Election Season

“Why, why why, could they not have had this reporting problem in 2004? Asking for a friend.”
 —Late Monday night tweet about the Iowa caucuses from Joe Trippi, veteran Democratic strategist who was Howard Dean’s campaign manager in 2004

Remember that old Chinese curse about living in interesting times? I wonder if whoever came up with that was thinking about something like the coronavirus. Or maybe early 21st-century election campaigns?

For the next few days I am in the interesting position of observing fascinating campaigns in both of my countries. The American one will go on quite a bit longer, but the Irish one will end on Saturday—closing an election period with the very civilized lifespan of a mere 25 days.

Usually, the only questions in an Irish election are as follows: will it be Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael that will form a government and will they have to find a coalition partner? If the polling is to be believed, however, things could be different this time. A major opinion poll released yesterday has Sinn Féin in first place with 25 percent, followed by Fianna Fáil at 23 percent and Fine Gael (the current government party) at 20 percent. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.8 percent.

Typical Irish election
social media humor

Opinion polls, of course, are not destiny, as people who dislike Brexit and Donald Trump know all too well. For whatever reason, Sinn Féin has historically underperformed its opinion polling, but of course that will continue to be true only until it isn’t. If Sinn Féin does indeed come in first, it will be huge. It will mean that Irish voters will have taken a major step away from the legacy factions of the 1922-23 Civil War toward a party that is a strange mixture of nationalist and socialist ideas and of which the primary raison d’être is the reunification of the island’s 32 counties. My own personal political intelligence (I follow a few college-age Irish people on Twitter) tells me that many young, as well as some not-so-young, voters are enthused about the prospect of a left-wing coalition that could comprise the Green Party, Sinn Féin, and a collection of other smaller parties and independents.

What about older—and generally more reliable—voters? The country is actually in pretty good shape in terms of employment and the economy, but there is a lot of unease over hospital waiting times and a persistent homeless crisis. Moreover, a string of spectacularly violent incidents involving feuding criminal gangs has created an impression of things spinning out of control. The polling might indicate that people are looking for change even if they little to complain about their own current personal circumstances.

Meanwhile, how about things in the U.S.? I have to confess that I got a frisson of déjà vu this morning when a radio bulletin informed me there was hiccup with the results of the Iowa caucuses. This follows the rather shocking discarding of the Des Moines Register poll, which is traditionally the final pre-caucus tea-leaves reading. If one is prone to conspiracy theories, one might be tempted to fear a cover-up or an attempt at massaging results. Other details that feed this paranoia: earlier polls were suggesting that Bernie Sanders would win and the fact that, in certain banana republics, delayed election results are a warning sign of mischief.

Worryingly, this is more likely to be something worse than vote tampering. It could be sheer incompetence. Think about it. The very same party that has been harping for more than three years about Russian hacking into social media and U.S. elections is not only the same one whose last presidential candidate was found to have been conducting all her government business on an unsecured email server in a closet in her home but which is now the same party that has attempted to collate its first 2020 voting results with a new app that did not work.

I’ll be honest. I’m getting very worried about the Democratic Party. Not only did it clearly fix its presidential nomination process four years ago for a pre-determined candidate, but this time around it seems determined to sabotage itself by frittering away its two-year term in control of the House of Representatives by doing nothing but relitigating the last election and offering no clear-cut vision for the next election. That is not to say that there are not new and interesting ideas out there in the Democratic Party, but the people who run the party seem determined to tap the energy of those ideas without seriously entertaining the ideas themselves.

For more than three years now Democrats have lectured us that President Trump is a threat to democracy because of his authoritarian tendencies. They impeached him for seeking an investigation of a political opponent. The problem is that half the country looks at the Democratic Party and sees it doing exactly what it accuses the president of doing: using its political office to launch endless investigations of a political enemy. What else does the Democratic congressional majority have to show for the past year?

If voters have concerns about the integrity of American elections, will they really be inclined to turn to the people in charge of this year’s Iowa Democratic caucuses? And which happens to be the same party that was so concerned about democracy that it engaged in a completely quixotic attempt to bar the other party’s president from being able to run for re-election?

