The illusion of choice

Allow me to disabuse you of something: you didn’t have a choice this past November and I am here to tell you that you can stop pretending that you did, even though deep down, you should have already sensed this. Only the hardcore ideologues could go to the polls believing that they were voting “for” and not “against” someone. Ignorance is not bliss, it is ignorance; there will always and only be one cure for it.  

Sometimes however, the illusion of democracy is better than the alternative, even though it would be more accurate to describe our current governmental system as a Kakistocracy—government under the control of the nation’s worst or least qualified citizens. As Yoda would say, “A ship of fools, we most certainly have.”

I also want to help those of you who may be burdened with the guilt of not voting; those of you like me who were so sickened by all three candidates (remember “What is Aleppo?”) that the act of getting in your car to go to the polls was truly absurd; I feel your pain. Are we un-American? No. Are we unappreciative of our unique history and our democratic ideals? Again, no. Publius’ words live on in my home. Interestingly however, there are many people who seem to have developed a deeply shortsighted notion of our ‘right’ to suffrage. To some, not voting gives them a whiff of the unpatriotic; it stirs up some vague and instinctual pejorative feeling which makes them want to swing their moral hatchet.

Allow me to bury this particular hatchet. The aforementioned reaction is the product of ignorance; it is the result of a failure to understand the distinction between a “right” and a “duty.” While it is within your ‘right’ to research this distinction if you want to, it is not your ‘duty’ to do so… catching on?  Let me also point out that there is no affirmative right to vote in the constitution although many will speak as if there is. Some folks are also under the delusion that if enough people did not vote, somehow democracy would disintegrate; it can only be a lack of political imagination which allows someone to believe this. For those who hold themselves hostage to this belief, may I suggest that voting — or not voting — is much like the relation between vaccinations and “herd immunity”: as long as enough people get the vaccine, the likelihood of a pandemic is almost nil.  

So take a deep breath and relax; regardless of how you “exercised” your “right,” the fascinating experiment that is America will continue; Trump will be on television to greet you everyday, just as Hillary would have been.  

Let me close with the following quote: “It is apodictic that a vote does not lose its constitutional significance merely because it is cast for a candidate who has little or no chance of winning. Nor do we think it loses this character if cast for a non-existent or fictional person, for surely the right to vote for the candidate of one's choice includes the right to say that no candidate is acceptable.”  Dixon v. Maryland State Administrative Bd. 4th Cir. Md. 1989