On the election

By DOUG SHAVER
November 5, 2020

I’m writing this on Thursday, two days after the election, and it seems likely that Joe Biden will win. For me that is relatively good news, although I did not vote for him. Nor did I vote for anyone else on the ballot. I did a write-in vote.

According to one of our founding documents, this nation is dedicated to the principle that the purpose of government is to secure certain inalienable rights, and that in order to fulfill that purpose, governments exercise certain powers, and that those powers are derived from the consent of the governed. Both of the two major political parties wish to govern in ways to which I do not consent. The Democrats would give the national government powers that I do not want it to have. So would the Republicans. And so I could not in good conscience vote for either party’s candidate.

That didn’t mean I had no preference between the two. I am a conservative, so I do not want the nation to go where the Democrats wish to take it, but still less do I want it to go where Trump wishes to take it. He would take it wherever it suited his personal interests, and that is no kind of conservatism. That is just tyranny, and no sensible conservative can support tyranny.

Biden has at least given lip service to the need for a national reconciliation. The sincerity of his personal commitment to that ideal is almost beside the point. I prefer a president who says he wants it to one who admits in effect to not giving a damn. But the lesser of two evils is still an evil. I have my own ideas about what a national reconciliation will require, and I am not counting on Biden’s ideas, assuming he even has any, being consistent with mine. As with the final outcome of the election, we’ll just have to wait.

Meanwhile, I’ve already noticed a major obstacle. I’ve known for a long time that it was there, but a reminder popped up in one of my Facebook groups while the votes were being counted. This particular group is overwhelmingly liberal, so of course they wanted Trump to lose, but several comments expressed utter bAccording to one of our founding documents, this nation is dedicated to the principle that the purpose of government is to secure certain inalienable rights, and that in order to fulfill that purpose, governments exercise certain powers, and that those powers are derived from the consent of the governed. Both of the two major political parties wish to govern in ways to which I do not consent. The Democrats would give the national government powers that I do not want it to have. So would the Republicans. And so I could not in good conscience vote for either party’s candidate.ewilderment over his losing by such a narrow margin. “It is extremely depressing,” one said, “to realize that the race is this close.”

What ought to depress anyone who cares about good government is the indifference of both major parties to the interests of most of the nation’s citizens. Four years ago, there was something like a consensus within the commentariat that the Democrats lost because they’d gotten out of touch with the people in general and thus left the political field wide open to anyone who could pretend to be a populist. And who was better at pretending to be anything than Donald Trump? His list of incompetencies is endless, but salesmanship isn’t on it. Most Americans are convinced that the people running this country just don’t care about them any more. When Trump said, “But I do care about you,” he made them believe it, because that’s what good salesmanship is all about: making people believe you when you’re trying to sell them something.

And notwithstanding the leftist orthodoxy, Trump was never selling racism, xenophobia, or anything else of that sort. He was just selling himself. He wanted to be president of the United States, and to become president,According to one of our founding documents, this nation is dedicated to the principle that the purpose of government is to secure certain inalienable rights, and that in order to fulfill that purpose, governments exercise certain powers, and that those powers are derived from the consent of the governed. Both of the two major political parties wish to govern in ways to which I do not consent. The Democrats would give the national government powers that I do not want it to have. So would the Republicans. And so I could not in good conscience vote for either party’s candidate. he had to say certain things that a substantial fraction of the American people wanted to hear. And, he was a good enough salesman to know which things those were. Of course his adversaries vilified him on moral grounds for saying those things, but a majority of the American people were indifferent to his adversaries’ moral judgments.

And so, on the day after the 2016 election, we saw posts denouncing the result as “a victory for racism.” It was no such thing. Trump’s supporters were not disputing the claim that racism is bad. They were examining what leftists were offering as evidence for America’s racism and disagreeing that it was evidence for anything of the sort. And consequently they were disputing the need for legislative and regulatory remedies advocated by the left.

This was the lesson the Democrats should have learned in 2016, but they did not learn it. Having failed to convince the American people that Donald Trump was evil, they decided that their only recourse was to say it more loudly and more persistently. This did not work, and this is why, although Trump seems to have lost the election, he only barely lost it.

Trump is a consummate salesman, but nobody is perfect, and he made a monumental error. Having zero salesmanship skills myself, I’m in no position to identify his specific mistake, but I suspect it had something to do with his response to the coronavirus. The Democrats did not save us from the disaster that a second Trump administration would have been. It was the pandemic that saved us.

But there are other disasters looming, and we’re going to have to save ourselves by finding a better way of picking our presidents. The current system, which results in a quadrennial choice between the lesser of two evils, is not working. Although few have noticed, or will admit it if they have noticed, there is a civil war going on. Whether the war is literal or only metaphorical can be debated, but there have already been literal casualties, and even a metaphorical war can cause as much suffering as the literal kind.

Any civil war can happen only when the government has failed to get or keep the consent of the governed. Elections are supposed to convey that consent, but uninformed or misinformed consent is as bad as no consent, and it has become difficult for average voters to properly inform themselves. It can be done, but the necessary steps are not intuitively obvious. A good system of public education can teach them easily enough, but we no longer have a good public-education system. Perhaps we never did, but as bad as maybe it used to be, it’s certainlAccording to one of our founding documents, this nation is dedicated to the principle that the purpose of government is to secure certain inalienable rights, and that in order to fulfill that purpose, governments exercise certain powers, and that those powers are derived from the consent of the governed. Both of the two major political parties wish to govern in ways to which I do not consent. The Democrats would give the national government powers that I do not want it to have. So would the Republicans. And so I could not in good conscience vote for either party’s candidate.y gotten worse.

A free press is supposed to have a role in informing the voters, too, but our mainstream media are having their own problems in that regard. Journalists must themselves be properly informed before they can do any good, and few of them are.

It’s all very complicated, as you might have heard. There are no simple solutions, but there are solutions. I will be proposing some that make sense to me. Whether anyone agrees with me about them is beside the point. The point is that it’s time for us to be discussing them. And I do mean discussing. Until now, our various tribes have all been just preaching at each other. But preaching is not discussion. It’s just a bid for power.

Both major parties say they want to empower the people, but our Constitution already gives the people all the power they need. If so many of us think we have been disempowered, then we have a problem, but we cannot fix any problem until we have correctly identified it. Step One in our troubleshooting procedure should be to adopt a very skeptical attitude toward anyone who, being already in a position of some power, assures us that we can gain power by giving them even more power.