I have long been a critic of LO2ERS, which is my preferred shorthand for Lesser-Of-2–Evils voteRS. My primary concern is that they typically congratulate themselves after having “held their noses” and picked the candidate they consider to be the “lesser of two evils”, as if in so doing, they had done a good thing for our society. What they fail to notice, however, is that they have not done a thing at all to reform anything to any appreciable and lasting degree.
Indeed, listen to an American gripe about the sad state of things, and nod along at his concerns until he’s said his say, and I’ll bet your chances are almost nil of getting a meaningful answer to this question:
“So, what you are going to do to fix this?”
He’ll look at you with that deer-in-the-headlights stare typical of those whose neurons have never fired in such a pattern before. Sadly, fixing things is simply not part of the American awareness. Yes, I know that many of us think it is, but that’s the problem, because it simply isn’t. We may boast grand themes of “freedom” and “Constitution” and “reform” and “change” and so forth, but at the end of the day, we congratulate ourselves for having voted for a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, as opposed to two pokes in the eye with a sharp stick.
This is our heritage. It is our way of being “involved”. And some of us even go out of our way to “get out the vote” so as to get even more Americans involved in this useless activity.
But alas, this is my fifth paragraph and I have not yet addressed my title.
It is interesting to see how different people cope with the cognitive dissonance that arises when grand themes give way to nose-holding pragmatism. Some choose to withdraw from the entire process in disgust. Others choose to forge ahead with a partisan loyalty that belies the obvious faults, shortcomings, and misdeeds of their preferred parties. Meanwhile, a very few (probably fewer than one in a million, I estimate) set out to discover real solutions. And that leaves us with what seems to be a growing segment of voters: the single-issue folks who decide that the whole ball of wax can be reduced to a candidate’s stance on some preeminent issue.
Here are some favorites off the top of my head:
- Which candidate belongs to the preferred party
- Religion
- Guns
- Abortion
- Homosexuality
- Economy
- Jobs
- The selection of Supreme Court justices
- Medicare/Medicaid
- Government job security
- Government grant security
- Which candidate seems most “presidential”
So many seem to believe that one item from a list such as this one is the “most important” issue. So they’ll gather up their friends and tell them that “we” need your help to support Candidate X, as if “we” could not possibly have any other natural concerns about an election than Issue Y. And if you don’t join in, they’ll chide you about the importance of “getting behind” their candidate in order to get Issue Y fixed.
What they don’t seem to understand is that when I call the Fire Department, it’s because I’d like all my burning house extinguished, and not just one room. So when their champion pledges to put out the fire in my pantry, you’ll have to pardon me for not being very excited about his candidacy.
Yes, I hear you pragmatists now, chiding me thus: “Well, at least you could save your pantry, Jack, so why don’t you get real and get on board?” What they never seem to have an answer for, however, is the question of just how one chooses between saving the pantry or the laundry room, the bedroom or the bathroom. Does not common sense dictate that the whole house ought to be saved? Indeed, what is the value of a soggy pantry left standing amidst the rubble of a house that is otherwise reduced to ashes?
“Oh, you complain too much, Jack. Our house hasn’t burned down. It’s not that bad.”
The fact of the matter, however, is that there is not one “room” in our collective “house” that now exists as it was designed in the beginning. Everything about our country is compromised from its intended state. Not one right remains certain in the actual practice of things. And not one precept of the Constitution remains inviolable. The public, however, is ignorant of this fact. To them, therefore, it’s all about whether things are better or worse than they were yesterday, for they have little working concept of the design of our body politic. Such things are simply outside the realm of their concern. To care enough to research such things is, in our society, an inordinate amount of care.
Interestingly, my wife and I tried to start a single-issue political initiative in 2010. The issue we chose was not on the list above. Rather, it was the Rule of Law. We had observed that a great deal of what ails the US is its frequent departures from its own Constitution. Fix the aggregate paradigm of the people about the Rule of Law in general, so went the reasoning, and you can fix a boatload of issues in one fell swoop.
This concept proved much too heady for most, however. Basically, you could sum up the public’s response to the idea thus: “The rule of what?”
We could argue that restoring the Rule of Law would naturally fix many of the items of the list of favorite issue above, but no one wanted to hear such an argument. They would have been much more interested in participating in a more granular issue than in a top-level one that would naturally affect so many others. Or to put it in Thoreau’s vernacular, they prefer to hack at the branches, rather than at the root.
Indeed, fixing many problems is simply outside the scope of America’s political intentions. No, we’d much rather take bold steps to reduce our deficit by one or two percent than we could to correct the lawless government that causes that deficit in the first place. And we’d much rather “fight” for the candidate who will “create” a bajillion new jobs than we would to put a stop to the governmental interference that led to job loss in the first place.
I’m sorry to bring up that jaded metaphor about “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”, but it’s just too good a match for our national paradigm. Indeed, we’d much rather argue over how those chairs should be arranged than we would to figure out whether the ship can be prevented from sinking.
This is because we are stupid.
Interestingly, however, we are stupid because we do not choose to be wise. There is no insurmountable obstacle in our way. No, the only thing that stands between us and a reformed nation is our own unwillingness to roll up our sleeves and get to it. It is not a matter of intelligence; it is a matter of diligence and responsibility and common sense.
But those topics are too weighty for our cognitive miser society. Indeed, they are so easily distracted from them by the simplest of temptations, such as our upcoming election, in which so many millions will be told that they are good people for having ventured to get out and vote for a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. This, they will be told, is how they exercise their “freedom”. To me, however, it looks like this is how they keep themselves chained.
