Orman shares insights, experiences from the campaign trail

“A Declaration of Independents,” Greg Orman, Greenleaf, 2016 ($24.95)

Greg Orman is absent this election cycle in Kansas, but he’s not forgotten. His new book, “A Declaration of Independents” (subtitled “How We Can Break the Two-Party Stranglehold and Restore the American Dream”), is both a “reform the system” treatise and a memoir and includes both thoughtful discussions and interesting excursions into Orman’s own life and his experiences on the campaign trail running as an independent candidate against Sen. Pat Roberts in 2014.

Should Orman run for office again, this book will certainly provide him with some heft. It doesn’t ultimately live up to its subtitle, though; his vision of genuinely independent and practical voters and representatives changing the country is admirable, but it also leads him to ignore more radical alternatives that, in contrast to pure “independence,” actually have some record of success.

The key to Orman’s worldview is his conviction that the American party system serves to depress real productive thinking. He repeats this again and again, claiming that “one of the real strengths of Independents” is that “they’re able to approach an issue with an open mind and see all sides of an argument.” That this kind of self-congratulatory thinking is pretty much identical to what all partisans routinely believe about themselves is apparently lost on Orman, but he’s certainly not alone in believing it’s true. What Orman correctly identifies as today’s “hyper-partisanship” really does frequently stand in the way of people being able to see, as George Orwell once put it, what is right in front of their nose. The question is: why?

Here, Orman understands the relevant research very well. In the middle – and best – section of the book, he identifies most of the culprits that political scientists and historians have long pointed out: how mobility, individualism and suburbanization in American life have functioned as a “Big Sort” that has resulted in overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic neighborhoods, churches and social circles; how the gerrymandering of congressional districts has taken advantage of that sorting and magnified it; how our own very human habits of judgment turn most of us into defensive advocates rather than open-minded explorers; how technology (and particularly social media) encourages – and makes profitable – the nationalization, simplification and polarization of complicated, local debates; and how our single-member, winner-take-all electoral system logically leads people to think in terms of turning their particular groupings into majorities (“don’t vote for a third party candidate; you’ll be throwing your vote away”). It’s a great review of important scholarly literature, communicated in an impassioned yet common-sense way.

Unfortunately, though, Orman’s solution to addressing these well-documented trends – namely, figuring out what kinds of reforms would enable as many nonmajor-party-affiliated candidates as possible to get elected to office – reflects his own somewhat simplistic individualism. He’s right to argue that Citizens United should be overturned, but he doesn’t consider that Citizens United was only the latest step down the road the Supreme Court set us on decades ago, when it established that spending money on a candidate was the same as constitutionally protected speech.

He rails against closed political primaries, claiming they are an act of disenfranchisement that rob independents of their political rights, but can’t answer his own question: “If party primaries are a private political endeavor, as courts have ruled, why does the state administer the primary elections – and why do taxpayers pay for the process of holding them?”

The answer points to the structural realities of what mass democracy actually means. As the push for ever-greater popular participation in elections increased throughout the 19th century, the necessity of creating some kind of structure to bind together voters, and translate their individual preferences into majorities that could actually wield power in our representative system, became undeniable. Parties ended up playing that role.

If Orman’s complaint is ultimately with the party mentality itself – and if often read like that is the case – then his criticisms need to be directed at the operations of our constitutional system as it was written and as it evolved. Until then, valorizing “independent thinking” alone misses the point; on the contrary, Orman’s independent thinkers need to either commit themselves to one of the major parties and work to build coalitions within them, or they need to build an alternative party to force change upon the dominant two, as the Populist Party successfully did a century ago.

Of course, on every level, from the most local to the presidential, there will occasionally emerge opportunities for well-prepared independents to insert themselves into races and attract the support of voters. There are, after all, all sorts of reasons to vote for any given candidate, not all of them strategic. And the pure civic benefit of seeing new faces and considering new issues is undeniably great.

But if Orman truly imagines that thousands of such one-off races will “break the two-party stranglehold,” he misunderstands something basic about how America’s national government works. Our messy, divisive democratic system can’t function without parties to give the interests of voters some rough shape, however self-interested those who operate those parties may be. The first step of a real “Declaration of Independents” would thus have to be an upfront announcement of the formation of an Independence Party, weirdly enough. Until then, Orman’s story is an impressive one, but not as instructive as it might have been.

This story was originally published September 25, 2016 at 8:06 AM with the headline "Orman shares insights, experiences from the campaign trail."