The Perpetual Campaign

“Putin Not Arsed Interfering In Irish Election.”
 —Headline on the satirical Irish web site Waterford Whispers News, January 14

As Americans suffer through an interminable presidential election campaign that seems as if it has been going on for years—even though we are still more or less a fortnight away from the first actual voting—other countries mock us by holding their own elections in what seems like the blink of an eye.

Yes, the Brexit morass seemed to drag on forever in the United Kingdom, paralyzing the country’s politics. Yet once Boris Johnson finally got the various parties to agree to holding an election, he was able to dissolve Parliament in early November, and the voting took place a scant five weeks later. In the end, it all happened relatively quickly and, surprisingly and pleasingly for some, the voting turned out to be quite decisive.

Now it is Ireland’s turn. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar dissolved Dáil Éireann a week ago, and voting will take place three and a half weeks from now. Americans can only dream of having an election campaign confined to such a quick and relatively painless time span.

Of course, in democratic nations election campaigning never really stops. Politicians are always angling for the next round of voting—even when they do not know precisely when that will happen. That’s one of the quirks of the parliamentary system. A government has a maximum lifespan, but frequently its demise—and consequently, the next election—comes sometime before that deadline. Sometimes well before. Any member of a parliament may theoretically ask for a vote of no-confidence in the government at any time, and if the government loses that vote, then let the electioneering begin.

In the U.S. system, by contrast, we know the dates of all future elections on into the distant future. Election Day is a fixed date on the calendar, and every Congress and presidential administration knows it will be in charge until the next election. Interestingly, Democrats seem intent on making the U.S. system more like the European parliamentary one. At least that is the impression they give. By passing articles of impeachment in the House of Representatives, they seem to want to use that power as a substitute for a no-confidence motion. Yet they are doing this in the full knowledge that it has virtually no possibility of being ratified in the Senate. You normally do not see a quixotic no-confidence motion, i.e. one that has no chance of passing, like this in European parliaments. So the impeachment is not really like a no-confidence motion after all. It’s more like a form of censure. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi tells us, “You are impeached forever.” Will that be a consolation to her if President Trump is reelected after his certain Senate acquittal? A lot of sober observers think that is the likely outcome.

Back to the Irish election. Interestingly, Varadkar has been the head of government for two-and-half years, yet this will be his first time leading his party into an election. That is because another quirk of the parliamentary system is that you can get a new national leader without having a national election. Varadkar became Taoiseach when he replaced Enda Kenny as leader of Fine Gael in 2017. Until recently he had been able to avoid an election by continuing a “confidence and supply” agreement (where the main opposition party Fianna Fáil agreed not to bring down the government) negotiated by his predecessor when no party got a governing majority in the 2016 election. Varadkar was able to argue successfully for quite some time that the government should not end while the “crisis” of Brexit was ongoing. Apparently, that crisis must be over because members of the Dáil were getting ready to bring down the government by holding a vote of no-confidence in the health minister over persistent problems in the healthcare system.

So what is likely to happen on February 8? Polling suggests that Fianna Fáil has a slight-to-significant edge, but the real question is whether either of the two parties will be able to form a new government easily. Party voting has become more fractured in recent years, as younger voters abandon old loyalties to remnant factions of the 1922-23 Civil War and eye more ideologically-based parties. These include Sinn Féin, formerly the political arm of the Irish Republican Army but now a fairly standard-issue hard-left party; Labour, a shell of its former self after a disastrous coalition with Fine Gael; the Green Party, benefitting from a burgeoning and youthful climate awareness; and small parties and factions like Solidarity, People Before Profit and the Social Democrats. It will also be interesting to watch a new party called Aontú (Irish for “unity”) which has split off from Sinn Féin in reaction to that party’s hard-leftward tilt.

Another issue to watch in the near-to-medium future is that of Irish reunification. Strangely, Irish politicians in the North and in the Republic do not seem too keen on the possibility, but British ones seem quite open to it. A by-product of Boris Johnson’s election victory is that, customs-wise anyway, there will now be more of a border in the Irish Sea than between the North and the South of Ireland. Reunification will come to make more practical sense—even if its specter will raise all kinds of problems and challenges for the political class.

Tory Tide

“The trouble with socialism is that it would take too many evenings.”
 —Oscar Wilde, on the potential time drain of central planning

Way back in 2013 (that’s six years ago, for those not completely awake) some lazy blogger chanced his arm by bringing up an article in The Economist magazine about political trends among young people in Britain.

