No state is more dominated by a single political party than Hawai‘i. Today, there are no Republicans in Hawai‘i’s state senate and there are only five Republicans out of 51 members in the house. And Hawai‘i’s beleaguered GOP appears poised to lose yet another seat after November’s election.

This is nothing new. The Democratic Party has more or less governed Hawai‘i since 1954. That was the year when labor leaders and returning Asian-American veterans of World War II overthrew the ruling oligarchy of sugar planters.

Although individual Republican candidates—including two Republican governors—occasionally have found success by emphasizing their independence from the reigning Democrats, the nationalization of American politics is making that strategy less tenable, and not just in Hawai‘i. Republican and Democratic parties in each state are increasingly unable to distinguish themselves from the national parties in Washington. And in a diverse state like Hawai‘i, with the second-highest rate of union membership in the nation, the Republican Party’s shift to the right has made it nearly impossible for the local party to win state-wide elections.

So what happens to a state when there’s no opposition party?

One sobering answer: not nearly as much as most voters would hope. For many Democrats, especially liberals, the dominance of Hawai‘i’s Democrats might seem like a cause for celebration—things could get done. And, yes, the Aloha State has an enviable progressive record on many policy issues. It became the first state to legalize abortion in 1970. Just four years later, it adopted an innovative health care law that requires most employers to provide health insurance.

But in recent years, the lack of vigorous, two-party competition has led to a culture of complacency among politicians and apathy among voters. Hawai‘i once had some of the highest voter turnout rates in the nation, but today the Aloha State consistently ranks dead last among the 50 states. In the 2016 presidential election, only 43 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot—a rate that was seven percentage points lower than West Virginia, the 49th-worst state.

As voters have disengaged, they have also become critical and distrustful of state government. One poll taken before the primary election this summer by the University of Hawai‘i’s Public Policy Center, which I direct, gave the Hawai‘i State Legislature a 21 percent approval rating. What is more troubling, only 30 percent of respondents thought they could trust Hawai‘i’s state government to do what is in the public’s interest most of the time.

Part of the problem is that voters are rarely presented with a choice between different policy agendas or governing philosophies—even in major statewide races. In the most recent gubernatorial primary, the two candidates, incumbent Gov. David Ige and U.S. Representative Colleen Hanabusa, spent much of the election bickering over small policy differences and forwarding vague arguments about their superior leadership abilities. The lack of public debate often becomes even more acute during the general election. Indeed, Democrats are so confident they will win in November that Governor Ige, who won the primary, has agreed to only two televised debates with his Republican challenger.

With the decline of the Republican Party, the two-party system has been replaced by Hawai‘i’s unique brand of factionalized politics. Unlike political parties, these factions are held together through personal relationships and the legislative favors doled out by powerful committee chairs, rather than shared ideology or policy preferences. Today, the state legislature is run by shifting coalitions of Democrats that go by obscure names like the “Chess Club,” for legislators who consider themselves policy wonks, or the “Opihi”—the Hawaiian word for local saltwater limpets that cling to rocks, thus designating how faction members stick together, no matter the issue.

This has led to a political process that is almost entirely opaque. Without an opposition party to force public debate, even seasoned political observers struggle to understand why some bills are passed and others fail. The problem is compounded by the legislature’s frequent use of tactics such as “gut and replace,” where bills that have moved through the review process are stripped of their original language and replaced with entirely different bills at the last moment.

Finally, the dominance of a single party means that many urgent public policy challenges remain unaddressed. Although incumbents are solicitous about the welfare of reliable Democratic voters such as the members of public-sector unions, they pay scant attention to the problems faced by increasingly disaffected young voters and working families. Unlike many other left-leaning states, Hawai‘i still has no publicly-funded pre-kindergarten education or paid family leave for working families. Its general excise tax is very regressive because it indiscriminately affects all consumers, placing one of the highest tafx burdens on low-income families in the nation.

How to bring back the light of transparency and the pressure of competition to Hawai‘i politics? There are no easy solutions, but publicly funded elections and institutional reforms like California’s “top-two” primary or European-style multi-member legislative districts might provide opportunities for more people to get involved and for more voices to be heard.

