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 at least I might 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 weathervane by the name of Ed Markey, who lately has been chumming around with that donkey AOC and her cadre of world-savers. I’d have liked to have seen him sent off to the glue-factory, but there was no hope of that. (He 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 barely 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 did ask 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.