An Era of Angry Populism by Harsanyi David

Author:Harsanyi, David [Harsanyi, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Creators Publishing
Published: 2016-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

Please Don't Vote

October 3, 2014

Most Americans don't really care about contemporary political issues or the rudimentary workings of their government. But they sure do love voting. And the biggest fans of "democracy" treat this orgy of vacuous lever pulling as if it were sacred or patriotic. It is neither. In 2013, President Barack Obama, who's often argued that voting should be easier, issued a decidedly undemocratic executive order to create a commission that was tasked with investigating how to expand participation.

The report, for example, suggests that no one in the country should have to wait longer than 30 minutes to cast a ballot — or, in other words, voting should entail 15 minutes less exertion than ordering Chinese takeout. Nowhere within the recommendations — or elsewhere, for that matter — do we ever ponder whether voters have a civic responsibility to know who the vice president is before getting an "I voted" sticker.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that little more than a third of American adults can name the three branches of government, and 35 percent can't name a single one. Only 38 percent of Americans could correctly identify which party controls the House or the Senate, and more than 40 percent "didn't even feel qualified to guess at the leadership of each house of Congress." There are dozens — hundreds — of surveys over the years that confirm the fact that the majority of Americans care more about anything than they do about foreign policy. And though there's no shame in being turned off by the cavity of Washington, there might be something shameful about nullifying the vote of a citizen who took the time to figure out the difference between Medicare and Medicaid.

Accountability is a downer. Making things "easy" is empowering. Last week in Colorado, scores of negligent teachers and their pliable students took to the streets to protest the implementation of a curriculum that goes heavy on teaching the responsibilities of citizenship rather than romanticizing the state. (The curriculum, it should be mentioned, was implemented using the democratic process that unions claim to hold in such high esteem.)

Is it any wonder that so many young people have ridiculously outsize expectations about what government can or should be doing? Is it any wonder that so many people can be so easily manipulated with emotional appeals — and the kind of "bed-wetting" and scaremongering we hear every day? "Hence the concentration of power and the subjection of individuals will increase among democratic nations," said Alexis de Tocqueville, "not only in the same proportion as their equality, but in the same proportion as their ignorance." Sounds about right.

In Ohio, for example, a person can vote four weeks before the election. And if you forget to register, feel free to do it on the day of the election. As if that weren't enough to degrade the sanctity of the democratic process, this week the Supreme Court had to stop the state from offering an extra week, which would have allowed people to both register to vote and vote.

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