Arguments All the Way Down

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, August 05, 2026

 

The system isn’t the problem.

 

Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan primary. I think that’s a shame. I think he’ll be bad for the Democratic Party and the country. No one should be shocked that I think that. I think he’ll be bad for the Democrats in three ways. He’ll have a harder time winning the general election, and the Democrats will have a much harder time retaking the Senate without Michigan. And, if he wins, he’ll likely pull the Democratic Party to the left, albeit at the margins. After all, he’d be one out of 100 senators, and it’s not impossible that his left-wingery will cause some Democrats to move rightward to signal he doesn’t speak for them. Which leads to the third reason I think he’ll be bad for Democrats. He’ll be another fringey Democrat that Republicans can point to as proof the Democrats are too radical.

 

The more one party seems extreme, or actually is extreme, the more space is created for the other party to seem or be extreme. That dynamic is one of the main reasons our politics are so dysfunctional. I think he could be bad for the country in other ways, because I think his policies are bad.

 

But I don’t bring up El-Sayed to explore any of those points.

 

I just want to touch on an argument he made throughout the primary. El-Sayed subscribes to a commonly held view on the left—and big chunks of the mainstream—that money is corrupting our politics. There are specific areas where I don’t think this claim is always wrong. For instance, the current president is corruptly making a fortune off the presidency. I don’t think money is corrupting Trump, I think Trump is corrupt and is making money as a result. I also think there are endless examples of consultants, lobbyists, and “influencers”—across the partisan spectrum—arguing for things contrary to the public interest for personal profit. This is not a new phenomenon in America—or anywhere else.

 

But where I think the “money corrupts politics” argument is wrong is where it is loudest: that special interests are buying power by supporting various candidates in elections. This claim was central to El-Sayed’s pitch. Because he is anti-Israel and two of his core constituencies—white college-educated progressives and Arab or Muslim Michiganders—are anti-Israel too, he often framed his claim in the context of AIPAC. “Donald Trump is not, himself, the disease of our politics. He’s just the worst symptom of the disease of our politics,” El-Sayed said in July. “The disease? It’s the system that allows corporations and billionaires and special interests like AIPAC to buy and sell politicians to rig the system against us.”

 

In furtherance of this claim, El-Sayed peddled a lot of politically ignorant twaddle insinuating that aid for Israel—but never aid for, say, Egypt—is why our schools and healthcare aren’t adequately funded. If you know anything about the amounts of money involved in education, healthcare, or foreign aid, you know this is demagogic nonsense.

 

But here’s the thing: El-Sayed won. So even if you buy the argument that billionaire and corporate money (or the Joooz) unduly influence elections, the claim can’t be that strong given that he won. The same goes for all of the DSA and generic Democrats who campaigned on such claims who also won their primaries or elections. How powerful can the Thomas Nast cartoon fat cats be if Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez keep winning elections?

 

Money is obviously necessary in politics, but it’s not sufficient. Once you have enough money to get your message out, the message matters more than any additional money. If money alone won elections, we’d be in Michael Bloomberg’s second term (ditto if “the Jews” controlled everything). He blew over a billion dollars in exchange for winning the delegates of American Samoa. Billionaire Tom Steyer lost the California primary after spending enough money to scald a wet mule, as Haley Barbour might say. Hillary Clinton and her allies outspent Trump and his by nearly 2 to 1 in 2016.

 

Aha, some opponents of our system might say, that proves a different claim about how “undemocratic” our system is. Hillary Clinton won nearly 3 million more votes in 2016!

 

That’s true (and those votes weren’t, as Trump insists, from illegal immigrants). Trump won the Electoral College, not the popular vote, in 2016, blather about a “landslide” to the contrary. But we should acknowledge that this complaint is wholly separate from the claim that money buys elections. No one bribed the electors. They cast their votes, as prescribed by law, the way their states voted.

 

If you follow politics as closely as I have to in order to put food on the table, you’ll notice how the vast majority of people who make the money argument also make the abolish-the-Electoral-College argument. Given that they are completely different arguments, the only thing linking them is the conviction that “the system” is rigged against the complainers.

 

I am a defender of the Electoral College, even though I think the case for it is weaker than it has been, certainly in my lifetime and probably much longer. Part of the case for the Electoral College is to force presidential candidates to broaden their coalitions and get out of their comfort zones. If we decided elections by popular vote alone, that would increase the importance of money because candidates would focus almost entirely on major population centers, i.e. a handful of cities and states, and spend gobs of money in the most expensive media markets. By requiring candidates to cobble together majorities drawn from different states, candidates don’t just pay attention to small states, they pay attention to swing states, which are more representative of the median voter, not the parties’ base voters.

 

That system is breaking down somewhat, but it’s not the Electoral College’s fault. The reasons for that have to do with the nationalization of our politics and media ecosystem and the dysfunction of the parties themselves. Getting rid of the Electoral College wouldn’t eliminate those problems, it would exacerbate them. Indeed, as politically impossible as it would be in the current climate, I’m sympathetic to the idea of strengthening the Electoral College by giving electors more autonomy to defy their voters. I’m not wholly convinced, but I do think a lot of our problems stem from too much democracy and too little republicanism, which is why I’m constantly carping about weak parties and dumb primaries.

