A Critical Review of “The Primary Solution” by Nick Troiano
Review
I enjoyed this book; I respect Nick’s motivation for writing it and highly recommend it to anyone who cares enough about America and knows enough about the democratic process to vote. It is well written, well organized, easy to read, very informative and inspiring. I was shocked and appalled by what I learned; shocked by some of the statistics he provided and appalled to think that a society that is intelligent enough to put a man on the moon (the pinnacle symbol of brilliant collaboration and success for the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers and perhaps even the Gen-Xers) could have let it get this bad. Is it true that “Congress has an 8% approval rating, yet 90% of members get reelected,” (p. 11, Kindle Edition) and “only 20% of Americans trust the government?” (p. 1)? And is it really because “only 8% of all voters cast ballots in the partisan primaries that determined 83% of House contests”? (p. 5) These are just a few of the figures that Nick brought to light in the first chapter of this book.
I think he did a nice job at researching the problem, and I agree, “We run our country like a company that scrutinizes its final products but entirely ignores its own assembly line. It’s time we refocus our attention.” (p. 7). He asked a lot of good questions and provided links to his references, including the polls that support his answers. For example, in the first paragraph of the Introduction, he stated that only 20% of Americans trust the government today, compared to the early 1960s when, he said, the number was nearly 80%. I was born in 1960 and I remember my parents and other adults being very respectful and speaking very highly of government officials. I searched for the Pew Research report that he referenced, “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2022,” to verify that he was telling the truth, which is the fundamental principle upon which I center my life, and he was. When I read the report, I noticed it was updated to 2023, and was glad to see that it had actually gone up to 27% in 2020. Then I was even more shocked to see the dive that happened after that. Now it is only at 16%!
I can’t say that I’m surprised because I watch and read the news; I already knew what Nick pointed out: “Our political system […] rewards politicians who pander to their party’s base with reelection, while hoping they will then come to Congress and work together to get things done.” (p. 7) Still, these statistics got my attention. The obvious question is why? Nick said that he has been asking that question since he first got involved in political reform fifteen years ago. He listed several factors that he found in his surveys, but the largest factor that he said fuels our broken politics is “one that has been hiding in plain sight for decades: partisan primaries.” (p. 2) It is his contention that the single most important thing we can do to improve representation in our government and hold it accountable to delivering better results is to abolish partisan primaries.
Now I had heard a lot about whether to hold “open” or “closed” primaries, but this is the first time I heard someone suggest that they be abolished entirely. I am one of the people he described, who “[takes] these first-round elections for granted as a historically sacred or unchangeable aspect of politics…” In fact, I took it for granted that the people who voted in primaries were doing a service for the rest of us who don’t have time or just don’t like politics. I actually know some people who do that service, and they are passionate about it. One of the reasons I am not a member of any political party is that they are too passionate for me. To me, the practice of politics seems too much like the practice of religion.
If surveyed, I might have been part of the 72% that Nick said, “believe that the biggest problem in our politics is the politicians running for office” rather than “the rules of our current election system,” which he said is only 28%. According to the reference that he quoted, only 2% said that partisan primaries are to blame. Changing that perception is why he wrote this book. (p. 2) He has done that for me and from my new, higher vantage point, I feel motivated to write this review, to encourage you to READ THIS BOOK.
However, I have read the U. S. Constitution several times, including the amendments, and the Declaration of Independence and would highly recommend reading those before reading Nick’s book. Once I began to see the landscape better, I looked deeper into the other things he pointed out and have a few criticisms about what he wrote.
Political division or ignorance?
My first criticism is in regards to a statement he made in his conclusion; he said “America’s greatest enemy is not a foreign dictator but our own political division.” (p. 272) I would disagree and say instead that our greatest enemy is our ignorance about each other, about ourselves, about the meaning of principles and about how a self-governing system operates or is supposed to operate in principle. But I still like the approach that Nick took. In order to decrease our ignorance, we have to start somewhere. He obviously knows that we can’t find solutions to our problems if we can’t even nail down the problem correctly. So he nailed down what he called the “Primary Problem” in the introduction and did a great job explaining in parts 1 and 2 (chapters 1–5) how it actually stems from the primary election process. He made a lot of sense and the fact that the answer is right there in the problem statement seems somewhat profound.
