Friederich Hayek and Will Rogers on the Democratic Party

I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat. (Will Rogers)

I came across the following argument online — I put it in my own words:

The Democrats claim to regard Trump as an existential risk, someone whose election could end democracy in the US. If they believe that, they should have been willing, over the past four years, to move towards the center, give up some of their political/ideological objectives in order to make it more likely that Trump would lose the 2024 election. They didn’t. Biden, having run for the nomination as a centrist Democrat, proceeded to act as a left-wing Democrat, even if not as far left as Sanders and AOC might have wanted.

Hence they did not believe their own rhetoric about how bad electing Trump would be.

The conclusion may well be true but there is a mistake in the argument — it treats the Democratic party, perhaps the left more generally, as an organization, a metaphorical person acting to achieve objectives.

It isn’t.

Many years ago I heard a talk by Hayek on the difference between an organization and a self-generating order. An organization has purposes and acts to achieve them. A self-generating order acts as a result of some internal logic but has no objective it is acting to achieve. It may, very likely will, act in ways that fit no objective any of the individual actors who make it up desire.

Consider the biosphere, the set of living creatures produced by evolution. Each individual organism can be seen as designed to maximize its reproductive success but neither the species nor the biosphere as a whole fits any similar pattern. Predator species are designed to be able to run down their prey, prey species to be able to run away from their predators. A design that slowed both species down would free up resources to let each better achieve reproductive success or any other plausible objective. Similarly across many other examples, the characteristics and behavior of species make sense only in a world in which no single mind is designing all of them. Even within a species, design is for individual reproductive success not species success, with males designed to defeat other males in the competition for mates.

Darwinian evolution is, in that respect, a better explanation of the world as we observe it than intelligent design.

For an economist, the obvious example of a self-generating order is the market. It is probably the example Hayek used in the talk I am remembering. It is a worse example than the biosphere because it comes closer than the biosphere to looking like something rationally designed to achieve objectives of its constituent actors.¹ But even the market does not entirely fit that pattern because of the existence of market failure, situations where the outcome of the market can be explained by individual rationality but is not consistent with group rationality, could be improved for all concerned by a sufficiently intelligent and benevolent social planner.

The Democratic Party has the form of an organization but is more like a market. Democratic politicians are not employees acting on orders from a superior but individuals acting for their own objectives. The candidates in a primary are not acting for the benefit of the party — if they were they could decide among themselves which had the best chance of defeating the Republican candidate and save their supporters’ money for the election. The voters in the primary are not acting for the benefit of the party, not voting entirely on the basis of which candidate is most likely to win the election and make the party stronger but on some mix of that and which candidate will push the policies the voter prefers. For a pro-Hamas voter, to take the sharpest current internal conflict in the party, a pro-Hamas candidate with a forty percent chance of winning the election is better than a pro-Israel candidate with a sixty percent chance.

Suppose you are a candidate for the congressional nomination in a district where the committed Democrats, the ones likely to vote in a primary, are well to the left. Even if you believe that Trump is an existential risk and defeating him is worth postponing your preferred policies for a few years, you know that if you run as a centrist you will lose the nomination to someone running as a leftist. After you get elected as a leftist you could shift sharply to the center in how you vote, but doing so would be politically expensive. The voters who supported you in the primary will feel betrayed, support someone else next time. Staff members may quit. That might be a price worth paying if it kept Trump from winning the next election and destroying democracy, but it won’t. The shift of one congressman towards the center will have only a very small effect on the policies of the party, how they are perceived by the voters and the chance that Trump will win — but a large effect on the political future of the congressman.

The same analysis helps explain another puzzle in the behavior of the Democrats. Biden’s intellectual decline was obvious enough to be recognized by millions of people during the debate. It must have been obvious much earlier to anyone who interacted regularly with him, which would include virtually all of the top leadership of the Democratic party. Keeping him as the candidate risked his condition becoming visible to the public, as in fact happened. If they succeeded in concealing his condition until after he won the election, the result would be electing a candidate mentally unable to do the job, more obviously so year by year. It was in the interest of both the party and the country for Biden to drop out of the contest for the nomination and allow other candidates to compete. Why didn’t it happen?

Part of the answer is that Biden didn’t think it was in his interest, in part because he was no longer thinking very well, in part because he was  biased in both his picture of himself — everyone is a biased judge in his own case — and his weighting of his interests against those of other people. Being president was the culmination of his career, being president twice the ultimate win in the game he had spent his life playing. As long as he could persuade himself that he could win he could believe that running was the best way of keeping Trump from destroying democracy in America.

Without Biden’s cooperation it would have been difficult for the party leadership to replace him. Any individual who tried would be not only risking his career but dividing the party. If he failed and Biden ran, that would increase the chance of Trump winning. If the party was a person or an organization, if Biden and everyone else who mattered was under the control of a single will, the answer would be easy. But they weren’t.

There remains the puzzle of why Biden himself did not shift the party towards the center in order to reduce Trump’s appeal. Part of the answer may be that a president is not a dictator, that he was not entirely free to follow policies that others in his party did not support. I think a more plausible explanation is that Biden, at least, did not believe the catastrophist rhetoric, viewed Trump as an opponent to be defeated but not as a disaster to be prevented at almost any cost.

Also, of course, he was no longer thinking very clearly.

An alternative explanation, for both Biden and others in the party, is that they did not believe that moving the party towards the center would make it more likely to win. The evidence against that is the campaign actually run by Harris, the attempt to portray her, however implausibly, as a centrist.

This post has been about the Democratic Party but the same logic applies to the Republican Party. It did badly in the 2022 elections because Trump was using his influence on the primaries to maximize not the power of the party but his power within the party.

It applies to the Libertarian Party as well.     

1. A point expressed in the idea of economic efficiency, discussed in an earlier post.