men like Donald Trump from gaining power, is a classist, racist argument with roots in the elitist history of the country. Experts can dance around the subject, but what’s there is easy to see: a disbelief in the people’s ability to govern themselves.

What’s being put forth is a rather ludicrous proposal. That the elites who created this situation are the only ones who can put it right. The mistakes are so massive and so complicated that only those who put them into motion can now bring them to a halt.

The truth, however, is that the problem isn’t the people, it’s the system within which they’ve been tasked with operating in. Our politics are flooded with so much money our politicians are bought and sold multiple times over. Fundraising and reelection are their only goals. Special interests and lobbyists own their votes and, by extension, the parties themselves. Giving power over to them to choose our future leaders isn’t about averting disaster, it’s about ensuring that absolutely nothing can change.

Entrenched power and wealth never moves toward change or reform. It simply chugs forward in search of more power and wealth. Gifting us two candidates every four years that are belched forth by the political parties isn’t a recipe for moving our ship out of these waters and into a new direction. It’s about continuing our course, no matter what signs arise that we’re heading down a dangerous path.

Donald Trump was never the problem. It’s hard to admit sometimes because the truth is ghastly, but a man like Trump could have never come to power had the system not been sick and in decline. He was able to takeover the Republican Party in the primaries because the Republican Party was ripe for a takeover and had been drifting in the direction of Trumpism for years and years and years, regardless of who their standard bearer or presidential nominee was. And the reason? Because the party itself was moving in the direction and was being pushed by its own propaganda media apparatus.

Chances are, the party would’ve emerged from its smoky room in 2016 holding Trump’s hand aloft in victory.

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So what is the argument that should be being made?

Reform and education.

Our primaries have been wounded by decades’ worth of propaganda, misinformation, and corruption that has so warped the picture of American life that voters have gone into the polls with little in the way of clarity as to what they’re even voting for. This has happened because of propaganda campaigns, disinformation operations by the parties and corporations, and an all-out assault on the education system, an attack with designs to keep voters from understanding their past, present, or future.

When pundits argue the smoke-filled room should come back, they’re not just arguing that elites should regain power or that voters shouldn’t have a say, they’re locking the door on Americans and trying to keep them from ever gaining necessary information that could help them, their country, and the world.

We have allowed those same elites that pundits and writers call for to maintain their power and wealth by turning a blind eye to their manipulation and thought-control. We’ve taken it for granted that this is just how a society is supposed to work, with the powerful orchestrating from above and ants below dancing to their instructions. Removing the primary system and returning to elite-chosen candidates wouldn’t change the candidates, more than likely, but it would doom any potential for things to actually change or get better.

And that’s what we’re talking about there, the great, quiet debate of 2020: whether we should ever try something different or we should rely on a class of technocrats and monied managers to take the controls of a complex society and trust that they’ll figure it out. It is this philosophy and acquiescence, unfortunately, that has contributed to the authoritarian regimes and fascist movements in history as the people simply walk away from their responsibility to self-govern.

The answer isn’t to retreat or to cede control to the wealthy and the powerful.

The answer is to do better.

The answer is to finally, thankfully, belatedly, trust the people.

Jared Yates Sexton is an author and political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Politico, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. His most recent book is American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. You can follow him on Twitter @jysexton and subscribe to his podcast The Muckrake.