 

Speaking of republicanism, by which I mean the idea, broadly speaking, that leaders should be less slavishly beholden to voters and specific constituencies and more concerned with the general welfare—even, shudder, “the common good”—the thing that bothers me perhaps the most about the detractors of the Electoral College is the way they make it sound like America is so much less democratic than other countries. For instance, Yale’s Samuel Moyn recently whined to Ross Douthat that the Electoral College violates the principle of one man, one vote.

 

Part of this stems from the fact that a lot of people, and not just people on the left, have this vague idea that our system should be parliamentary. In their view, presidents represent a party. If a presidential candidate wins, he should get to do what he wants because the whole country voted for him and his party (never mind that the reasons people vote for a candidate are wildly diverse and often at odds with the reasons of other members of the same coalition).  

 

This idea is often expressed amid a lot of vomitous codswallop about “mandates.” An electoral mandate is a serviceable enough term for punditry, but it is an alien concept to the Constitution. If a Republican is elected president the same year a Democrat is elected to the Senate, that Democrat is under no obligation to rubber-stamp the president. Indeed, in all likelihood, that Democrat was elected to oppose the policies of the new president. (Does anyone think El-Sayed, if elected to the Senate, should or would be deferential to Trump because he was given a mandate in 2024? I mean, I’m sure Stephen Miller would make that case, but it would be a dumb case.)

 

A guy named Andy Burnham was just installed as prime minister in the U.K. Literally no one voted for him. I don’t mean that voters didn’t vote for him. No one, including the MPs of the quite unpopular Labour Party formally voted for him. According to their rules, since he was the only candidate with sufficient backing of MPs and party organizations, they didn’t even need to have a formal leadership vote. He was simply confirmed as the new leader of the party and the country. In fact, the last time they had a national election, he was a mayor. He wasn’t even in Parliament. How, exactly, is America less democratic than the U.K.? He’s not prime minister because of one man, one vote, but one man, no votes.

 

What unites the two arguments—money is the problem and/or the Electoral College is the problem (and for that matter “the Jews” are the problem)—is the attitude of the people making the argument. There is an arrogance that runs through our politics that rests on the belief that the only reason “we” aren’t in power or getting our way once in power is that the system is rigged in some way. It can’t be because our views are unpopular. It can’t be because decent and intelligent people disagree with us; it must be because the system is corrupt, rigged, unfair, undemocratic, etc. Looked at from a distance, you can recognize how so much of this stuff is less a thoughtful indictment of our system and more of a vague conspiracy theory.

 

This is the reason why parties in power bitch about the filibuster. We won! Why should there be any barrier to our will? You can be sure that if a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, many of the Democrats now defending the filibuster will start denouncing it and many of the Republicans now denouncing it will revert to calling it a vital tool of our constitutional system. I’m looking at you, Mike Lee.

 

Is there any doubt that if Trump lost the Electoral College in 2024 but won the popular vote, he and his loudest acolytes would have declared the Electoral College illegitimate?

 

El-Sayed is full of crap when he says the “disease” of American politics is money in general, and AIPAC money in particular. But American politics is suffering from a disease. Partisans, activists, and a great many voters suffer from a delusion that our constitutional mechanisms and/or various shadowy powerful forces are conspiring against the popular will and the common good. They think that if they lose an argument—and that’s all elections are, arguments about which candidates and which parties should prevail in a specific contest—it must be an indictment of the system.

 

But our system was designed for arguments. People talk about democracy in romantic, almost magical, terms. They think elections are profound expressions of the national will or spirit. They’re not. They’re arguments about who should have a job for a defined period of time. If they get the job, they don’t have a mandate to do things. If they have any kind of mandate at all—beyond faithfully doing the job assigned them—it is to argue for their position persuasively.

 

This is obviously the case for legislators. Their job is to persuade other legislators to pass laws. They can’t force their colleagues to do anything. But it’s also true of the president. He is not the “boss” of the legislative branch, nor of the courts, never mind governors, mayors, or American citizens more broadly. If anything, we’re his boss, because here the people rule. But he is expected to make arguments. He is supposed to marshal popular support for his policies—like, say, going to war with Iran—and he is supposed to convince Congress to pay for his policies. That’s it. It’s arguments all the way down.

 

I can’t stop thinking about this civic sermon by Antonin Scalia about the genius of our Constitution. As a classical liberal and conservative, my favorite part of the Constitution has always been the Bill of Rights, arguably the least democratic feature of our regime. The Constitution doesn’t make it impossible to infringe on our rights, but it makes it damn hard. It puts our rights on a shelf so high that it’s almost impossible to take any of them down. The only way to do so would be to form a coalition—again through endless argument at the national, state, and local level—so huge that the combined mass of the persuaded might be able to form a human pyramid tall enough to pluck it down.

 

But Scalia makes a powerful case that the genius of the Constitution isn’t the Bill of Rights. After all, it was an “afterthought.” The genius of the Constitution is that it makes it incredibly difficult for any single faction to gain and centralize enough power to trample our rights. It forces factions to compete for power through arguments. For obvious reasons, I don’t trust Trump with unchecked power. But I also wouldn’t trust Abdul Al-Sayed, or Bernie Sanders, or anyone else with unchecked power. Indeed, the fact that these people tend to believe that obstacles and inconveniences on their quest for ever-more power are somehow illegitimate or unfair is precisely why I don’t trust them with power.

 

The system has problems, but it isn’t the problem. The real problem is the people who think the system is the problem because it stands in their way and forces them to treat the arguments and interests of people they hate with respect. These are the sorts of people the founders wanted to check in the first place.