One of the ways that Nick’s book inspired me was that he compared the government to a machine, saying, “parties are necessary organizing mechanisms for running a republic. They function as important intermediary institutions that oil the gears of self-government.” (p. 128 Kindle Edition) As an electrical and nuclear engineer, I use things like machines, electrical circuits and nuclear reactors as metaphors (or models) to help me see how things that work in automatic, actually work in principle. A self-governing society should work the same way –in principle– as other automatic things like a self-governed gas-powered engine, which actually has a part called the governor, a self-sustaining harmonic oscillator and a self-sustaining nuclear reactor. These are systems that I understand intimately, from a scientific engineering perspective and can use as models for illustrating the principles of operation. I compare the component parts in things like politics to the machine parts (where the “parts” are parties) and look for commonalities in how they function or fail to function. I have used this process throughout my Navy career and in other areas of life, including my 43-year marriage and family life, where my wife and I take turns being the “governor,” to find balance and live in harmony.
I’ll get to my second criticism in a minute, but let me explain briefly; a self-governed gas-powered engine (just like a business and Capitalism itself) is based on the principle of balancing supply and demand. The governor in an engine supplies fuel, based on the demand for power by the engine itself. The governor has no power in and of itself but only samples the output of the engine and responds to its need for more fuel. It is immediately obvious to me that our “governors” (including Governors, Representatives, Senators, Court officials, VPs and especially the Presidents) are the parts in our system that have been demanding the power. In other words, they are trying to operate the system in reverse and giving themselves too much “fuel.” In an engine, that is called being flooded. In the government, I would call it being swamped. I submit that this principle gives new meaning to the saying, “drain the swamp.”
Political division, which Nick said is “our greatest enemy,” is actually the source of what we call in electrical engineering, “apparent power.” It is the vector sum of “true power” (the sum of all the people’s power) and “reactive power” (the way we interact with each other). It is what good leaders and managers call synergy, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It is what they use to maximize the effectiveness of any organization. Political division is not our “greatest problem” as Nick said, but rather the source of “reactive power.” It is the type of power that political leaders use very skillfully to increase their own “apparent power.” The reason that reactive power is not an inherent problem itself is that, once we understand the principle of a “power factor,” we can take the excess power away from them and put it back to good use for the country as a whole. So, the most fundamental problem, which is more primary than Nick’s idea of the “primary problem,” is that people are ignorant about what principles are and why they are so important.
The M-Rule
That brings me to my second point, which is actually a two-part criticism and an argument against the basis of Nick’s “primary solution,” i.e. he thinks that a priority is the same as a principle and that “the majority rule” means that the majority rules. Like most people, he uses the word “principle” to refer to things that should really be called something else, like rules, values, priorities, things-to-keep-in-mind or perhaps just good ideas. In some cases, they are just strong opinions. For example, under the section, A Spectrum of Policy Solutions he said, “Let me posit two key principles [emphasis added] that any new system should uphold:” (pp. 151–152).
1) All eligible voters should have the freedom to vote for any candidate in every election, regardless of party.
2) A candidate must earn a majority of the vote in order to win an election.
Nick lists the same things more correctly as “priorities” on his webpage at https://www.uniteamerica.org/priorities.
A principle is actually a fundamental truth. A first principle is a truth that is self-evident. The priorities that Nick listed are not fundamental truths and they are certainly not self-evident. If they were, then everyone would agree and there would be no problem. The first one is what he is trying to convince the reader, so he put the cart before the horse. That is why I add “in a literary sense” when I said that the book is well organized. He makes his point, and I agree that all primary elections should be abolished, that party candidates should be decided some other way, like at their conventions, paid for out of their own pockets. If that were the case, then I would that “All eligible voters should have the freedom to vote for any candidate in every election, regardless of party” because there would only be one election.
The second priority on his list is also a conclusion that stems from the concept (not a principle) of the majority rule, which is only a good rule (in my opinion) for dealing with fairness. And it only works well for dealing with things that are so simple that everyone can easily know what they are voting for and understand the true consequences of a win.
