Strongarmed

A third of Americans prefer a strong, unelected leader to a weak, elected one

I admit that it makes for a quick, alarmist, headline, given that people are running around like headless chickens in fear of the immanent demise of Democracy. But it leaves me with a question: Who elects weak leaders?

Okay, Republicans feel that President Biden is weak, but that's the negative partisanship talking. And, of course, there were Democrats who felt that President Trump was weak. (They may have even had signs.) And I can grant that for some voters, their party's nominee may have been weak in their eyes; progressive Democrats who would rather have had a Sanders Administration may be an example. But, generally speaking, how would a "weak" candidate manage to win an election? This seems to presuppose that there is some set of policy and/or social positions that are more important to voters than "strong" leadership is. But what good would it be to vote for someone who one doesn't believe is capable of actually enacting any of those policies when there are any other choices?

Because of the primary system in the United States, it seems unlikely that the first choice of any significant section of the public would be a weak leader. Again, I can grant that a party might somehow manage to put forward an entire field of weak leaders in a primary election, and then the least wimpy of them advances to the general election where partisanship propels them into a safe seat for their party, but the Presidency is almost never a safe seat. It's possible that the George W. Bush Administration was such a disaster or that Hillary Clinton was such an unpopular candidate that Presidents Obama and Trump could have been literal ham sandwiches and still won the White House. But honestly, that strikes me as unlikely.

If the point is that a sitting officeholder were to become so feeble that they could no longer carry out the duties of their position, there tend to be procedures for that. And at such a point, it's no longer logical to argue that the impulse is any more "undemocratic" than any other restriction that the Constitution places on the will of the majority.

At the risk of repeating myself (as if that never happens), representative government with officeholders elected by popular vote is a means, not an end. Democracy is not, in and of itself, a guarantor of enlightenment among a populace. Okay, so people are becoming broadly unsatisfied with the outcomes that modern American democracy delivers. That's a sign that the implementation may need to change somewhat, not that people should simply accept some affirmative responsibility to support a system that doesn't serve them well.