In the race for president of the United States you’ll find on display all the pretences, conceits, and absurdities of modern government.
The race has now narrowed to the two most widely distrusted and loathed candidates. The first, a loose reality-TV star who will say whatever pops into his head. The second, a tightly controlled Lady Macbeth… who will say nothing unless it advances her ambitions.
When we wrote recently that we would not vote for either one, we brought our dear readers together… marching under a single banner. They agreed with one another on one important point: that your columnist is an idiot. They only disagreed on the details… that is, about which type of idiot we are. Writes one dear reader: “Until I read your comments about Donald Trump, I thought you were insightful and smart. Now, I know you have blinded yourself to the dangers that Trump represents.” Another struck me from his roll call of intelligent persons.
Do I, they were asking, have a beef with democracy? I do. My beef is that it is a fraud. It pretends to put the people in charge. Instead, it picks their pockets and cheapens their lives. They willingly and enthusiastically participate in its solemn deceits – its elections, its wars, its taxes and its hangings. They not only want to vote – they also believe they have an obligation to tell others to vote. It’s as though the entire thing might fall apart if any mutt slips the kennel. They feel that we all have a duty to support the system, no matter how much it swindles us. And so, we are bid to stand in line, to cast our ballot, and thus to join in the ritual humbug. We are asked to believe things that are palpably and provably untrue.
Like what, for example? Well, that “every vote counts”, for one. Wrong! Statisticians have worked it out. The odds your vote counts are vanishingly remote. You may as well stay home; it won’t make any difference. “If you don’t vote, you’re giving a vote to the other side.” Wrong! By not voting, you’re denying both candidates your approval. “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Oh yeah? We’ve been doing both for many years. The abstainer is the only one among us whose hands are clean, the only one who can honestly say he had “nothing to do with it”.
Another reader’s plea – “pick the lesser of two evils” – is what is urged on us in this election. But that is what German voters said to themselves in the election of 1932, which left the Nazis as the biggest party in the Reichstag. On the one hand were the socialists and the Bolsheviks. On the other was that bulwark against chaos: Mr Hitler. He was the “lesser of two evils”, they said. And maybe he was. But who, in 1945, would admit to having voted for him?
Ms Clinton? Mr Trump? How do you ever know which is the lesser evil? And why would you want to approve any evil… no matter how much lesser it is? Why would you want to get involved at all? Perhaps, though, we think that somehow the gods of democracy sit in judgment, requiring that we all “do our part” for democracy.
But maybe the gods don’t give a damn. Come election day, we could stand in line with millions of others to participate in our godly duty. Or we could, instead, just do something useful.
Category: Economics