These days, I find myself attempting to stay adjacent to contemporary politics, but I feel compelled to share some thoughts on the topic of voting. The urge to write on the subject has no doubt been spurred on by being constantly bombarded with low-rent vulgar political advertisements in recent weeks and months, which have made political engagement almost unavoidable. I guess the latter is not surprising: for it was Orwell who told us that as a society becomes increasingly totalitarian—as ours undoubtedly has in recent years and decades—political engagement in the most colloquially menial way, becomes ubiquitously incessant, and therefore almost unavoidable.
These days, meaningless political slogans and tropes are everywhere.
The first vulgarity that has grown increasingly distasteful to me, is the entire concept of voting based on one’s so-called and perceived, “self-interest”—as if the average human being could even know what such a nebulous thing would consist of if made manifest; such a concept has become so synonymous with the act of voting itself that people, particularly those on the left, have turned the former—i.e. that it’s one’s sacred “right and duty”, to exercise one’s “right to vote” in one’s “own interest”—into something of a maxim: if an implicit one. Of course, such a concept is—at its core—utterly misinformed, idiotic, and even immoral for a multitude of reasons.
First and foremost, voting one’s “own interest” based on material, class, and socioeconomic conditions at the expense of others and the state at large, is—utterly and completely—myopic and selfish, and is therefore morally reprehensible (when co-opted as a general principle). I firmly believe the so-called “right (and duty) to vote” is completely wayward and misconstrued—especially when pleas for others to vote are being made by the most meanly average people being placed before us unsolicitedly, front-and-center, to bemoan what they perceive would happen to them, if candidate x, y, or z is, or isn’t elected. To them I say: stop the pedantic doom and gloom and understand: no matter who is (or isn’t) elected, it is very unlikely that things will change in any discernible or tangibly meaningful way! Has the inertia of society truly changed since 2020? Or 2016? Or 2008?
Political theater; and pleas by "actors":
Before you throw virtual tomatoes at me, please understand more intelligibly, what I do here mean: that is to say, the machinery of government, administered in the current mode, is so vast and inter-connectedly entangled, that almost nothing but an organized upwelling of the masses—who, for the first time in history were suddenly so constituted and comprised, by mostly wise, decent, and skillfully virtuous individuals—from below could stop its headlong inertia. We are ruled, extensively by effect, yes—but impotently and inefficiently—by a giant leviathan, consisting of hoards of unelected and unaccounted-for professional bureaucrats, which in actuality constitutes the fourth branch of government operating within the United States’ umbrella of influence. It seems to me such members are almost interchangeable, and thus have no true names or faces that may be dealt with through suffrage (as we convince ourselves we do with politicians).
The current state of American governmental bureaucracy: good luck deciphering such a levianthic behemoth, with its oft entangled and overlapping jurisdictive authority.
If such a state of affairs is granted as more or less true, how then is a bombastic show of democracy, front-and-center, going to disentangle and uproot such entrenched institutions with their own vast and convoluted agendas and institutional interests?—many of which, we can’t even be well aware of with truly deep study. Suffice it to say, the monster standing before us is simply so vast, intricate, and complicated that even people who (presumably, if we take them at their word) attempt to join its legions of public officials, to subvert it from within, can but understand it little, but accomplish still less—and in most cases, such idealistic actors are soon consumed themselves by the former's serpentine trappings. Do we expect such a hydra to go out without a fight each passing election cycle? Excuse me for rolling my eyes when some illusioned and unthinking working class person—not to castigate but merely be truthful, calling “a spade a spade”, with no haughty ill-intent—struggling for mere survival within the matrix of modern society, then appears on the circus stage to lament, bemoan, and implore us about what the raise or lowering in this or that tax, increase or decrease in wholly-inefficient state-sponsored welfare programs, increase or decrease in the surge of migrants, etc. will personally (on the grounds of a mere uncritical perception) mean to them.
