Today, we caucus

In America, ordinary people decide the political fate of really powerful people who want to be even more powerful. One would think we would end up with a lot of humble political leaders—but no.

Ted Cruz has degrees from Princeton University and Harvard Law School and has close connections to the Goldman Sachs investment firm through his wife, Heidi, yet he is begging for votes from pig farmers.

Donald Trump graduated from the prestigious Wharton School of Business, owns a sizable chunk of New York City and a gambling casino, is worth close to $10 billion, and uses a private Boeing 757 as a runaround car. But he has been ingratiating himself to people whose idea of fine dining is pork tenderloin on a bun at the local bowling alley. (And it is!)

Hillary Clinton, from long experience, is as comfortable in power as you are in old slippers. Yet she needs the permission of schoolteachers in Oskaloosa to expand it, all while suffering the impertinence of nosy press questions.

Every four years our political system humbles people who need a mandate from ordinary, and ordinarily overlooked, people if they want to ascend to the sweet prize of political lordship and glory. (Trump is the exception. He only speaks to crowded stadiums and doesn’t have to get that close to actual common folk.)

Caucuses are not like primaries. In a primary election, you show up at a polling place, cast a vote, and go home. It’s quick, simple, and impersonal. Caucusing is a drawn out social affair that can go all night. People gather in a public hall and speak up in favor of one candidate or another. The Democratic Party’s system is a lot more fun than the Republicans’—it’s more like a parlor game. But in both cases the meetings involve those trying to sway the undecided before the actual voting to elect delegates to the state’s 99 county conventions.

The Iowa caucuses—county-by-county, glad-handing, corn-dog, retail politics—and next week’s New Hampshire primary—small state, look-me-in-the eye-and-make-your-pitch campaigning—are an exhausting and humiliating trial for the big shots who then disappear either to oblivion or to the seclusion of the Washington power elite. Perhaps that’s when the victors take revenge on the little people who presumed to sit in judgement of their “betters.” The winners in Iowa and New Hampshire always pledge to remember the states that launched them toward victory, but they never do. They are like passionate young men who say “I love you” and are never seen again.

Voters in this election cycle are notoriously skeptical toward politicians they call “the establishment.” So office-seekers are falling all over themselves to join in this condemnation and offer themselves as “anti-establishment” alternatives, but at the same time necessarily as politicians who practice the same political arts in the service of the same political ambitions. And voters swoon the way they always do.

Perhaps if we would stop looking for saviors and shop for leaders the way we shop for cars—comparing specs, reading reviews, considering costs—then our leaders in Washington would respect and fear the people who sent them there and would be more likely to govern accordingly.