{"id":56253,"date":"2020-08-29T02:02:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-28T23:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/sadly-political-conventions-have-completely-outlived-their-purpose\/"},"modified":"2020-08-29T02:02:00","modified_gmt":"2020-08-28T23:02:00","slug":"sadly-political-conventions-have-completely-outlived-their-purpose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/sadly-political-conventions-have-completely-outlived-their-purpose\/","title":{"rendered":"#Sadly, political conventions have completely outlived their purpose"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Sadly, political conventions have completely outlived their purpose<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n The party conventions are over \u2014 and I don\u2019t just mean the 2020 conventions.<\/p>\n

In one sense, the conventions have been over for a very long time. They were created primarily to do two things: pick presidential nominees and craft party platforms. A convention hasn\u2019t actually picked a nominee since 1952, when Democrat Adlai Stevenson won the nomination on the third ballot.<\/p>\n

Since then, conventions have mostly just app<\/a>roved nominees as foregone conclusions on the first ballot. Ever since the rise of primaries in the early 1970s, the nominee is literally chosen before the convention. All that\u2019s left is the coronation.<\/p>\n

But at least conventions still crafted party platforms. These are statements of principle and policy, hammered out between different factions within a party, to state clearly (or sometimes murkily) what the party stands for. Historically, platform fights could matter enormously. It was through the negotiation of the platform that a party decided where it came down on issues such as slavery and prohibition.<\/p>\n

The other practical benefit? The platform also gave marching orders to the nominee. It was part mission statement, part job description. Its overall purpose was to say, \u201cThis is what the party expects from you,\u201d because the nominee was selected to do the job the party wanted.<\/p>\n

Of course, in reality, if the nominee was elected president, he could ignore the platform. Still, the principle that the party and its elected officials were bound to the platform had some juice in it.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s gone. In advance of the GOP convention this week, the Republican National Committee announced that, for the first time in the history of either major political party, it wasn\u2019t going to bother writing a new platform. (Technically, the party decided in June to recycle the 2016 platform, outdated cover and all.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden administration, as well as those espoused by the Democratic National Committee today,\u201d the committee declared in a resolution.<\/p>\n

Later, a list of sound-bite promises with no policy specifics was released to describe President Trump\u2019s second-term agenda. My favorite: \u201cDrain the Globalist Swamp by Taking on International Organizations That Hurt American Citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regardless, the point was clear. The party is now the servant of the nominee \u2014 in this case, the president. Hence a platform is truly pointless because the party stands for nothing other than whatever the president says it does.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a third role for conventions \u2014 one that would appear to be the most obvious. Conventions are meant to CONVENE. It\u2019s in the name.<\/p>\n

Party members from across the country travel<\/a> to meet face-to-face to work, negotiate and social<\/a>ize.<\/p>\n

Again, such work used to include actually picking a nominee, but the primary system and modern communications destroyed that.<\/p>\n

Long before the pandemic, conventions had been turning into tightly scripted partisan infomercials for the coming election. Make of that what you will, but at least people still convened. They put on their silly hats, they wore their flair and they had discussions and debates in the moments when they weren\u2019t being used as the political equivalent of a studio audience in a ShamWow ad.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s gone this year, too. COVID-19 erased even the conventional part of the conventions. But the reality is that they\u2019ve been mostly virtual \u2014 conventions in name only \u2014 for a long time already.<\/p>\n

This month\u2019s highly produced nightly videos with staged bits of spontaneity (just like the Oscars or Emmys) were the fulfillment of trends long in the making. The parties are paper-tiger marketing firms now, geared to bend their brand to whichever politician happens to win the nomination or hold power for their team.<\/p>\n

People will show up for conventions again, but the GOP\u2019s convention in particular makes it clear that when they do, it will be as props and applause machines only.<\/p>\n

Twitter: @JonahDispatch<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Sadly, political conventions have completely outlived their purpose” The party conventions are over \u2014 and I don\u2019t just mean the 2020 conventions. In one sense, the conventions have been over for a very long time. They were created primarily to do two things: pick presidential nominees and craft party platforms. A convention hasn\u2019t actually picked…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56254,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[60883,60882],"class_list":["post-56253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-political-conventions-have-completely-outlived-their-purpose","tag-sadly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}