Worse still are those shrill and blood-curdling shrieks via visceral verbal admonishment—mostly by working-class women, who have fallen quite non-perspicaciously, to the unholy alliance of state and corporate power working upon their minds in unison—that certain candidates intend to do away with the “hallowed and sacred right” of women to maintain autonomous will over “their bodies” (wherein it is conveniently omitted that they contain “clumps of cells” that will soon be soulfully-animated), by maintaining the “right to choose”—whether to abort or keep—their co-created offspring: oh the horror of such pretensions! If it is the devil’s work to everywhere scheme to maintain, and persevere for individual life, then I suppose I be his henchman; but as I see it, such anti-abortion advocates aim at protecting the “sanctity of life” for those who are in that state of wholly-dependent state of nonage, whereby they are too weak and impotent—and are in a sense symbiotic organisms, united as one with their birth mother, with measurable psycho-spiritual (and material) benefits granted to both beings—to defend themselves and their corporeally-embodied existence! No matter where you personally stand on such a gravely serious issue, can we at least acknowledge the disgustingly disingenuous nature of such grotesque advertisements? Advertisements which dichotomize and reduce, a serious issue of life-and-death, to mere trope and triviality—an issue about which perhaps, volumes arguing either side and everywhere in-between, could be written. The latter, i.e. the disingenuous nature of most modern political discourse, is my real point, as political advertisements targeting the female voter base with what amounts to emotionality-charged propaganda, to argue for or against allowing individual states to determine abortion policy within their jurisdictive borders, is not only absurd, but immoral—and is doing all American men, women, and fetuses alike, a great disservice in misrepresenting and hyperbolizing the true issue(s) at stake. But what is to be expected when politics have become mere “show business”, as Neil Postman once told us?—in 1985 in fact: decades before the phenomenon of Trump and "reality" politics.
Many "real" issues remain largely hidden—and are therefore, seldom discussed.
More important than the distractive issues being everywhere discussed, consider we live in a world where: satisfactory housing, healthcare, and non-toxic food are prohibitively expensive for most citizens; where vast sums of private consumer debt (and an ascendent public debt) is the norm, not the exception; where retirement is becoming a relic of the past; where the social fabric is disintegrating and basic human decency—i.e. demonstrable care and concern for others in word and deed—is rarer than ever; where community is virtual, which is to say: unreal; where citizens sometimes target police, and police, sometimes exorcize inner torments outwardly through predatory but unnecessary acts of violence: citizens of the increasingly all-encompassing “nanny” state. Where college straps students with legions of debt and wastes—unless a student be pursuing a genuine liberal arts education or highly-specialized and worthwhile profession of their choosing—many prime years of their lives that may be better spent elsewhere: for college, unlike yesteryear, no longer promises even a decent job within a reasonable timeframe after graduation, as studies show.
While we are on the topic of work, or the lack thereof, consider that sustaining jobs have become a rarity, and meaningfully-fruitful work: a luxury; almost all jobs are posted on job sites and use discriminatory, AI-driven, “applicant tracking systems” to sift through hundreds of depersonalized applications: as a result, so-called ghost jobs (i.e. jobs that don’t actually exist) have proliferated on nearly all job posting sites; and worse still for our youth: moms usually have to work (even if they don’t want to)—since wages are so stagnant (in terms of purchasing power) most households cannot meet basic needs without two sources of full-time income. Worse still is the epidemic of fatherlessness and disintegration of the nuclear family—which is to say nothing of the ongoing social conflict between generations—wherein the young blame the old, and the old blame the young for the country’s perceived disintegration: such a generational conflict increasingly governs interactions between family members of different generations, tearing them apart in all but formality; in tougher times, we need to lean on family more, not less—but that is not what is being witnessed in the world today, in the age of globalization, where families are as fragmented and disconnected from one another as ever before.