Regardless of one’s political affiliation, Hawai‘i’s experience suggests how detrimental one-party rule can be for voter engagement and policy responsiveness. No democracy can remain healthy for long without a loyal opposition.

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Such predictability was not always the case. In fact, three-quarters of a century ago, the City of Brotherly Love played host to a very different convention—one whose outcome was so unexpected it became known as the “Miracle in Philadelphia.”

This was before the age of modern primaries, when the convention was less of an award ceremony, and more the actual contest. When the 1940 Republican National Convention opened, just 300 of the 1,000 delegates were pledged to a candidate. The contenders included such heavyweights as former President Herbert Hoover (attempting a comeback), Manhattan district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of South Dakota, and three U.S. senators, among them Michigan’s Arthur H. Vandenberg and Ohio’s Robert A. Taft.

And then there was Wendell L. Willkie, the boisterous head of the New York City-based Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, the nation’s largest energy holding company. Willkie’s previous foray into the political realm was as a delegate at the 1924 and 1932 National Conventions—as a Democrat.

But when President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the Tennessee Valley Authority to compete with private utilities, Willkie soured on the Democrats and became a leading spokesman for the business sector against New Deal policies. Willkie nonetheless described himself as a “liberal” with an ironclad commitment to civil rights and individual liberties. He said that if elected he planned to desegregate the government, the armed forces, and Washington, D.C.

Still, it was quite a leap to go from Democratic National Convention delegate to Republican presidential candidate. Willkie had not even bothered to mount a formal campaign, having declared his “availability” for nomination just 48 days before the convention’s first gavel fell. He had no campaign funds and no campaign manager or hired spokesman. A Gallup poll six weeks prior to the convention reflected Willkie’s minimal efforts, showing 67 percent support among Republican voters for Dewey, 14 percent for Vandenberg, 12 percent for Taft, and 3 percent for Willkie.

Yet it was Willkie who, to the astonishment of everyone except himself, somehow managed to walk away with the nomination. How did an industrialist from Indiana—sometimes known as the “Barefoot Wall Street Lawyer” for the folksy Indiana ways he brought to the big city—manage to best his far better-known, better-connected and better-moneyed rivals?

The answer is both simple and complex. Only a month earlier, Hitler’s Nazi troops had stormed through Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France. More than 350,000 British and French troops, in full retreat, had staged a daring escape across the English Channel from Dunkirk. On the first evening of the convention, at a special session at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall broadcast via radio coast to coast, Republican National Chairman John Hamilton of Kansas addressed the country’s mounting fears. “The world is witnessing a terrible demonstration of how quickly the hard-earned rights of man can be destroyed,” Hamilton declared. “Individual liberty and opportunity are gone in much of the world; the rights of man, slowly built up over a thousand years, have vanished.” His speech concluded with a descendent of Benjamin Franklin ringing the Liberty Bell.

For the 1940 Republican presidential hopefuls, this state of affairs created a problem. All of the leading candidates were well-known isolationists, while Roosevelt, who was seeking an unprecedented third term, had been engaged globally for almost two terms. Indeed, the official Republican platform issued that week declared the party “firmly opposed to involving this nation in foreign war.” But it added, “The zero hour is here. America must prepare if it wants to defend our shores, our homes, our lives, and our most cherished ideals.”

Taft, son of President William Howard Taft, was the conservative leader of the U.S. Senate and the Republican establishment’s pick. Vandenberg, a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was leader of the Senate’s isolationist block and an early frontrunner, subsequently knocked out by Dewey in the primaries. Dewey, the impeccably dressed, 38-year-old, gang-busting U.S. Attorney had narrowly lost the New York governor’s race in 1938. But he won nine out of 10 presidential primaries and came to the convention as the strong favorite.

Willkie, 48, was the sole internationalist—and the only contender with experience running a large organization. In 1929 he was hired as corporate counsel at Commonwealth & Southern and quickly rose through the ranks. Four years later, in the midst of the Great Depression and with the company on the verge of bankruptcy, he was made president. Willkie rebuilt the company, increasing business assets to more than $1 billion, employing 25,000 workers and bringing electricity for the first time to millions of people in 10 states.

