“Bullet” is related to “ballot” (from French boulette, diminutive of boule “ball”). In some places and times, actual bullets were used to cast votes.
With the resignation this week of the state Republican Party chairwoman, the talk is all about fixing the Indiana GOP. But maybe it can’t be “fixed.” Political parties are not forever, you know. Sometime the ground shifts too far (the Whigs, the Bull Moose, the Bucktails, etc.)
The institutional features that the Framers built into the U.S. Constitution have been weakened or circumvented to the point that elections are being conducted not within the constraints of a constitutional republic but in a raw, wide-open democracy. Indiana’s Democratic Party knows how to play on that field. The Republican Party doesn’t know where the field is at.
Let’s give them a map. The Democrat Party doesn’t wait on its voters to be motivated by a common good or principle. It conscripts from the hapless, the disgruntled and, yes, the ignorant. It then organizes them as troops for the war that politics has become. Its leadership is likewise war-like, that is, fighting without rules or concern for truth.
And like it or not, Republicans must do the same if they are going to restore/reinvigorate a constitutional republic. Here is blogger Curtis Yarvin writing the day after the election:
”The radicals (in the Democrat Party) have been winning this argument, slowly but surely. Now they’ve pretty much won. There is only one Democratic Party. This is a land of wolves now. Are you a wolf? No, but learn to fight like one. The healthy core of the Republican Party is the sheepdog party. As a Republican leader, you have exactly two jobs: fighting wolves, and herding sheep. Not ‘governing.’ Not building ballrooms, bombing Iran, etc.’”
Otherwise, you are stuck with political tactics meant for a constrained republic instead of majoritarian competition — a very high-stake competition. The rational incentives now are securing a majority and then converting temporary control into permanent advantage — a one-party state in their case, a constitutional republic in ours. Each election cycle has become a contest over the right to set the future terms of competition, not the wisdom of certain policy issues or legislation.
Again, that’s where we are — at war. This understood, I asked my assistant Grok to frame three questions that Republicans should be asking themselves:
- When the Framers distinguished a republic from a pure democracy, what institutional features did they treat as essential to the former? Was it the mere fact of elections, or the presence of structural constraints — indirect selection of senators, staggered terms, a written constitution difficult to amend, enumerated powers, and a judiciary empowered to enforce limits against the temporary will of a majority?
- Which of those constraints remain operative in their original form? The Seventeenth Amendment removed one. The growth of the administrative state and the routine use of delegation have attenuated another. Judicial doctrines that treat large areas of policy as non-justiciable or that defer heavily to political branches have narrowed a third. What remains that can still say “no” to a sustained popular majority on a matter of ordinary legislation or spending?
- If those residual constraints are weak or easily circumvented, by what mechanism does the system still prevent the majority of the moment from treating the minority’s rights, property, or institutional position as ordinary objects of redistribution or disablement? Is the answer “political culture,” “norms,” or “self-restraint”? And if those are the residual safeguards, what evidence suggests they are more durable than the constitutional architecture they replaced?
A veteran party man from a few decades ago, a successful chairman in once solidly Republican northeast Indiana, told me his secret: “I play down the issues; they only rile up the electorate.” Instead, he depended on what he called his “apparatus,” a disciplined group of precinct captains who could reliably canvass the nursing homes, senior centers and Republican neighborhoods to get out the necessary votes.
Sheep dogs, in other words. And as a policy wonk, it pains me to admit that he was onto something. —tcl