The disastrous effects of the current socio-political arrangement:
Consequently, the state and its ideologues raise our children and teach them its inhuman “values”; in short, everywhere we can see the disastrous results of such an arrangement of our work life, which dominates our “culture” and daily lives. We do not so much work for corporations and the bloated bureaucratic welfare state as we so imagine—who often legally own the rights to the fruits of our labors, and increasingly infiltrate many other aspects of our lives—but are instead possessed and owned by such a united—twofold but sacreligious—marriage of power: who knew the "separation of church and state" would entail the supplantation of the church by the "joint-stock company", i.e. multinational corporation? Who in this modern age is truly free?—by which I mean acts as a self-determining and willful agent, whose time is spent pursuing those higher things which are most dear to it? Of course, I am aware life has always been mean—in the sense that it has, and always must be, first oriented towards survival and propagation—but something has viscerally changed since the new millennia and things are not the way they used to be: that much is clearer than ever.
Industrialization, and the technologies which were so derived, promised to free us (and our time) from needing to pursue primary needs holistically, with the fully-fledged force of our being; instead, it has enslaved us to them altogether. As such, we stand at the precipice of a (post-industrial and technological) "collectivist" neo-serfdom—where the individual and family are actively being inhibited from owning property and even their labor—which Hayek so presciently warned us about.
Worse still: what does all of the above aim at? In what direction do the wheels of this impersonal modern machine turn? I think it no understatement that many Americans are addicted to “work” for the sake of the production and consumption process itself—as if that process be a worthy end in itself. But even for those who don’t fall prey to the former trap, what do they aim at? What is the end of their work?—of their lifetime participation in the beastly machine? I think those who are somewhat aware but fully participate nonetheless may be worse still: for those people who participate in the system insofar as they may seek their own advantage, attempt to “suckle the honey and avoid the sting”; for such people, “happiness” is often akin to the fulfillment of their meanest, basest, and most selfish desires. One finds under such social conditions, people often do what they can get away with—relying on external imposition to “keep them in line” (hence the sad, but genuine, need for a more pervasively repressive police state apparatus)— rather than an internal compass of one’s own conscience, fashioned through the twofold process of proper education and habituation: could the lack of such social functions being everywhere mal-performed, be why theft is so rampant that chandleries have to lock up razors and soap, lest they too be stolen? We have misconstrued and misunderstood that education—in the proper sense—is an essentially moral task: and in such a pluralistic and secular world that is quickly degenerating, what shrewd and discerning parent would allow such a state to morally form their children?—if they have a choice, that is. But people (and parents) increasingly have no true choice in any meaningful way: and that is precisely the point of this essay.
The internet has allowed families to "connect" from afar; what is commonly omitted: the modern arrangement of social and work life, has also necessitated that it be so.
Hence in the modern world, we seldom find people who willingly and consciously do that which is morally right for the good of the individual and whole populace (for these usually accord on a spiritual level)—as well as for the more abstract and less tangible "goods" of state, culture and the otherwise association of people (of common heritage and values), which we have long-since called, “society”. It is in the age of incessant political engagement, pandering, invocation, and placation we find ourselves in the present predicament. What if the solution is not overarching political engagement, but “mere” brotherly love for one another, one's nation, and all decent humanity far and wide? What if we pursued work for ourselves in the best and most meaningful way?; a way which accords with our very particular nature—not as we are, but as we could be? The most damnable thing about voting is that it requires almost nothing of us but signifies consent: real change—a reordering of our lives around our most sacred and deeply-held principles—in our life mode and methodology, could require of us to the contrary: nearly everything, if not the kitchen-sink!; but the latter is, I think, the true cost to bear, for individual authenticity, in the age of post-modernity.
In moving forward, we should look to the past for firm foundations, good ideas.
But either way, the whole structure of American Republicanism is centered around such notions of common decency and the decentralization of power, as well as the promise of those who—by fortuitous endowment, no doubt enhanced by the opportunity-rich conditions available to some in imperfect early America—promised, if imperfectly (owing to human nature), to facilitate the common good of the whole organism (and that of its inferior and subjugate, component parts); a society ought be a living organism, not a mere inhuman machine: living in the sense that it is animate and alive—fatally flawed assuredly, but alive and filled with real uniqueness of being, nonetheless.
