Why I am Apolitical
The circus begins in earnest every four years around here. Not on election year, as one might expect, but way before that, no matter how many polls show that Americans would prefer a much shorter election season. The battle of attrition starts early and marches on until the last remaining puppet of both major political parties – the two candidates who have made the least amount of PR mistakes and who have best deflected their enemies’ verbal attacks in this war of silly sound bites, meaningless drivel, and compromises with the devil – are left standing like the finalists of some beauty contest from Hell.
And I am supposed to vote for one of them.
I don’t think so.
But maybe this is just a bad year. Maybe this is not a good example of our election process really working the way it was designed. Past presidential elections were much better, weren’t they? Quick: name our five best presidents. After Lincoln and Washington and Jefferson it gets a little difficult, doesn’t it? Rutherford B. Hayes? Grover Cleveland?
The problem, and the reason for choosing to be apolitical, goes well beyond the asinine selection process we euphemistically call the presidential campaign, although that would certainly seem to be sufficient reason for excluding oneself from the mockery. For in truth, one system of selecting government leaders is no better than another. The problem, at its core, is the nature of those leaders. And for this, we have no solution.
The inherent problem with any government, is that those who wish to lead (by election, by force, it doesn’t really matter) are fundamentally flawed. People who wish to lead are people who wish (or need) to have power over other people. One doesn’t need to be an historian to see what happens when power-hungry people take command of things. And one doesn’t need to be a psychologist to understand what is at the root of such people’s motivations. Even the most benevolent, altruistic politician (give me a minute and I’ll try to think of one), acting presumably from a position of “only” wanting to do what’s best for his or her country, is acting, in reality, from a foundation built on arrogance, seriously thinking – in the politician mindset – that he or she knows what’s best for that country.
Do I advocate anarchy? Power is like water, constantly seeking and finding ingress. Destroy one assemblage of power and watch a new one take its place. I’m not that naive. We are, I think, left with only one way out and that is to minimize the power of the government; to reign in the authority of those who would choose, by holding government office, to exercise their psychological need for power over others; to heed, in short, Thoreau’s admonition “that government is best which governs least.”
It was a dream in my country once. Men with names like Jefferson and Franklin and Washington and Adams and Madison, all came together at one incredibly amazing moment in the history of the world to erect a government that would recognize an individual’s right to do what that individual sees as best for him or herself, instead of the government doing it – to ensure the individual the right of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” (Not happiness, mind you – merely the ability to pursue it unfettered.) To be sure, this was not a new idea. But these men were essentially constructing a government, based on this idea, from scratch. These men were in uncharted territory, yet willing to “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
But what about their motivations? How could they have gotten where they were without at least some desire to lead, some notion of wanting to do what they felt was best? What separates them from the political leaders of today? Very simply, what separates these men is that they were freeing themselves from bondage. These were not people working within a system bent on crawling their way to the top of it. These were prisoners seeking the light of day and working to make sure those who came after them would be free as well. Washington (literally) led the charge and could have made himself king. He chose not to, preferring to stay instead within the ideals put forth by the Founding Fathers, seeking ultimately not power over others, but the quiet solitude of Mount Vernon where he lived his final years.
And today?
To paraphrase baseball’s Ralph Kiner, if these men were alive today, they’d be spinning in their graves. The idea of minimal government now exists only in theory. With tiny, little baby steps, the United States government has, over the course of the last two-hundred and thirty-two years, slowly crept in, as on Sandburg’s cat feet, to each and every segment of our lives, the biggest baby step of all perhaps being the institution of a national income tax in 1913, thus providing the government leaders a means by which to regulate behavior and shift power from one group to another, giving themselves constituencies, and enabling the power grabbing (and resulting polarization) to grow and grow and grow.
And the worst part? It can’t be put back like it was. The bell has rung. The toothpaste is out of the tube. The dam has burst. The people with the power won’t give it back because they’re in power.
It’s over.
Nothing short of another revolution, nothing short of tearing it all completely down, would repair the damage.
Ah, but here’s the problem with such a scenario: the repair would be temporary. Why? For a reason that has taken me literally years to discover. Maybe I saw it but wished it wasn’t there, I don’t know. The realization of it was no less than stunning:
People don’t want freedom.
We want government in charge. We want our needs taken care of. We’re willing to sacrifice willingly our freedoms. There was a saying in post-war Italy: Say what you will about Mussolini, but at least the trains ran on time. We don’t want freedom to live our lives as we see fit. We want punctual trains and we will vote for whomever promises them to us.
I won’t argue the morality of any of what I am saying. I am aware that desire for individual freedom is a subjective value. But it is my value. And this is why I am disaffected. This is why I am apolitical. I cannot take part in a government that I do not believe in, and the government I believe in cannot exist.
So enjoy the political season, voter. Rearrange carefully the deck chairs while the waters of governmental obtrusiveness fill the compartments below. And make sure to languish and revel in the absolute hatred that both parties have for each other. Enjoy the complete polarization that it all brings about every four years, and all for no discernible reason. I will be sitting on the sidelines observing the spectacle, and the irony of nothing more significant than Coke butting heads with Pepsi. Democrat? Republican? I cannot tell you apart. I gather you both seem to be desirous of something called “change.” And I’ve noticed that both candidates are promising “change.” Just like last election. Just like the next election. One would think the typical voter’s naiveté would ultimately embarrass him or her to complete paralysis. But you keep coming back for more.
And you keep proving George Bernard Shaw right: We get the government we deserve.
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No, no, no. My garden is fully epicurean, my gardener a recidivist stoic and my wife an ex-Astartean temple prostitute. Life is groovey.