Party Leadership Elections are Undemocratic

Originally posted on Medium as Jago Couch on Aug 22, 2015. It’s potentially confusing for me to criticize something as “undemocratic”, which is why I didn’t post it here, but the argument of the post is relevant to my recent posts so I now prefer to have it here to refer to.

We’ve all had our laugh at the Labour party’s leadership election, but it’s time to get serious.

“Internal party democracy” is deeply stupid. You could even say it is undemocratic.

The purpose of a party is to provide a choice — one among several — to voters in public elections.

If every party stands for “whatever its members say”, and each party’s membership is open, then there is no reason to expect the parties to differ from each other. No choice would be provided at the public elections.

Not only at the level of voting, but at the level of support (funding, campaigning), each individual can choose which party, if any, is theirs. But that choice can only be made sensibly if the citizen can tell what a party stands for, and what it is likely to stand for in future. To have value, a party has to stand for something specific and reasonably constant. This goal is not consistent with internal democracy.

The ideal organisational form for a party is for it to be run by a small self-selecting clique. That provides both consistency and the possibility of gradual adaptation to changing circumstances. A fixed constitution is not likely to work, and if it did work would completely freeze the party, making it unable to adapt. Any other arrangement (including single-person control) will produce unpredictable changes in position, reducing the value of supporting the party.

Note I’m not arguing against parties having large membership, or against the membership having influence. I am arguing that ordinary potential party members have *greater* influence by being able to join a party with a consistent predictable position, than by having a vote that can be overwhelmed by random motivated entryists. Because membership in a party is and should be voluntary, it is a case where influence should be entirely exerted through the force of “exit”, rather than “voice”. It is better to be a member of a party that is controlled by a small self-selecting clique whose opinions you know and agree with, than to be a member of one which is controlled by a vote of thousands of members, including yourself.

The Labour Party organisation is attempting to be reasonable about choosing which new members should be able to vote, but it is impossible because there is no rationale for allowing any of them to vote at all. If it’s legitimate for a member to change the direction of a party, then it’s legitimate to join the party in order to change its direction.

This contradiction has been brought to a head by Labour’s introduction of very low subscription fees to join as a voting “supporter”, but charging more is not an absolute defence against hostile entryism. It just postpones things until there’s an election which is close enough, and for high enough stakes to make an attack viable. Of course, the internet makes organising such an attack as easy as creating a hashtag.

One thought on “Party Leadership Elections are Undemocratic”

  1. The McCarthy movement was essentially derivative, being a rerun not only of Cicero’s attack on the Cataline cabale, but also of the campaigning of a 1st World War British Imperialist mountebank called Noel Billing.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Pemberton_Billing

    Like McCarthy, Billing was involved in Military Aviation during the war and invented heroic exploits for himself. When the British Empire found itself with its back to the wall three to four years into the war, he either invented or adopted as his own a conspiracy theory about an organisation called the Unseen Hand. The relative success of the Central Powers was not due to the incompetence of the British Administrative Class or their unrealistic war aims, it was caused by traitors within (The Unseen Hand):-

    There exists in the Cabinet Noir of a certain German Prince a book compiled by the Secret Service from reports of German agents who have infested this country for the past twenty years, agents so vile and spreading such debauchery and such lasciviousness as only German minds can conceive and only German bodies execute.

    This was the Black Book, a list of 47,000 British perverts who were being blackmailed by the Germans:-

    https://spartacus-educational.com/FWWblackbook.htm

    It was their treachery, and not any defect of the Military or its war aims which was responsible for the straits in which the British Empire found itself. Sued by someone he had defamed, Billing fielded a carefully coached perjurer who alleged she had seen the book in Berlin, that the plaintiff’s name was in it and even that the presiding judge’s name was in it. As this was a civil process rather than a criminal trial, there was no-one to enquire whether she could really read German and how she managed to remember 47,000 names. This approach was spectacularly successful, the jury found for Billing, crowds strewed flowers before him as he left the court and he was returned to Parliament as MP. (The insanity of the British public during the 1st World War was unbelievable.)