“The writer concludes,” wrote this blogger, “by describing how he spoke to young people of varying backgrounds, regions and levels of political engagement and asked if there were any politicians that appealed to them. ‘The reaction was strikingly uniform,’ he writes, ‘silence, then contemplation, then a one-word answer—“Boris”—before a flood of agreement: “Oh yeah, I’d vote for Boris Johnson.” The chaotic, colourful mayor of London, a rare politician who transcends his Tory identity by melding social and economic liberalism, appears to have Britain’s libertarian youth in the bag. The 2020 election beckons.’ ”

Did I mention that was written six years ago? Well, fair play to the staff writer who penned that prescient Economist piece and, especially, to the insightful blogger who highlighted it. (Yes, ’twas I.)

In fairness, it was not a perfect forecast. The election was held in December of 2019, not 2020. More importantly, while Johnson’s brand of classic (as opposed to modern) liberalism was undoubtedly a factor, it was not the main thing about him that propelled his party to one of the most decisive and unanticipated victories in UK politics for quite some time.

What the magazine writer and the blogger could not have anticipated was that the almost-2020 election would be dominated by something called Brexit. In another country under other circumstances, the election could well have been a second referendum on whether Britain should really be leaving the European Union. Because of the quirkiness of the UK political system, the choices felt more like a carnival con man’s shell game than a straightforward binary choice. The two major parties were each internally divided between Remainers and Brexiteers. The one viable and unambiguously pro-Remain party (the Liberal Democrats) should have been positioned to replace one of the major parties, but somehow it was led by a seemingly nice Scottish woman, who not only managed to alienate voters in general but who ended up losing her own seat in Parliament.

If you were a Remainer who couldn’t stomach the Lib Dems, then your logical choice should have been Labour, whose position was to promise a second referendum and thus a chance to reverse the 2016 referendum that kicked off the Brexit process in the first place. Yet Labour’s vote fell way, way below the number of Remain votes three years ago, and in fact, Labour was routed worse than has happened for decades. Had that many people been won over to the Brexit side? Doubtful.

For his part Johnson, upon taking over Conservative Party leadership from the hapless Theresa May in July, was bedeviled by divisions in his own party. That plus successful machinations by other parties meant that his only hope of achieving an orderly Brexit was to win a decisive Tory majority. He succeeded smashingly.

How did he do it? For one thing, he went head-to-head with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in promising to spend shed-loads of government money. More importantly, though, he relentlessly and tirelessly repeated one single, simple message over and over and over: Get Brexit Done.

Unlike Labour, whose leader did his best to avoid talking about Brexit or to even take a personal position on it (he voted to leave the EU in 2016), voters had a clear idea what they were voting for with the Conservatives. The “Get Brexit Done” mantra was inspired in that, while obviously sitting well with Brexit supporters, it also had an appeal for the mass of voters who, after three years, just wanted the whole mess finally ended, one way or another.

There is another major contributing factor to Labour’s disastrous performance—one which Joe Biden was quick to seize upon in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in the States. Since the departure of Ed Miliband as Labour leader four years ago, the party has been permeated and controlled by the far left. Corbyn’s life and career have been devoted to socialism and left-wing causes, including violent insurgents such as the Irish Republican Army. Despite the state of lawlessness and extra-constitutional rule in Venezuela, he has yet to denounce or even criticize Nicolás Maduro’s regime. If he had become prime minister, the country could have looked forward to a wave of high taxes and wholescale nationalizations.

Particularly troubling have been the defections and internal criticism within the party itself having to do with Corbyn’s tolerance for a growing anti-Semite element. The situation got so bad that Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis took the unusual step of publicly speaking out.

We seem to be in an age where political parties strive to cast their opponents as not just wrong on policy but as illegitimate and disqualified from even holding office. We see this approach in the U.S. with the Democrats’ impeachment proceedings and in the Republican response. Dems say it is not safe to leave the president in office for the eleven months until the next election. The GOP suggests that one-party partisan impeachment is a sign that Democrats themselves are anti-democratic.

In Boris Johnson’s case, he did not have to invent an opposition that was virtually disqualified from governing. Could one or other of the American parties next year find itself in a similar situation?