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 Voting
in America: Free to Choose?
Unless you want smaller government, less welfare, secure borders, fewer corporate
handouts...
[by Mac Johnson] 2/28/06
The Islamic
Republic of Iran has elections, but most Westerners correctly
believe it is not a true republican democracy. This is because
the only candidates that people are allowed to vote on are
those chosen for them by Iran’s ruling elite. By the
time the people have any say in the matter, their potential
choices are few and quite similar to one another. The citizenry
can then wisely vote for the tallest candidate -- confident
that the beloved status quo is well protected.
You can see
how this is different from America’s political system,
a true republican democracy. Here, we can have up to two similar
candidates per contest, both of whom have earned their place
on the ballot by a system of arcane networking among America’s
ruling elite. The citizenry can thus wisely vote for the tallest
candidate -- confident that the beloved status quo is well
protected.
Contributor
Mac
Johnson
Mac
Johnson is a freelance writer and biologist in Cambridge,
Mass. Mr. Johnson holds a Doctorate in Molecular and
Cellular Biology from Baylor College of Medicine. He
is a frequent opinion contributor to Human
Events Online. His website can be found at macjohnson.com [go
to Johnson index]
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America is
a great country despite her government -- because the American
people, in Milton Friedman’s immortal phrase, are “free
to choose.” I can, within my price range, choose from
among thousands of houses in geographically diverse areas.
I can choose my car from among dozens of makes and models.
I can choose my clothes, my toys, my bank, my computer, my
books, my meals, my job and a legion of other things from among
a plethora of possibilities. I can choose what fits me best,
based on need or price or compensation or image -- and so can
you.
The result
of such abundant possibilities is that I can assemble a better
life for me and you can do the same for you. Add this up 300,000,000
times and you have America’s general prosperity. If we
are unhappy with our choices, we can hunt new ones. And if
someone meets our needs better, we can flock to the new and
improved choice, and away from the unwanted choices.
Consider
cars or computers. How different are they now than they were
in your childhood? How ordinary is it that they should improve
year by year -- that better choices appear? Now imagine that
we had a choice of only two brands of car and all new competition
was kept off the ballot, so to speak. Would cars get better
very quickly? Would they get better at all? What if, in 1980,
laws had been passed effectively limiting computer manufacturing
to one of only two brands?
How would
this have affected the rate of improvement? In all likelihood,
you would still be using floppy disks, staring at a green screen,
and typing an arcane series of slashes and abbreviations to
try and send a small, ugly text file to a dot matrix printer.
Yet this
is our political system -- two choices, chosen through similar
processes by an initiated class of donors, pundits, power brokers
and strategists. Is it any wonder we are unhappy. Having just
two choices means we often have no choice at all.
Suppose you
want illegal immigration controlled? Which party is for that?
The party of amnesty for cheap labor, or the party of amnesty
for cheap votes?
Or what if
you want government made smaller? Is that still the Republican
platform, or have they shelved that goal while they create
a $57 billion “Department of Limited Government” to
study the issue at a series of earmarked laboratories built
on artificial reefs located in each and every Congressional
district in America?
Or posit
that one found the limitations placed on America’s sovereignty
by trade agreements somewhat troublesome? Well, that’s
just exactly the sort of issue that you could count on the
Democrats to address, just as soon as the United Nations and
the World Court told them that it was OK to do so.
Likewise,
what if one were a believer in truly free trade right here
at home, and thus did not want the government to determine
who the winners and losers in business would be through tax
breaks and handouts to preferred donors? Which party will work
for that exactly? The main reason that our bipartisan tax code
is slightly larger than Maureen Dowd’s therapy notes
is that every congressman in the country is trying to amend
it to spare his special friends from having to play on a level
field.
Well, there
are always the primary elections to have some new choices from
each party, correct? Well, no. Not anymore. Both parties are
becoming increasingly bold about squashing all choice in the
primaries. Primary elections are rapidly becoming nothing more
than vestigial ceremonies, like the vote of the Electoral College.
In the guise of “sparing” the eventual winner (as
if anyone knows for sure who that would be) the expense and
bad press of an internal fight, party insiders now openly choose
the winner of the primary for the voters. They then force out
or financially strangle all those who would dare to “split
the party” by competing in an actual election. Not surprisingly,
party insiders are the candidates that are chosen for the voters
most every time.
Right now
in Rhode Island, the national Republican Party is doing everything
in its power to force Republican voters to re-elect unpopular
Sen. Lincoln Chaffee, by actively campaigning against his Republican
primary challenger, Steve Laffey. Rather than voters using
the primary to tell the leadership who to support, the leadership
is using the primary to tell the voters who to support. “Orwellian” is
an overused word, but it applies here.
Similarly,
in Ohio’s Senate primary, the Democrats recently forced
out popular Iraq War veteran Paul Hackett to make room for
political insider Rep. Sherrod Brown to receive the nomination
without a serious challenge. "This is an extremely disappointing
decision that I feel has been forced on me," commented
Hackett upon withdrawing. More importantly, the decision was
forced on Ohio’s Democrat voters, who may not have chosen
Brown.
And even
when a candidate not preordained by the party elite manages
to win a primary, the party leadership will usually scuttle
his campaign by refusing to support him in the general election.
They can justify such a decision by claiming the race was not
competitive -- a self-fulfilling prophecy designed to benefit
the prophesiers. The voters will then be more likely to listen
the next time they are told who “can win” a general
election.
In short,
Americans are increasingly not free to choose their desired
leaders. Two insiders are chosen in back rooms, and people
must then settle upon which one annoys them least in the general
election. Because neither candidate has been tried by fire
in a close primary, both are usually terrible candidates, hiding
from voters even as they must appeal to them.
Solutions
to this disturbing lack of choice must be found.
One is simple:
parties must allow primaries to be neutrally administered and
freely contested. It is in a party’s best interest to
identify talented candidates through competition. The first
party to reinvigorate its candidate selection process in this
way will dominate the other.
Another solution
would be harder to enact, but even more beneficial: laws must
be passed -- by ballot referendum if necessary -- requiring
that the winner of a general election must have at least 50%
of the vote, or else face a run-off election. This would open
up America’s political landscape to third parties, who
would no longer face the huge hurdle of people worrying that
they would be “throwing away their vote” by voting
for a third candidate.
If the greater
of two evils wins with a clear majority of the vote, he could
not have been defeated by anyone voting for another opponent.
If no candidate gets a majority in a three-way race, you can
always settle for the lesser of two evils in the run-off.
Voters must
be more free to choose. -one-
First appeared at Human Events Online
copyright
2006 Mac Johnson
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