The preceding is why, in the early days of American civilization, the “right to vote” was restricted to those who were landed—but early America in its very creed, sought to make every man the “lord of his own domain", no matter how menial; but what is very often omitted and seldom acknowledged by proletarians: such endowed “landed aristocrats” were also—quite often—properly educated: which is to say, those who owned property in their own right, were blessed to have the leisure necessary to afford the mere opportunity of a liberal education in the full and proper sense; they were therefore, ostensibly by extension, invested in the permanence of place and the flourishing of the people in that particular place which they were so deeply and personally invested; they were also beholden to their neighbors on a personal, "face-to-face" basis: it is a lot easier to be an asshat behind a computer screen than it is in person, where real audacious and brazen "courage" is required. But nonetheless, genuine “progress” for a civilization such as America or Britain, would encompass a wider, more judicious, and more fully-realized application of its estimable principles—far and wide—thereby reaching a greater number of persons from all races, and noble religions and creeds.
Further, such a collection of statesman as America’s diverse and disparately stitched-together “Founders”—who in reality consisted of a patchwork of individuals from various backgrounds and inheritances—were therefore, generally invested in the tranquil flourishing of the domestic whole; unlike modern America, the culture—at least in an aspirational sense—was that (among other things) of a soulful nobility, "can-do" spirit of self-determined agency, and a collectively common but individually-prescribed "pursuit of happiness”, i.e. an attempt at human flourishing; it is therefore no coincidence that the “pursuit of happiness” is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, wherein Thomas Jefferson famously effaced it as a sacred prescriptive command, while eschewing what had hithero been conceived by John Locke: i.e. the right to "property"—material and otherwise. To such ends, the American government was designed with an Aristocratic-bent, modeled in part after the mercantile and bourgeois, Venetian Republic—and not merely, the more warlike and agri-democratic Roman one, with which we are all more familiar.
"Positive democracy", it turns out, is net-negative: why we ought aim at goodness, rather than inclusivity.
The Electoral College—against which it is en vogue to levy attacks in the age of wayward and absolute “democracy”—for instance, was conceived as but a buttress against such “tyrannies of majority” whim. As such, America’s mode of government was designed precisely to pit one “estate” interest against another—ensuring that institutional interests by each present party would be in continual opposition to one another, so that precisely nothing “radical”—to quote one of the circulating anti-Kamala Harris ads—would ever “get done”. Which is merely to say: to preserve the evolutionary Anglo-American format and tradition of governance, which developed incrementally over time (since 1215 in fact, when the Magna Carta was first issued by King John II of England) with continual but gradual refinements: America, at her infancy, may have had far more in common with Burke than Paine, it turns out.
America's "Founders" issue the "Declaration of Independence", declaring separation from Great Britain.
But we have forgotten our founding principles (and creed) in the age of positive democracy; to that destructive “end”, we no longer allow (or even wish for) the wise and good to administer government on our behalf. They are us, and we become them: for we project onto those who rule us, every shadow impulse from below—creating a two-way feedback loop: as “they” become worse, so too do “we”; as we become worse, so too do they. But perhaps more damningly, our intimations and suspicions have been borne out time-and-time again, as if it were all prophetic!—self-fulfilling or otherwise. Absolute power does in fact, corrupt absolutely—every single time! Why should the result be altogether different, if the mere difference at present, is that such grasping undertones are of a tyrannically-democratic pretense? Who can, here and now, make the case that the democratic impulse itself—which demonstratively asserts that “I, myself, am so great that I deserve to take part in my own governance”—has not simply been commandeered by those who, for their own ill purposes, wish the Republic harm? Now, as always, good power must resist those forceful and ill-gotten powers—which seek to do us all iniquity for their own warped advantageous conception.
