The Amer­i­can po­lit­i­cal sys­tem works. Of course it works. That’s what a sys­tem — a thing that once set up keeps run­ning — does.

But it doesn’ nec­es­sar­ily work the way we want it to. It doesn’t in­ev­i­ta­bly advance the com­mon good or make Amer­ica a bet­ter na­tion. It doesn’t consider such things. It can as eas­ily make the world worse as make it bet­ter.

This ex­plains some­thing of Amer­ica’s cur­rent pain and fear for the fu­ture and the po­lar­iza­tion that fol­lows them. The sys­tem just keeps run­ning, and we get what we get. And what we get, we may not want.

Wit­ness, I sub­mit, the pres­ent pres­i­den­tial cam­paign.

The two can­di­dates

We Amer­i­cans have been raised to be­lieve that we can trust the sys­tem and things will work out well enough. Look at all the re­lieved ed­i­to­ri­als when Trump’s at­tempts to over­throw the elec­tion failed be­cause all the courts said no.

But it doesn’t al­ways work, and it can fail very, very badly, and in a way that could be per­ma­nent. We can’t trust it the way we thought we could. Look at the two can­di­dates.

You prob­a­bly re­ally like one and re­ally dis­like the other. You may well think one will save Amer­ica and the other will de­stroy it. Most Amer­i­cans will agree that some­thing went re­ally wrong to give us ei­ther Don­ald Trump or Kamala Har­ris. I take that as the con­sen­sus view that the sys­tem crashed.

How did we get Trump, the least likely pres­i­dent in Amer­i­can his­tory? In 2015, he de­cided to run for the Re­pub­li­can nom­i­na­tion, in what might have been a pub­lic­ity stunt or a lark or a chance to get the ad­u­la­tion he needs. For rea­sons un­known — but which if known would prob­a­bly be dis­cour­ag­ing — he jumped to an early lead in the polls.

Then he came in a close sec­ond to Ted Cruz in the Iowa cau­cuses, and the polit­i­cal me­dia duly cer­ti­fied him as a se­ri­ous can­di­date. The jug­ger­naut was roll­ing. (In a move that the na­tion should have taken as a warn­ing, Trump tweeted, “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.”)

Think for a sec­ond about why the Iowa Cau­cus has such im­por­tance, when it means lit­tle. The cau­cuses only choose del­egates who then choose the state’s party’s del­egates to the party’s na­tional con­ven­tion. It shouldn’t have the ef­fect it does.

It’s an ar­ti­fact of the past and a prod­uct of the can­di­dates’ and the me­dia’s need to have a po­lit­i­cal event. (I re­mem­ber watch­ing the prepos­ter­ously dra­matic Wolf Blitzer a few months ago.) Com­pletely ir­ra­tio­nal, un­rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Amer­ica, but it can make or dam­age a can­di­date. That’s the sys­tem work­ing.

Trump was on a roll. The other can­di­dates could have stopped him, but they were all play­ing the an­gles, try­ing to fig­ure out how to edge out the oth­ers and make them­selves the sole al­ter­na­tive to Trump, while also not alien­at­ing his sup­port­ers. No one stepped aside, so Trump trod on all of them.

Then, of course, be­ing pol­i­ti­cians, they all made their peace with Trump, and in the po­lit­i­cal world mak­ing peace means pre­tend­ing you like him and think highly of him. It means be­com­ing a cheer­leader be­cause your path to power runs through him. That is the sys­tem too.

Trump and Har­ris win

In the elec­tion, Trump had the luck to face Hil­lary Clin­ton, who was not the na­tion’s most lik­able can­di­date and one who thought she had states like Penn­syl­va­nia in the bag and didn’t cam­paign hard enough to ac­tu­ally win them. Trump drew the po­lit­i­cal equiv­a­lent of an in­side straight and found him­self the pres­i­dent of the United States.

The sys­tem worked, as a sys­tem. As a sys­tem pro­duc­ing a vir­tu­ous and com­pe­tent leader, not so much.

And how did we get Har­ris? Am­bi­tious and gifted at pol­i­tics, she’d made her way to the Senate, but suc­cess in Cal­i­for­nia does not nec­es­sar­ily mean suc­cess any­where else. Nat­u­rally enough, she ran for the Demo­cratic nom­i­na­tion for pres­i­dent, and bombed.

Al­most no one seemed to like her as a pos­si­ble leader. She looked like a sen­a­tor for life.

The Demo­cratic es­tab­lish­ment threw the nom­i­na­tion to Joe Biden, as it had to Hil­lary Clin­ton, to make sure Ber­nie Sanders didn’t get it. (I think Ber­nie would have beaten Trump in 2016, be­cause he would have ap­pealed to some of the same eco­nom­i­cally mar­gin­al­ized vot­ers.)

Biden needed a vice pres­i­dent who would sat­isfy Demo­cratic con­stit­u­en­cies and — he’s been in pol­i­tics too long to take any risks — too un­pop­u­lar to threaten his run for re­elec­tion. And there was Har­ris, the side­lin­e­able vice pres­i­dent from cen­tral cast­ing.

Then, as Biden’s men­tal prob­lems got worse to the point they couldn’t be hid­den any­more — prob­lems Har­ris cer­tainly knew about — and the party lead­ers decided to move him out, their only choice for a can­di­date was the vice pres­ident. If Biden hadn’t de­bated, he’d still be the can­di­date.

Amer­i­cans agree

That’s the way the sys­tem works. And ex­cept for those who don’t think much of ei­ther can­di­date, al­most ev­ery Amer­i­can thinks it worked as badly as it could this year, producing candidates one of whom wasn’t just bad but dangerous.

Amer­i­cans dis­agree about who’s the dan­ger, but they agree that the elec­tion will make or break our na­tion. And that’s the way the system works.

_____

(c)2024 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.