I won’t be bombarding your inbox daily but the events of January 6 twisted a singular political brain cell to mull things over. Don’t get the idea that I think all Democrats are saints, don’t play political games, and are exempt from avarice like many in powerful positions. I am mostly concerned with the political differences between the two parties, and how that affects the general populace through policies and the law.
The United States is not a full-fledged democracy, but neither are we a republic that is detached from the people’s wishes and desires. We’re a hybrid form of government, a constitutional representative republic (or a representative democracy), which elects officials to create laws and policy on our behalf. The United Kingdom is a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy, France is a unitary semi-presidential republic, both representing other forms of Western-style democracies. In creating a functional system called “federalism,” the U.S. Constitution also shares certain political powers with the states.
The upside of our system is it's efficient, it's empowering, and it encourages participation. The downside is it can invite corruption, it can also become inefficient, and it’s not always reliable.
Recent events have clearly shown that the participation factor has weighed heavily in favor of ousting the treasonous current administration. Keep in mind, Biden and Harris won the election by more than seven million votes, higher than the popular vote percentage margins of the winners in 2004, 2000, 1976, 1968, and 1960. It’s the highest for any Democratic presidential ticket dating all the way back to Lyndon Johnson’s defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and before that, you have to go back to FDR in 1944 to find its equal. Smells like democracy in action to me.
The GOP did all it could to subvert the elections in the last several months. Don’t forget that Texas’s Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been under indictment since 2015 for securities fraud, filed a lawsuit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the United States Supreme Court claiming these four states exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to justify ignoring federal and state election laws and unlawfully enacting last-minute changes, thus skewing the results of the 2020 General Election. 106 current Republican members of Congress signed a brief in support of Paxton’s lawsuit.
Why do you think these folks want to subvert the process? Is it because if real votes get counted that Republicans will lose every time? Even the orange man has said Republicans would never win election again if it was easier to vote. Democrats have now won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections, something no party has done before in U.S. history. The election in November is also their fourth consecutive popular-vote victory; the last time that happened was the party’s run from 1932 through 1948.
In 2016, the Pennsylvania GOP along with 26 other Republican-controlled states, purge over 16 million people from the voting rolls nationally (The Brennan Center documents a 33 percent increase in voters purged during the 2014-1016 election cycle) helping give Pennsylvania (along with Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin, according to Paul Waldman in the Washington Post) to Donald Trump by razor-thin margins far smaller than the number of voters purged and/or turned away at the polls. And another estimated 2 million Americans tried to vote that year but were turned away for lack of the proper ID. Over the past two decades every Republican-controlled state has introduce rigid ID laws. That same year a federal appeals court overturned North Carolina's sweeping voter ID law, ruling that the law was passed with "discriminatory intent" and was designed to impose barriers to block African-Americans from voting. More about that here.
Take one example why Republicans want to suppress the vote, and that is their opposition to Universal Health Care. The arguments by Democrats for UHC include that among industrialized countries with comparable levels of economic development, government-provided health care is much more efficient and more economical than the U.S. system of private insurance. And, with our largely privately funded health care system, we are paying more than twice as much as other countries for worse outcomes. In Canada, every citizen has a Canadian government-issued “Health Insurance Card” which is also their first-choice voter ID card. Which makes it very easy for every citizen over 18 to vote. You see where I’m going with this. More voters, less Republicans in office.
It’s easy to pretend that politics don’t matter. Aristotle said that “Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.” He understood that If you are part of a society, then you are a part of its politics.
And here is today’s philosophical moment…