In the run-up to the convention, as global tensions mounted, Willkie captured the imagination of the public and the media. U.S. News, Time, Life, Look, Fortune, and The Saturday Evening Post ran feature stories, and 10,000 “Willkie for President” clubs sprang up across the nation. By convention week, a Gallup poll suggested that Willkie had carved a big chunk out of Dewey’s lead. Dewey was still far ahead, at 47 percent. But Willkie was now in second position, at 29 percent, with the other contenders relegated to single digits.

As was the norm—before convention rule changes that went into effect in 1972—most delegates of both parties were either uncommitted or committed to a “Favorite Son” candidate from their state. All the 1940 candidates thought that if they could hold off Dewey on the first ballot they had a chance. But Willkie had momentum. During the convention, the Willkie for President clubs inundated the convention with more than a million pro-Willkie telegrams and letters, which were dumped at the delegates’ feet, while the balconies were stacked with supporters screaming, “We want Willkie! We want Willkie!”

Where did such enthusiastic support come from for this non-establishment candidate? Initially the clubs did emerge from the establishment, spurred by Republican strategist and Willkie supporter Oren Root. But that was just the beginning. The clubs—fueled by the barrage of national publicity and Willkie’s homespun personality—resonated with the public and spread rapidly and spontaneously across the nation, culminating in this moment of frenzied support.

On the first ballot, Dewey took the lead, with 360 of the 501 votes required to win. Taft, known as “Mr. Republican” and favored by uncommitted party-insider delegates, trailed with 189 votes, while Willkie started in third place with 105. But Dewey made a tactical error in not holding reserve votes for the second ballot, which would have helped create the impression of momentum. Instead he dropped to 338 while both Taft and Willkie gained ground. By the end of the fourth ballot Dewey’s support had collapsed to 250. Taft gained momentum with 254, while Willkie surged forward with 306. The relentless chanting from the balcony continued: “We want Willkie! We want Willkie!”

On the crucial sixth ballot, state delegations stampeded to Willkie. The darkest dark horse since the days of Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield won the prize. Afterwards in his small hotel room, the nominee laughingly told the press, “I guess the first thing I’ll have to do is change my registration from Democrat to Republican.”

George Gallup called Willkie’s charge to the nomination “the most astonishing” in the brief history of polling. Journalist H.L. Mencken wrote, “I am convinced that the nomination of Willkie was managed by the Holy Ghost in person.”

The campaign was almost as exciting. Roosevelt later said that despite his victory—amassing 27 million votes to Willkie’s 22 million, the most secured by any Republican presidential candidate to date—the “liberal” Republican known for carrying his own bags hit him with the toughest fight of his political career. Roosevelt so respected Willkie that soon after his inauguration he sent his former political foe traveling throughout Europe and Asia as his personal diplomatic representative during World War II. Willkie’s resulting book, One World, was a bestseller. In 1944, Willkie briefly mounted a fresh campaign for president, but dropped out after he was defeated by party conservatives in the Wisconsin primary. He died soon after, at age 52, from a series of heart attacks.

Though Willkie never realized his presidential dream, his spectacular performance at the 1940 convention stands as one of the all-time greatest presidential convention upsets. And Willkie’s strong showing against FDR in the general election ensured him—and his ideas—a seat at the table. In 2016, when many American voters across the ideological spectrum have again demonstrated their frustrations with the limitations of political insiders, history reminds us that our democratic institutions can, indeed, accommodate the demands of sudden popular change.

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

The post Before Donald Trump, Wendell L. Willkie Upended the GOP Primary in 1940 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This analysis assumes that American politics has an obvious center, in which both sensible policy positions and swing voters may be found. But the more you look for this legendary center, the harder it is to find.

I plead guilty for having succumbed to the lure of the “center.” In 2001, I co-authored with Ted Halstead The Radical Center, a book that called centrism a “shallow mantra in recent American politics” but attempted to reinvigorate it with use of “the word radical—in keeping with its Latin derivation from ‘radix,’ or ‘root’—to emphasize that we are interested not in tinkering at the margin of our inherited public, private, and communal institutions but rather in promoting, when necessary, a wholesale revamping of their component parts.” We proposed a combination of expanded public funding in many areas with greater individual choice—for example, nationalizing much of K-12 finance in return for a degree of school choice. However, our attempt to provide the term “radical center” with substance in the form of a modernized version of the New Deal failed to make the term take hold in popular usage.