Nick makes it clear that he interprets “the majority rule” to mean “the majority rules.” He uses the word “majority” more than 20 times, starting in the Introduction (p. 3), and finally says, “’Majority rules’ is a common phrase we associate with our democracy, but in virtually all American elections, the winning candidate only needs to have the most votes — not a majority of votes.” (p. 87) When referring to ranked-choice voting, he quoted a letter “signed by the Republican Party and four minor parties” saying “[RCV] eliminates the problem of our current election system, where a candidate strongly opposed by the majority can win. It assures majority rule.” (p. 171). Later, he said, “Unlike the convoluted process we see today, the simple principle of “majority rules” would determine the outcome.” (p. 204). Finally, he hammers his gavel by saying “Even my seven-year-old nephew, Aston, and four-year-old niece, Arabella, have learned to say, “Majority rules!” [emphasis added]…” but he is talking about “…when we’re deciding on what activity to do together.” He follows that with his opinion; “It’s not only common sense, but also a bedrock principle of American democracy [emphasis added].” (pp. 227–228)
I strongly disagree that “the majority rules” is a principle, much less “a bedrock principle of American democracy.” There is a subtle, but extremely important difference between using “the majority rule” (or the M-rule, like a thumb-rule) and saying that “the majority rules,” meaning that being ruled by the opinions of the majority is the best way to run something or make decisions.
The word “rule” in “the majority-rule” is a noun, not a verb. It is labeled a “rule” (ergo the M-rule) so as not to be confused with a “principle,” which is exactly what Nick, and perhaps the majority of people in America have been fooled into believing these days. It might be a good rule to use for deciding on what question to ask, but not for finding the right answer, i.e. the truth. For example, a question like, why are we seeing the kind of percentages that Nick laid out for us? Those percentages came from a sampling process and proper sampling techniques can be shown, in principle, i.e. based on the principles of statistics, to represent what is happening to the majority. It is called a “rule” because we say, as a rule, the result represents the truth, but it is only true within certain limits and only for a certain amount of time. A rule is true when it is used properly, but A PRINCIPLE IS ALWAYS TRUE.
Using the M-rule to choose a solution to a complex problem or who to elect for a particular office is foolish. Maybe I should say it is foolish when the majority of the people being polled know practically nothing about the root causes of the problem(s), the many variables that go into determining an appropriate solution, or about the true motivations of the people running for the office. The majority of people don’t bother to get educated and even if they try, the easiest thing to do is the “eat” what the media feeds them. Then the easiest thing is to choose one side or the other and vote by party, what they call “straight-ticket voting.” That is how we get fooled into falling for the same things and the same people, as Nick explained.
There is an excellent article entitled “The American System of Majority Rule” (dated 1962) at https://fee.org/articles/the-american-system-of-majority-rule/ that goes deep into the problems with the majority rule. In fact, that author (Edmund A. Opitz) said, “To emphasize further the undemocratic nature of the Senate, the Constitution provided that its members be appointed by the legislators of the various states, not elected by the voters. We amended the Constitution to change this procedure.” Personally, I think that was the root cause of our problem. The men who drafted the Constitution, Opitz said, “worked overtime to devise ways of protecting society against the action of majorities. They knew that “The Majority” is a technical term in politics, customarily meaning “a minority on the make.” The problem, it seems obvious to me, is that all anyone has to do is to convince the majority about whatever they want, regardless of whether it is true or false, right or wrong, and only for long enough to get them to vote for them or for whatever it is they want to pass. If it’s a law they pass, a new system put in place or a person they put in office, the results can be long-lasting, harmful and even devastating.
It is foolish to use the majority rule for making important decisions, especially about complex systems or complicated issues. The majority of people are usually uninformed, uneducated, irresponsible, selfish, greedy, vindictive and sometimes downright cruel. It is certainly not “a bedrock principle of American democracy.” In fact, I would argue that it is one of the major misconceptions about democracy. Before we decide on any major “new systems,” as Nick suggests, we need to go all the way back to the basics and understand the bases, to ensure that they are in fact, fundamental truths. Being self-evident is the one key principle that really needs to be used, as it is in the Declaration of Independence started: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” You know the rest, I hope. If not, take the time and make the effort.
The last paragraph in Nick’s book says, “There is nothing so wrong with our democracy today that our same democracy does not give us the tools to fix. The only question is whether we — including you — will use them while we still have the time.” I totally agree that our system gives us the tools, but if we continue to use those tools backwards, they will continue to tear us apart.
