Testing our democracy

The practice of politics, to include the formulation and execution of public policy, is rather more art than science. Campaigns that are largely or exclusively data-driven, such as Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, put Donald Trump in the White House in 2017.

The late Horace Busby, a much-admired strategist and one of Lyndon Johnson’s longest- serving aides, once volunteered that LBJ was almost singular in his ability to properly interpret public opinion surveys and employ them to his longterm advantage. Johnson regarded as invaluable even those polls, especially those polls, that told him what he would rather not have heard, Busby said, because they indicated where his administration’s rhetoric was falling short, where its message needed to be fine-tuned or abandoned altogether for a substitute.

So, provided they are kept in proper perspective, polls can illuminate, educate and edify. On occasion they can more nearly horrify. The University of Virginia’s highly regarded Center for Politics, in its latest findings, settles for merely “disturbingly” — as in, “Disturbingly, nearly one-third (31 percent) of Trump supporters and about a quarter (24 percent) of Biden supporters at least somewhat agree that democracy is no longer a viable system and that the country should explore alternative forms of government to ensure stability and progress.”

Surprised? Consider the spectacle of a U.S. House of Representatives, in which the Republican majority has for almost three weeks been unable to choose a Speaker after ousting the man who had been its senior officer for fewer than nine months, a Californian who was the first Speaker in a century to fail to win the chair on the first ballot. (Fourteen more ballots and all manner of compromises were required of the already wounded Kevin McCarthy before his ill-starred tenure began.) In the cannibalistic struggle to succeed him, two ranking members of the GOP conference became entrées.

“We are a fractured, stubborn, divided bunch right now. There are hard feelings, lot of open wounds,” said Rep. Steve Womack of the Third District, the most outspoken of Arkansas’s four House delegates.

As the week of Oct. 22 began, nine GOP representatives had announced their candidacies for the speakership, but Womack, appearing on Roby Brock’s Sunday public affairs program, was not sanguine about the near-term prospects for comity: “Who is that individual that’s going to be able to get everybody to coalesce around them? I’m going to predict to you that maybe none of them. And if that happens, then we’ll either be stuck in neutral again, spinning our wheels.”

No imagination is required to assess the damage to U.S. standing among allies and adversaries abroad, but a quick scan of the overseas press confirms that the impact of intra-governmental disarray is not insubstantial.

“There is no one else to play the American role,” cautions the quite conservative Gerald Seib of the Times of London, noting the overwhelming sentiment (polls, anyone?) in the U.S. and the larger West for both a secure Israel and a just resolution of the Palestinian question. Then there is the American dominance of NATO, indispensable to containing Vladimir Putin’s ambitions.

“No one else can do it,” agrees Dennis Ross, who has served Democratic and Republican presidents in the search for Mideast peace.

Of course, if one’s interests are strictly domestic there is the little matter of an impending budget deadline. The federal government, a good portion of it, will run out of money on Nov. 18. And, a gentle reminder, it was McCarthy’s last-minute deal with Democrats that avoided a shutdown on Oct/1. It was also a deal that won more Democratic votes than Republican. And the deal that sealed his fate as Speaker.

More chaos threatens, and beyond the District of Columbia. The Virginia survey reports that among supporters of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, about 40 percent believe “that the other side had become so extreme that it is acceptable to use violence to prevent them from achieving their goals.” Still larger (“staggering”) majorities “of both Biden (70 percent) and Trump (68 percent) voters believed electing officials from the opposite party would result in lasting harm to the United States.”

Cancel culture? Almost a third of Biden supporters and one in four Trump supporters, the poll reports, “somewhat agreed with limiting certain rights, including freedom of speech, to safeguard the feelings and safety of marginalized groups.”

We like to assure ourselves that our politicians are fickle, but that our institutions are strong. The latter are being tested as rarely before.