YOU SAY YOU WANT SOME DEVOLUTION?

Reason's Robby Soave offers a back-handed compliment to Robert Kennedy.  "RFK Jr. Spread Some Libertarian Ideas, Then Sold Out to Trump."  That's one way of looking at what happened.

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has suspended his campaign for the presidency in 10 swing states, where he will seek to remove his name from the ballot. He said on Friday that he did not want to play a spoiler role and prevent former President Donald Trump from winning the election. RFK Jr. cited his agreement with Trump on the fundamental issues of censorship and foreign policy as the reason for his tacit support.

Earlier in the week, RFK Jr.'s running mate, entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan, suggested that they wished to avoid a victory by Vice President Kamala Harris at all costs; even though RFK Jr. was formerly a Democrat—and has a recognizably Democratic last name—recent polling suggested that his candidacy was hurting Trump slightly more than Harris. RFK Jr.'s main appeal was to disaffected, contrarian voters who lost faith in the elite consensus, especially with respect to the federal government's heavy-handed COVID-19 policies; these voters are more likely to pick Trump as their second choice than Harris.

The party of Governance by Wise Experts has been driving away more than a few people that until recently would be inclined to argue about Expertise and then vote the Democrat ticket.

Mr Soave's essay continues with the answer to the baffled donkey's question.

Unfortunately, the U.S.'s winner-take-all system tends to create elections that are competitive for just the two major parties. Independent and third-party candidates struggle to gain traction and end up accomplishing very little. This is a structural problem; by contrast, in a European parliamentary system, a candidate who receives just 5 percent of the national vote might expect to receive 5 percent of the representation in the government. Major parties must then work with smaller parties to form governing coalitions. In the U.S., only the winner matters.

This means that tacitly supporting one of the two major candidates in exchange for influence is actually one of the only ways for an independent to transmogrify their support base into actual power. It's not surprising, then, that RFK Jr. has chosen this path. Seeking higher office outside the two-party system is extremely difficult and Republicans and Democrats work tirelessly to make it even tougher. Democratic activists, for example, filed legal challenges to keep RFK Jr. off the ballot in New York state. While insisting that the health of democracy itself is the fundamental issue in this election, the Democratic Party hired operatives to counter third-party and independent candidates such as RFK Jr.

Republicans are as guilty as Democrats are about making it difficult for third party and independent candidates, whether for the presidency or for more useful offices such as selectman and dog-catcher.  A successful candidate for dog-catcher on the Free Soil or Libertarian ticket, though, might find some of his ideas co-opted by one or both of the major parties.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

The past week or so has offered a salutary reproach to people who will see in the so-called two party system of the United States a stability missing from parliamentary nations, where it's bad form to bring up the Italians, the Israelis seem bent on confirming the wheeze about four congregations and six political parties being present at the minyan, and Queen Elizabeth's last official act was to ask Liz Truss to form a government only to put King Charles in the position of asking Rishi Sunak to form a government.

In the United States, in part, I submit, because the political bundles are too big, the two major parties exist to paper over differences, often under a "lesser of two evils" sort of rubric.  "That elections tend to devolve to a binary choice, and disaffected voters are often reluctant to reject a binary choice between bundles that are each horrible in their own way makes the [re-election of incumbents] more likely to be bad."  I predicted that the slim Democratic majorities taking office in 2021 in Washington would devolve into faction fighting, and the allegedly transformative legislation that came out of the 117th Congress was at the margin of one or two Democrat senators from contested states, and probably filled with earmarks and carve-outs to hold that House coalition together.

A Washington Post contributor, Perry Bacon, contends that there are "four political parties stuffed into a two-party system."  There's nothing magical about there being four coalitions, and the way in which they align themselves can change over time.  In the past two weeks, though, we might have seen that forming a government isn't as easy as past experience suggests.  I know that our civics-books view of governance is one in which the president is the head of government, but the president cannot sign any bills into law until both houses of Congress agree on what to send to the White House, and Congress can't pass anything until the House convenes, and the House can't be sworn in until they name a speaker.  Might we think of the Speaker of the House as the true head of government?

Mr Soave concludes, crediting Mr Kennedy with having the right enemies.

Indeed, RFK Jr. has often been at odds with the mainstream media, federal health bureaucrats, and the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties (though he's friendly enough with Trump to make somewhat of an endorsement). Given such a roster of adversaries, it's no wonder many libertarians felt at least somewhat positively toward him.

That might be, but until voters recognize that the focus on the presidency to the exclusion of everything else is the root cause of our electoral malaise, the electoral malaise will go on.

I submit, dear reader, that the troubles have been festering for a long time, perhaps dating to when Walter Cronkite was reading the news direct from the CBS newsroom in New York.  Long ago, that show opened calling the roll of the roving correspondents, reporting, via live television, from someplace other than the studio.  Yes, I've got a few years on me.  The first few roving correspondents would generally be reporting from Washington, and after a while somebody at the legacy networks decided that since the bulk of the news was being made in Washington, why not move the newsroom to Washington.

That was the first symptom of the current troubles.  Turn "public affairs" into "policy made in Washington" and turn "policy made in Washington" into the presidency, and inevitably, there will be no possibility of a Washington consensus, or any consensus at all.

Now, should there be a Trump presidency, will the faction fighting that will emerge from that White House, and it will, be pointed to as evidence of a shambolic presidency, or will somebody twig to the possibility that good governance, which is to say, minimal governance, might be a welcome byproduct of the inaction?