But we now occupy a world in which the wicked and avaricious have been made more powerful, while the good have been made impotent: that is the true cost of our gradual economic losses of power—as seen in housing, education, work, healthcare costs, taxes, legally-mandated insurance(s), etc. Such a process didn’t occur over a fortnight: how could anyone then suggest it may be undone, here and now, with this here “2024 Election”, about which it is said—like every preceding election in recent memory—that it is “the most important election of our lifetime”? What people has ever loosened their chains merely with the vote?—especially when the balance of power, between ruler and ruled, has shifted so dramatically in one mere century. I believe we may witness in our lifetimes, the effective abolishment of the “Second Amendment”, which will—once and for all—eliminate the necessary threat of forceful resistance; all other nations have fallen in such a regard: America is but the last holdout, but she too has been chipped away at, “bit by bit”.
A world-order with tattered foundations, cannot stand for long.
As evidence of the previous—i.e. the drive to raze our wisened foundations and begin anew from the ashes as a new conscious state-creation—consider that which we all know in our heart-of-hearts, but frequently fail to verbally explicate: America has become a place in which its consumer-citizens cannot even agree on fundamental and foundational presuppositions from which to proceed. Such obvious truths, which have been hithero known for ages—e.g. what is a woman?—have come under fierce attack from an increasingly unhinged, disjointed, irrational, and inhumane political left; the right is not without equal blame: for it is there that much hostility, resentment, general unfriendliness, selfishness, and megalomaniacal micro-management—as often seen in stodgy HOAs and uber-entitled directorial boards—occurs. In such a pluralistic society, with only a smattering of vague guiding principles and purposes remaining, is it any wonder that political advertisements directed at the masses placate the selfish, while eschewing the good of the whole?
But the conditions of early America that I sketched above—i.e. where good men and women, who are of a philosophic dispensatory bent, are empowered and take an active ownership in the state interest itself—can only exist insofar as a society itself aims at “The Good”, and thence uses every tool at its disposal to facilitate such estimably worthy ends; but to do the aforementioned, a society must not merely aim at self-preservation and material wealth, but flourishing. But fulfilling such an impossibly difficult task, is first based on knowing what that aforementioned “Good” be—if only to a vague degree—which is itself only possible insofar as we, en masse, will it so. As you consider voting this election season, ask: what does contemporary American society aim at?—if anything at all, beyond the mere fulfillment of litanous base impulses.
Tyranny: as such things change, much remains the same.
Perhaps when adjudicating our current plight—seeking to understand how tight we find our chains—we should consider those wise and beneficent words of the sagacious Erasmus, who in his On the Education of the Christian Prince, painted an immemorial portrait of tyranny that, in every age, rings true:
Now let him bring out the opposite side by showing a frightful, loathsome beast, formed of a dragon, wolf, lion, viper, bear, and like creatures; with six hundred eyes all over it, teeth everywhere, fearful from all angles, and with hooked claws; with never satiated hunger, fattened on human vitals, and reeking with human blood; never sleeping, but always threatening the fortunes and lives of all men; dangerous to everyone, especially to the good; a sort of fatal scourge to the whole world, on which everyone who has the interests of state at heart pours forth execration and hatred; which cannot be borne because of its monstrousness and yet cannot be overthrown without great disaster to the city because its maliciousness is hedged about with armed forces and wealth. This is the picture of a tyrant unless there is something more odious which can be depicted. Monsters of this sort were Claudius and Caligula. The myths in the poets also showed Busyris, Pentheus, and Midas, whose names are now objects of hate to all the human race, to be of the same type.