If the political center means nothing more than the mathematical midpoint between the policy positions of Democrats and Republicans, then it is a fluid concept, like the center of gravity of the U.S. population, which has moved from Kent County, Maryland in 1790 to Texas County, Missouri, in 2010. This kind of notional “center” does not reflect any particular constituency or worldview. As political scientist Jacob Hacker and others have documented, the Republican party has moved far to the right in the last generation, whereas Democratic positions on most issues have remained largely stable. If “the center” is the midpoint between the parties, then the center in 2013 must be well to the right of where it was in 1993, just to keep up with the radicalism of Tea Party conservatives.

Attempts have been made to supply the political center with actual content, as a third position in American politics between conservatism and liberalism. The problem is that there are two “centers” in American politics, as John Judis pointed out back in a 1995 article for The New Republic entitled “Off Center.”

One of these two “centers,” identified in the 1970s by the sociologist Donald Warren, is made up of “middle American radicals.” These are mostly white working-class radicals, including many so-called “Reagan Democrats” who supported New Deal liberal economic policies like Social Security and Medicare but were alienated from the Democratic party by its support for civil rights and cultural liberalism.

Judis contrasted this working-class “radical center” with the “moderate middle,” which combines liberalism on social issues with center-right views on economics. It is found chiefly among affluent professionals, managers, and investors. In recent years this “moderate middle” has been called “liberaltarianism.”

Because they were not conventional liberals or conventional conservatives, members of both groups were drawn to Ross Perot’s Reform Party movement in the 1990s. But because the views of downscale middle American radicals and upscale “liberaltarians” are diametrically opposite, the groups discovered that they shared nothing other than alienation from the two major parties. The Reform party was effectively destroyed by the clash between its populist wing, headed by Patrick Buchanan, and a socially liberal, small-government wing headed by former Colorado governor Richard Lamm.

To complicate matters further, in the 1990s, some sought to coopt “centrism” to describe a more modern version of the center-left. In 1998 the British academic Tony Giddens used “radical center” to describe the “Third Way” of Clinton-Blair neoliberalism. “The overall aim of third way politics should be to help citizens pilot their way through the major revolutions of our time: globalization, transformations in personal life, and our relationship to nature,” Giddens wrote in his book Third Way. “Our problems and possibilities are not within the reach of the left/right scheme.”

Speaking for the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) wing of American liberalism in 1996, Al From and Will Marshall in 1996 made it clear that the Third Way was more about reinventing the center-left for a new age than about centrism for its own sake. “The industrial order of the 20th century, with its great concentrations of economic and political power, is giving way to a new society shaped by the centrifugal forces of the Information Age,” they wrote for the Democratic Leadership Council. “America needs a third choice that replaces the left’s reflexive defense of the bureaucratic status quo and counters the right’s destructive bid to simply dismantle government.”

In recent years, the class-based gap between the two “centers” of politics and public opinion has become even more pronounced. Mainstream journalists and commentators—many of them members of the one percent, by income—treat “the center” unreflexively as what Judis called “the moderate middle” or upscale centrism: liberal on gay rights and immigration, conservative on taxes and social spending.

This kind of “centrism” might best described as “one percentrism,” because it has little support among the other 99 percent of Americans. For example, when it comes to Social Security, eight in 10 Americans prefer to raise taxes to pay for Social Security rather than cut benefits. Support for cutting Social Security is concentrated among the rich.

In a recent study, “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” social scientists Benjamin I. Page, Larry M. Bartels, and Jason Seawright found that the top one percent of wealth-holders in the U.S. “are much more conservative than the American public as a whole with respect to important policies concerning taxation, economic regulation, and especially social welfare programs.” Despite decades of efforts by billionaire conservative Peter G. Peterson and others in favor of deficit/debt reduction, the divide between elite and majority opinion is particularly striking when it comes to the federal deficit and the national debt, with 87 percent of the rich citing it as a “very important” problem while only 7 percent of the general public thought it was important when compared to more pressing issues like jobs and the weak economy. It is a testament to the distortion of American democracy by the power of rich donors that when majority views contrast with those of the rich, American politicians of both parties tend to side with the rich who provide their donations rather than the many who provide their votes.

