This Is Not 'Nam. This Is An Election. There Are Rules (or: why primaries and voting are fucked)

Walter's got a problem with people who only love rules when they wrote them. Turns out that covers most of America's political party apparatus.

Tuesday night at the lanes, some kid in a Member’s Only knockoff steps half a shoe over the foul line on his approach, and Walter is up before the ball even gets to the pins. Finger out. Vein going. The whole “you’re entering a world of pain” routine, except this time it’s just a kid in a bowling shirt who has no idea what he just stepped into. The .45 stays in the bag — it always stays in the bag — but Walter doesn’t need it tonight, because the kid backs off, the score gets marked, and Walter sits back down like he just held the line at the Chosin Reservoir instead of a Thursday league night in Reseda.

Here’s the thing about Walter nobody gives him enough credit for: he’s not actually a hypocrite about rules. Step over the line, you get called. No carve-out for guys with a sob story, no exception for guys who really, really wanted to. That’s exhausting to sit through for three straight games, but it’s also, structurally, the only defensible position a person can hold. A rule that only applies to the other guy isn’t a rule. It’s a leash, and you’re just the one holding it.

Which brings me — by a route Walter would call a bridge too far for normal people but exactly correct for a man who’s seen some things — to the rug.

Somebody tracked something foul onto it a long time ago. And now that people are trying to clean it, the guys who tracked it on are extremely, conspicuously upset about the cleaning. They’ve got a whole library of language ready to go about how actually the rug is fine, actually you wouldn’t understand, and also — have you considered that cleaning products are confusing to operate?

You want a case study, I’ll give you a case study. 2008, Washington state. Voters pass a top-two primary because they’re sick of party machines hand-picking who’s allowed to run under the party label. So who sues to kill it? Not one party fighting another the normal way, where you can at least respect the brawl. The Republicans, the Democrats, and the Libertarians — three outfits who agree on nothing, who would not share a foxhole, who Walter would describe as holding “ideologically irreconcilable positions, Dude, irreconcilable” — all walk into federal court arm in arm to protect their shared right to pick the menu before anybody gets a vote. That’s not a coalition. That’s a cartel that finally found the one product they all need to keep monopolized.

Then you’ve got Alaska. Alaska tries cracking the door — top-four primary, ranked vote in November, no party gatekeeping on who gets to run as what. The state GOP loses its mind, and somewhere in the middle of losing its mind, a guy goes on the record and says the quiet part out loud: candidates don’t need “the blessing” of the State Central Committee anymore. Blessing. That’s the word he reached for. Not endorsement. Not support. Blessing — like the man’s running a confessional booth instead of a ballot line, like the rest of us are supposed to show up, kneel, and wait to be told who we’re allowed to vote for. Walter would almost respect the honesty if it weren’t so goddamn on the nose. Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, except the tradition is “we decide who you’re allowed to choose from.”

And here’s the part that should make even a guy as patient as the Dude want to put a bowling ball through a television. Every one of these outfits has the exact same complaint loaded and ready: voters don’t understand the new system, it’s confusing, it breeds distrust, won’t somebody think of the poor bewildered electorate. Fine. Maybe that’s even a real concern. So where’s the pamphlet? Where’s the ad buy walking people through how a ranked ballot actually works? Where’s a single dollar of party money going toward making voters less confused, instead of a hundred percent of it going toward repealing the thing that confused them? Walter can locate a human toe inside an afternoon when the situation calls for it. These guys can’t print a fucking flyer.

Donny, bless him, pipes up around here — wait, isn’t it good if people understand their ballot? — which is, as usual, the only sane thing said all night, and which gets steamrolled, as usual, because Donny’s out of his element and nobody invited him into this particular conversation. But here’s what the movie always got right that everybody forgets: Donny’s wrong about basically nothing. He’s just saying it at the wrong volume in the wrong room. The Dude doesn’t argue with Walter about any of it. Doesn’t need to. Just nods at Donny like, yeah, man, you had it the whole time — and lets Walter keep yelling, because Walter being right and Walter being exhausting were never mutually exclusive. They’re a package deal.

So no, they were never trying to clean the rug. They were trying to get rid of it before anybody asked what they’d been hiding under it for fifty years. That’s the whole con, man. Not confusion. Not tradition. Not some tender concern for the voters. Just a bunch of guys who built a very nice room around a very dirty rug, and would rather burn the floor down than let anybody lift the corner.

The Dude abides. The rug, less so. Somebody’s gonna have to deal with that eventually — and it sure as hell ain’t gonna be the guys who soiled it.