A dozen years ago, I set up shop at a Des Moines middle school to cover the Iowa caucuses on a snowy January night.... Back home the next week, friends asked for a debrief. I told them it reminded me of something I’d recently seen on YouTube: grindadráp, a centuries-old community organized whale hunt practiced annually in the Faroe Islands, when the animals are driven out of the North Atlantic into shallow bays and then beached and bludgeoned with clubs, or stabbed with gaffs until the water runs red. Both events were dynamic, homespun, an exercise of tradition, a visual spectacle—yet archaic and totally disturbing. How do these things happen in the 21st century? Could what I witnessed in Des Moines really be the best way to kick off the selection of the next Leader of the Free World?Sometimes old traditions are exactly the best place to locate democracy, as it happens. A form that has been stable for generations is a form that generations of people have chosen. If the good of democracy comes from considering the views of others and not only of a small group, why not include the choices of your fathers and mothers, grandfathers and great-grandmothers? If this was choice-worthy for so many for so long, why not consider that they perhaps had a point?
Well, that's just a restatement of Chesterton: "Tradition is the democracy of the dead."
5 comments:
Well, you know. Tradition evolves, precedent gets changed or reversed, as society evolves, albeit often more slowly than society's evolution.
Some might suggest, impertinently, that tradition and precedent act as useful brakes on society's changing.
Others, though, the woke for instance, who clearly Know Better, want that change Right Damn Now. If it's going to change, anyway, why wait? They know what the correct change is, so just go there. Isn't that even the Marine Corps tradition as summarized by Major Dad? "See the hill, take the hill."
Eric Hines
Not usually without orders from your elders, though; and my elders are mostly among the dead.
As a former Iowan, I fall in the camp that primaries should be outlawed. All states should select delegates by caucus or convention. Primaries are too easily gamed, either by being 'open' (same day registration falls in this category, IMO) and thus allowing partisans to vote for the opposition candidate or being the 'jungle' variety that works to eliminate general election candidates from rival parties. They rank with a number of 'Progressive' reforms that have not worked out well in practice over the years.
"Who put this damned fence here? Away with it!"
In retrospect, I think all of this "well, the caucuses/primaries aren't really important" business is just laying the groundwork for why Biden will be handed the nomination regardless of what the proles... I mean voters... actually decide.
I think in 2016, Sanders did legitimately lose nationwide to Clinton, but early going it was close enough that I believe her campaign (and the DNC with which it was indeed colluding) cheated. Too many delegates ended up being decided by questionable irregularities for me to believe otherwise. Add to that the "superdelegate" business, and I think the deck was stacked for a predetermined outcome. I think this year, they've got an even weaker "designated winner", so they're "prepping the battlefield", so to speak, in case they literally need to throw out the results to make Biden the nominee.
If Biden comes out in the top 2 candidates out of Iowa, I think that will confirm for me that the fix is in, as he wasn't even polling in the top 3. They may not be able to give him #1, as that might be too unbelievable, but #2 is still higher than he could legitimately earned, but not so straining of believe that Democrats might not accept the results as legitimate.
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