The main object of a tyrant is to follow his own caprices, but a king follows the path of right and honor. Reward to a tyrant is wealth; to a king, honor, which follows upon virtue. The tyrants' rule is marked by fear, deceit, and machinations of evil. The king governs through wisdom, integrity, and beneficence. The tyrant uses his imperial power for himself; the king, for the state. The tyrant guarantees safety for himself by means of foreign attendants and hired brigands. The king deems himself safe through his kindness to his subjects and their love for him in return. Those citizens who are distinguished for their moral character, judgment, and prestige are held under suspicion and distrust by the tyrant. The king, however, cleaves to these same men as his helpers and friends. The tyrant is pleased either with stupid dolts, on whom he imposes; or with wicked men, whom he puts to evil use in defending his position as tyrant; or with flatterers, from whom he hears only praise which he enjoys. It is just the opposite with a king; every wise man by whose counsel he can be helped is very dear to him. The better each man is, the higher he rates him, because he can rely on his allegiance. He loves honest friends, by whose companionship he is bettered. Kings and tyrants have many hands and many eyes, but they are very different. A tyrant's aim is to get the wealth of his subjects in the hands of a few, and those the wickedest, and fortify his power by the weakened strength of his subjects. The king considers that his purse is represented by the wealth of his subjects; the tyrant strives to have everyone answerable to him either by law or informers. The king rejoices in the freedom of his people; the tyrant strives to be feared, the king to beloved. The tyrant looks upon nothing with greater suspicion than the harmonious agreement of good men and of cities; good princes especially rejoice in this. A tyrant is happy to stir up factions and strife between his subjects and feeds and aids chance animosities. This means he basely uses for the safeguarding of his tyranny. A king has this one interest: to foster peaceful relations between his subjects and straightway to adjust such dissensions among them as chance to arise, for he believes that they are the worst menace to the state that can happen. When a tyrant sees that affairs of state are flourishing, he trumps up some pretext, or even invites in some enemy, so as to start a war and thereby weaken the powers. The opposite is true of a king. He does of his own people. everything and allows everything that will bring everlasting peace to his country, for he realizes that war is the source of all misfortunes to the state. The tyrant either sets up laws, constitutions, edicts, treaties, and all things sacred and profane to his own personal preservation or else perverts them to that end. The king judges everything by the standard of its value to the state . . . The tyrant is first concerned to see that his subjects neither wish to nor dare to rise against his tyrannical rule; next, that they do not trust one another; and thirdly, that they cannot attempt a revolution. He accomplishes his first end by allowing his subjects to develop no spirit at all and no wisdom, by keeping them like slaves and devoted to mean stations in life, or held accountable by a system of spies, or rendered effeminate through pleasure. He knows full well that noble and acute spirits do not tolerate a tyranny with good grace. He accomplishes his second point by stirring up dissension and mutual hatred among his subjects so that one accuses the other and he himself is more powerful as a result of their misfortunes. The third he attains by using every means to reduce the wealth and prestige of any of his subjects, and especially the good men, to a limit which no sane man would want to approach and would despair of attaining.
—Desiderius Erasmus, On the Education of a Christian Prince, 1516
Desiderius Erasmus: a truly noble thinker from a bygone world; I think we need a new Renaissance.
While we should venerate our “kings” in the proper sense—i.e. those who have “fulfilled” their natures to the fullest extent possible by the dual-application of education and habit—we now bear among us, those “citizens” who tear down past figures who could have very easily usurped presidential power for their own capricious purposes, but consciously decided—despite the perpetual temptation—not to do so on principle alone: George Washington is perhaps the greatest exemplar of the former in our sweet American canon! But either way, make no mistake: only those who deeply care for, and are wholly concerned with, the “common good” deserve the "natural right" of voting: i.e., taking an active part in the governing process, and otherwise holistic machinery of government.
The trouble with democracy, is the wholesale worship of mediocrity—the exaltation of equality for equality's sake.
Call me a willing aristocrat: I don’t care—provincial charges mean nothing to me! We should all aspire to be aristocrats!—not merely by birth, but merit; which is to say, we ought tirelessly strive to be those superiorly learned and modulated creatures—who through philosophy properly-applied, become better in disposition as demonstrated by consciously-ordered habit. Such a high-and-mighty fellow can then be shown to demonstratively possess an inner governing principle of honor, duty, obligation—who then can enter the arena and be responsible to safeguard our fellows, culture, and nation-state.