Is the political center, then, a will-o-the-wisp, or mirage, that disappears when you approach it? In the past generation, the term “radical center” has been used to describe socially conservative, economically liberal populism; its opposite, socially liberal, economically conservative libertarianism; and the “Third Way” neoliberalism associated with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990s. A term so elastic is useless and ought to be abandoned. The related term “centrism” also has little staying power or substance—when compared to progressivism, conservatism, libertarianism, or socialism. In the words of William Butler Yeats, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

The post Call Off the Silly Hunt For ‘Centrism’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We’ll be able to see the evidence of this dysfunction as soon as the 2012 election results come in, said Edwards, a former Oklahoma Republican congressman and author of The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans. If Barack Obama wins and nominates a new Supreme Court justice, regardless of that person’s qualifications, experience, and record, every single Democrat will be for him or her—and every Republican will be against. If Mitt Romney wins, we’ll see the opposite happen.

This is the way the Congress and Senate work on every single issue. Edwards likened the adversarial nature of party politics to the NFL: if one team is for it, the other team must be against it. So how did this happen?

“Incentives work,” said Edwards. “What you reward you get more of; what you punish you get less of, and we have created a political system in this country that rewards incivility, that rewards intransigence, that rewards the refusal to compromise.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The U.S. government was founded on the belief that Americans should be citizens, not subjects, with power vested in the people to make decisions on everything from taxes to going to war. But the Congress that makes those decisions isn’t reflecting the wishes of the American people, said Edwards: “The people in Washington, I don’t know what they’re listening to, but it ain’t us.”

The problem is the party system—which is not what the founders intended. According to Edwards, the first four U.S. presidents agreed on just one thing: “Do not create political parties.” The permanent factions that we have today would be anathema to Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison.

The current state primary system, with its closed primaries and “sore loser laws” (in 46 states, if you run for a party’s nomination in a convention or primary and lose, you can’t be on the election day ballot), rewards candidates to the far right or far left. A candidate like Todd Akin in Missouri—a state with a population of 6 million—becomes one of just two choices on a ballot because he received 200,000 votes in a closed primary.

In everything else in our lives, we have a multitude of choices. But when it comes to choosing the people who make enormous decisions that will affect the entire nation, we allow “two private, power-seeking clubs” to limit ourselves to two choices, said Edwards.

Those clubs also manipulate voters’ choices in more insidious ways, like redistricting. In many states, the majority in the state legislature decides how to draw congressional district lines, putting their own interests ahead of geography and good representation. Edwards, a Republican, was originally elected to Congress in a heavily Democratic Oklahoma City district. “It drove the Democrats who ran the legislature crazy,” he said. They redrew district lines for the next election so that Edwards—a self-described “city guy”—would be representing a more rural, heavily Republican area of the state, helping Democratic candidates in nearby districts stay safer. “The wheat farmers and small-town ranchers and cattle merchants got screwed,” said Edwards—they weren’t being represented by someone who could articulate their concerns and interests.

Once in Congress, elected officials make sure the partisanship continues. On the House floor, there are two lecterns—one for the Democrats in front of the Democrats, one for the Republicans in front of the Republicans. The first time he addressed the House, Edwards tried to use the Democrats’ lectern in order to make an appeal to the other side. The entire room gasped—and asked him to go back to the Republican lectern. Congress even has two cloakrooms—where people eat or make phone calls—divided by party. “If you walk into the wrong one, it’s like you stumbled into a tryst,” said Edwards. “We’ve set it up to be constant war.”

Yet he doesn’t think the problem is the parties themselves. Rather, said Edwards, it’s that we’ve surrendered control of the system to them.

Edwards believes that change is coming. Forty percent of American voters call themselves Independents. He thinks the new open primary system in Washington state and California will also give voters more choices. More radically, he said that changing campaign finance by restricting contributions to living human beings—meaning no donations from labor unions, political action committees, corporations, or political parties—could be a part of a solution as well.

In the question-and-answer session, Edwards was asked how the American people might compel politicians to cultivate civility.

He said that voters need to punish politicians for negative ads. Tell a politician that he or she has lost your vote as a result of an ad. “They’re afraid of you,” he said. “They’re afraid of the voters.” By punishing bad behavior like nasty campaigns—and rewarding civility—we can get good behavior from our politicians.

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