Today was Primary Day here in Massachusetts. Primary Day in a midterm year is, for most people, fairly far down the psephological priority-list, and after looking over what was on the ballot, I didn’t even bother. (The urgency is deflated in my case anyway, because I live in one of the bluest parts of America, and so nobody I would vote for ever has the slightest chance of winning the local polls.)
This being Massachusetts, voters can ask for either a Republican or Democratic party ballot, and can participate in whichever party’s primary they like. There were two Republicans running for the chance to unseat Maura Healey, the incumbent Democrat governor, who faced no primary opposition (may the good Lord deliver us from that harpy’s talons in November!) — but of the two, the one I preferred to see lose was clearly going to be crushed anyway (he was), so there was really no reason for me to ask for a Republican ballot.
When I used to live in New York City, I registered as a Democrat, because I figured I might at least help stave off the worst of the worst in the primaries, but even that never seemed to work. I thought about doing the same here — one of our Senators is a geriatric Democrat draft-horse by the name of Ed Markey, who lately has been chumming around with that donkey AOC and her cadre of world-savers, and I’d have liked to have seen him sent off to the glue-factory. But there was no hope of that. (Senator Markey beat his challenger two to one.)
All that was left on the Democrat side, then, was a race for an open seat on the Barnstable County Commission, and while I did have a detectable preference for one of the three men vying for deathless fame in that one, in the end I simply couldn’t be bothered.
I asked a friend of mine — one of “our guys”, living, like me, in the belly of the beast — whether he was going to vote, and he said, in a tepid sort of way, that he figured he would, out of a sense of civic duty.
There was a time when I would have agreed, I suppose; but what popped into my head on hearing that today was that I think I could make a better case: that at this point in the nation’s decline, a majority of the electorate would best discharge their civic duty — if duty is considered to be “doing what’s best for the nation” — by staying home.
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According to Heinlein, voting is a pragmatic substitution for warfare, especially in the majority/preponderance/”we outnumber you” sense. Physical coercion, although being what fundamentally underpins all implied authority dynamics, is expensive.
If you don’t want to have to pay too high a price to get the situation you want – possibly at the expense of your life or someone else’s – then voting is the ounce of prevention that’s worth a megaton of cure. IOW, I don’t look at it as a “civic duty”, I look at it as well-conceived social technology that people should avail themselves of often and informedly.
We’re always 3 meals from barbarism. We can, of course, easily revert to clubbing each other to death.
UB,
“…voting is the ounce of prevention that’s worth a megaton of cure.”
Well, that’s the idea, at least, and that’s how it was sold to me growing up — long, long ago, in an America that no longer exists.
Yes, it can work well, sort of, within a small, republican system, as long as certain essential conditions and limitations are met — most of which no longer are.
It saddens me that this is likely the case. I don’t want it to be. I’m prior service and am always prepared for the worst but am dedicated to “acting as if” until certain observations convince me otherwise. Hollyweird has deluded huge swaths of the population by giving them a completely unrealistic expectation of civic collapse. Their mental health is already tenuous which is bad enough…they’re completely unprepared for the “bad day in Yugoslavia” physical reality their TVs never showed them. And that doesn’t even include their subsistence preparation, which for over 90% is non-existent.
I have found myself increasingly returning to a patrician mindset. It’s not actually fair that these people and their vote should equal mine. I’m a private investor and I pay more than their fair share of taxes, which is often nothing. They get to vote more depreciated dollars from my efforts while I can expect nothing but additional burdens for their upkeep. Didn’t someone say something about a society whose citizens can vote themselves eternal disbursements from the treasury being on its way to deaths door yadda yadda?
I pray for a civic and socioeconomic miracle. We’re gonna need it. But God often gives people not what they want, but what they need. Pain not optional.
UB,
This was utterly obvious throughout nearly all of history, and the Founders understood it too.
And yes: as I said eleven years ago, civil war is not a thing one should wish for.
I pray fervently, make it not so. Though I disagree with “father Abraham (lincoln)” I agree with him in the hope for “better angels of our nature”. My understanding of the human condition tempers my aspirations.
Most people just have no idea how much worse whatever bad they’re dealing with can become. The bottom of Satan’s pit has no floor…it’s bottomless. Your imagination of suffering doesn’t do it any justice. It gets so much worse. Stop. Do it now.
I don’t know if you were reading the Orthosphere four years ago when I posted my psephological parody modeled on George Bennard’s Old Rugged Cross, a hymn graven on my memory.
On a hill far away
Stood an old ballot box,
The emblem of suffrage I claim,
And I love that old box
Where dear votes have been cast,
Even thought casting votes is quite vain.
So I’ll cherish the old ballot box,
No mater how oft I’m let down;
I will cling to the old ballot box,
Until one day it makes me a clown.
Despite these dark thoughts, I’ve continued to perform my civic duty until now. But I have a suspicion my well of civic duty has run dry. I may work the pump handle a bit come November, but I don’t expect any clear civic duty to come up.