If I see or hear one more message telling me to vote, I may lose my mind. The only thing worse? Hearing, “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.”
What!?
Imagine a school class being told they all get a candy bar. The whole class gets the same kind of candy bar and everyone gets to vote on which kind. But then, the teacher tells them their two choices: Bit-O-Honey and Charleston Chew. That’s the 2020 election. Two choices, both inferior to nearly any other conceivable option, and I’m supposed to get all fired up for my opportunity to be a statistically insignificant part of choosing between them?
Please forgive me for my lack of enthusiasm.
It Wasn’t Supposed to be Like This
Our presidential elections morphed into something they were carefully designed to avoid becoming. Today, most of us strive to elect someone who will push either my interests at your expense, or your interests at my expense. Talk about a broken and unsustainable approach to governance!
Government – at its best – creates and maintains a stable and safe system in which anyone can live their life as they choose and support themselves and their family through their efforts. We no longer think of government’s role in terms anything like that.
For my money, one of the most awful phrases ever uttered in American politics is, “Elections have consequences.” Barack Obama coined this little gem and more recently – given its wise and benevolent connotations – Republicans chose to adopt it since winning the last election. Brilliant.
The problem? “Consequences” isn’t typically a positive, or even neutral, word. It almost always means things you don’t like are about to happen to you. That’s the way it was used by Obama and it’s the way it’s used now by Republicans. The idea that an elected official’s job somehow entails actively punishing those who voted for another candidate is literally horrifying. No matter, it seems widely embraced in America version 2020. Elections really should not pose meaningful risks to the things most central to our lives!
What We Should Aim to Restore
Our system of governance was proactively designed to keep us out of each other’s business. Further, federal government technically possesses only very limited powers because in a country this large, it makes far more sense for different regions and localities to have different laws. That approach confers two huge benefits. First, it allows the flexibility for people who live very different lives to pass laws that suit their way of life. Second, if you don’t like the laws where you live, you can easily move somewhere in the same country that suits you! Simple and brilliant!
Yet, in our infinite modern wisdom, we push more and more power into the hands of people further removed from our lives who can implement wonderful one-size-fits-none policies from on high. That never works well and it’s not working now.
Until we put our faith and trust in ourselves to build the lives we want and understand the laughability of the idea of somebody else providing the things we want for us, we’re literally doomed. Governments have never provided the things people want. Governments don’t produce, they can only take the production of individuals and then give it to other individuals in exchange for votes. That’s an unsustainable proposition and always has been. We seem hell-bent on heading right off the unsustainability cliff. Voting for either of the major parties this fall won’t change that.