    So the method created by Billing is as follows: you allege the existence of a list of traitors, without revealing the contents. If anyone thereafter hinders you in your endeavours, you say that his name is on the list. Billing set his sights high, in an attempt to make the whole country cower before him: he even alleged that the list mentioned Alice Keppel, mistress of the then king (and great-grandmother of the current Duchess of Cornwall.)

    McCarthy adopted this method in its entirety. Of course he had the spurious history of war-heroism, and when he started brandishing his list it began with 57 names, but soon went up to 206.

    The method of bolstering one’s outrageous assertions by reference to an uncheckable source proved popular: in the Alger Hiss case (not one of McCarthy’s triumphs, Richard Nixon was the prime mover in this one) there were the Pumpkin papers, a recovered stash once buried in a pumpkin patch, too secret to be produced in court. (When finally revealed, it was found to be banal.) And of course in the instant case, we have the Soviet archives which you say prove the integrity of McCarthy, without bothering to cite any particular instance.

    I myself have a list, of the more famous people who were blacklisted or suffered some other persecution during McCarthyism. It was not created by me: I culled it from the internet:-

    • Elmer Bernstein, composer and conductor
    • Charlie Chaplin, actor (probably placed on the list for his affair with Randolph Hearst’s mistress.)
    • Aaron Copland, composer
    • Bartley Crum, attorney (suicide)
    • Jules Dassin, director (blacklisted, fled to France)
    • W.E.B. DuBois, civil rights activist and author
    • Howard Fast, author (jailed)
    • Lee Grant, actress (refused to testify against her husband)
    • Dashiell Hammett, author (jailed)
    • Lillian Hellman, playwright
    • John Hubley, animator (blacklisted; survived by making commercials, anonymously)
    • Langston Hughes, author (named names)
    • Sam Jaffe, actor (blacklisted)
    • Gypsy Rose Lee, actress
    • Philip Loeb, actor (suicide)
    • Joseph Losey, director (blacklisted, moved to Europe)
    • Burgess Meredith, actor (blacklisted)
    • Arthur Miller, playwright and essayist
    • Zero Mostel, actor (blacklisted)
    • Clifford Odets, author
    • J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist, “father of the atomic bomb”
    • Linus Pauling, chemist, winner of two Nobel prizes (Peacenik who warned of the dangers of radioactive fallout)
    • Paul Robeson, actor, athlete, singer, author, political and civil rights activist (conclusively proven to be a Black Man)
    • Edward G. Robinson, actor (Friend of the Negro, named names, career suffered)
    • Waldo Salt, author (wrote Robin Hood, Midnight Cowboy)
    • Pete Seeger, folk singer (freed on appeal)
    • Artie Shaw, clarinetist
    • Howard Da Silva, actor (cleared of all charges)
    • Paul Sweezy, economist and founder-editor of Monthly Review (imprisoned, freed on appeal)
    • Tsien Hsue-shen, physicist (found not guilty)
    • Orson Welles, actor, author and director (left for Europe)

    I have tried in the main to check each entry against their Wikipedia biography. McCarthy set his sights on people who could not possibly have any connection to any information that would be of interest to Soviet espionage. As one of those named here (Zero Mostel) later commented: “What did they think I was going to do – sell acting secrets to the Russians?” There are a couple of scientists here who might have had some knowledge worth communicating, but careful inspection of their biography shows this never actually happened.

    There are a lot of Jews among the accused. The reason for this was possibly that in the 20s, 30s and 40s World Politics was extremely polarised. You were either on the left with the Communists or the Right with the Nazis. For obvious reasons Jews could not be on the same side as Nazis, so they had to be on the left. More recently they have found a niche in the Republican Party which is more attuned to their income.

    Where there were genuine agents of the Soviet Union arrested and convicted during the Cold War period, the name of McCarthy is suspiciously absent from their accusers. They were arrested and investigated by the FBI, whose job it was to do these things. However irresponsible the American polity that allowed McCarthy was, it was not so stupid as to allow him to compromise the investigation of real traitors.

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