No liberal seems to like the Iowa caucus, or at least no one who isn’t an Iowa public official. Christopher Hitchens
accused the caucus of being undemocratic, saying that its rules are a “fraud” and invite “Tammany tactics.” Dana Milbank
compared the caucus to a freak show performed by political activists and media types rather than local citizens. Even three Iowa intellectuals in the
New York Times criticized the states’ caucus as an affront to democracy, noting that local Democratic-party officials “shun public disclosure of voter preferences at their caucuses.”
Except for Milbank’s plaint that activists proliferate in the caucus, these criticisms are off base. The Democratic party’s Iowa caucus isn’t really undemocratic. Its presidential candidates receive delegates based on the preferences of voters, not party hacks or media honchos. Sure, the party’s Iowa caucus is not based on the principle of one-man, one-vote. But neither are elections for the United States Senate and the presidency, and few criticize those as undemocratic.
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No, the problem with the Democratic party’s Iowa caucus is that its type of democracy is elitist. And in a party that at the presidential level has lost support from the masses, this is a problem indeed.
The party’s Iowa caucus, which debuted in 1972, was never meant to advance the aims of its blue-collar clientele. Its intellectual roots were in the New Left, the student-centered movement that began in the 1960s. While many members of the New Left endorsed the principle of one-man, one-vote, others put more stock in “participatory democracy.” In The Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society, the group called for organizing political life on several principles. Among those was that “decision-making be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations;” “politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community ...;” and the political order should serve to clarify problems in a way instrumental to their solution; it should provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration …” Put crudely, the vision animating these principles was more guys-in-togas-deliberating-in-the-forum than the masses-marching-in-torchlight-parades-on-the-eve-of-the-election.
The main way in which the caucus is elitist is the amount and time and effort it requires of voters. Participants can not simply show up and vote. They must spend at least an hour and often several hours sitting through a meeting before finally declaring their support for a candidate.
Another way in which the caucus is elitist is that the caucus is a night-time-only affair. Unlike primaries, when voters can cast their ballots from dawn to dusk, the Iowa caucus occurs only in the evening. So long young mothers and second-shifters.
