Fareed Zakaria makes the claim that “the election is a necessarily democratic process, but not the choosing of the pool of candidates.” He also seems to be implying that this is at the core of the problems that American democracy faces. While Zakaria may be correct in arguing that allowing the public to choose candidates is dangerous, he overlooks that the decrease in faith in democracy is often attributed to the common opinion that the system is rigged, or simply not functioning as it should. The implication behind these rationales is that a large portion of the public does not feel that they’re voices are being heard. If this view is truly held by a large number of citizens, it would likely be counter-productive to attempt to limit one of the democratic aspects of the election process. Changing this process could feasibly be seen as a symbolic overhaul of part of democracy’s most important institutions, which would exacerbate the problem. From a different perspective, it is important to examine how giving this power to party officials would change the selection of candidates. In the case of the Republican Party, though citizens don’t directly choose the candidate anyway, it seems likely that little change would occur. If it were completely up to the party to decide, it is likely that the same choices would be made. The Tea Party’s influence on the Republican Party has forced them to gravitate towards an extreme point of polarization, threatening those in the party who were more moderate. This means that the party must mediate between the public and its internal conflict, and in the last election the solution to the problem seems to have been to pick the candidate that matched the public opinion and the Tea Party’s agenda, not the one that best represented the party. In this way, it seems that removing primaries might be symbolically dangerous and procedurally inconsequential.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fareed Zakaria makes the claim that “the election is a necessarily democratic process, but not the choosing of the pool of candidates.” He also seems to be implying that this is at the core of the problems that American democracy … Continue reading