The modern political arena laid bare.
One of many reasons modern politics have devolved to the degree they have, is precisely because they have become harbor to self-aggrandizing miscreants to placate mass hoards of self-aggrandizing miscreants; in such a devolved “order”, both political masters and willing participants are guilty of seeking their own (usually short-sighted and material) benefit at the public expense. The previous, i.e. cultural decadence, is why all great empires hithero known have eventually fallen—including Greece, Rome, France, and Britain: why now, should America be any different? Great men and women build great civilizations, but groveling and conniving cowards seeking their own advantage at the expense of other people and the institutional apparatuses that buttress and sustain a great civilization, tear them down.
E.g.: with advertisements and "corporate branding" literally everywhere, it feels more and more like we are truly living in Idiocracy.
We have, quite literally, reached a point in American civilization, where doing and being good—to whatever extent that is possible for a creature as flawed as man—rewards less (in terms of tangible but mean benefit) than its corollary: when a civilization reaches that point, it has surely lost its soulful principle of collectively-directed spirit. All of this is to say, America has become a culture without a soul that is steadfastly becoming merely parasitical—on the past no doubt, but also on the good-hearted individuals and families of the present: consider America’s declining birthrate, which shows that for various economic and environmental factors, people feel it a hopeless endeavor to have as many children as they desire. What kind of “civilization” are we becoming when people can’t even fulfill such a good and necessary—but basic—biological and spiritual imperative?
The proper role of a state and its methodology are, in actuality, mutually exclusive.
The role of a state ought be to facilitate the public “common good”, rewarding virtue whilst punishing vice; the means which it employs to such an end is of little consequence insofar as it achieves said end in actuality. Anglo-American practitioners of now-sacred “democracy”—like Locke, Jefferson, Tocqueville, Thoreau, Emerson, etc.—understood the former. But we have now reached a point in America, where it is so obvious to almost everyone, that our government has long since ceased, by-and-large, to facilitate the common good; and in that state of affairs, voting one’s own interest might, in actuality, be morally defensible!—which bodes catastrophe for the future of our valued civilization.
In the end, what you do decide to do is up to you—and we all ought to respect one another's choices in light of the extenuating circumstances: for in the end, the "empowered" democratic individual controls but little in the age of overarching wayward democracy.
I, for one, will have nothing to do with such a wicked apparatus which—whether red or blue—is likely to soon consume us (and all decent humanity) along with it. In our technocratic age, criminals—petty or otherwise—and illegal immigrants are often treated better than naturalized citizens: what insanity! The former is not to say we ought be inhospitable to individuals seeking a better life by emigrating or seeking asylum, but rather to acknowledge the sheer hypocrisy and dysfunction of the current governmental tapestry (and its vast but inept, bureaucratic apparatus). When everyone seeks his own advantage, Rome—new and old—burns; it truly does feel like what we are witnessing are the early stages of onset, of an all-consuming cultural conflagration.
If we hope to avoid such plights which have befallen our forbears, it is high time we disallow our government to send foreign aid to and fro, while allowing its own citizens—whose rights and well-being it is their sworn duty to serve and protect—to either perish or wallow, in the mires of a squalid mediocrity; we ought join together and demand that something be done about our many blights: from mass homelessness and rancorous inner city slums, to incessant inflationary economic troubles—spurred on no doubt, by the unbounded and heedlessly wasteful sucking of the public teat by the few, at the expense of the many: 2008 was the primer for the corporate-welfare state—2020 was, for all intents and purposes, its sequel. If you go to the polls this 5th of November, do so with a calculated realism, rather than a foolhardy idealism, understanding that no people has ever fully voted its way out of tyranny—especially one as vastly interconnected and insidiously hidden, yet persistently pervasive, as ours.
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