The people in the game now just think to the first Tuesday in November, and not a day beyond it. Peter Hart
The withering disease of apathy in the roots of democracy will eventually cause its death. Saul D. Alinsky
When we elect leaders who practice self-control, respect & collaboration, we get stronger communities. Diane Kalen-Sukra
It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. Douglas Adams
When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woes befall the state. Euripides
Politics is the art of the next best. Otto von Bismarck
Every election is determined by the people who show up. Larry Sabato
Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going. Joseph Alois Schumpeter
People at last prefer tyranny to chaos. Will Durant
Like many of you, I suspect, I have been immersed in the upcoming mid-term elections. Discussing policy with those on the other side of some proverbial aisle. Sending money I don’t have to candidates who actually seem committed to respectful, collaborative governance. Checking polls I barely trust several times a day.
As these elections are set to take place in earnest, and as my phone continues to receive a veritable deluge of funding requests which have for weeks literally crowded out the rest of my digital life, I have a few conclusions about our damaged system of elections which may be of some value to you.
1. The energy which is fueling this electoral cycle seems driven more by rejection of the other than by enthusiasm for candidates of our choice. Though the president is not on the ballot, this election is clearly a referendum on the Trump Administration and its enablers – the endless corruption, the blasphemous references to Jesus, the lies and their compounding interest, the resurgence of foreign policy at the tip of a gun including an effort to reconfigure the Monroe Doctrine into the Trumproe Doctrine. All of this and more placed on a table dominated, and surely not without reason, by food/gas prices and health care access.
2. Despite this election season enthusiasm, especially among democratic activists, the creeping apathy identified by Alinsky has continued to creep. It is important to remember that the landslide “winner” of the last US presidential election took the form of the 90 million people in the US eligible to vote who did not bother to do so. We will find out on Tuesday if the apathy train continues down the tracks, if elections are to be determined by more than political activists and the voters who they can coerce from their homes.
3. I’m one of those who believe that having democrats in the legislative majority would be beneficial to the general public in some key aspects, including reviving rural health care options and helping to expose and perhaps even root out some of the corruption which has literally swept over our “pay to play” government. But I’m also one of those who believes that democrats do not in several aspects represent a more trustworthy alternative to the current corrupt practices. Democratic leadership is also compromised, is also unduly partisan, is also ethically challenged in ways more reminiscent of than a challenge to the “pay to play” game that has re-emerged with a vengeance in our national culture. I want a democratic Congress and that might well happen. But what I really want is legislators who practice self-control, respect and collaboration and this appears to be a much higher hill to climb.
4. This leads me to consider the power of money in our political system and the degree to which the massive donations that the system condones raise the stakes for all candidates in all contexts. In part by daily venturing into the swamp also known as Twitter/X, I have had some luck in tracking the role of money in what remains of our democratic process – politicians compromised through massive donations domestic and foreign, oligarchs putting hundreds of millions of dollars into campaigns in part to pay campaign staff but mostly to subsidize the owners of television stations in markets where political races are competitive.
How does a candidate seeking some freedom from these monetized influences manage to fulfill fiscal pledges to constituencies as Elon Musk and others pour vast sums into swaying voters? And how can they maintain those values when much of what those sums buy is advertising which blends bits of legitimacy with claims which cross any and all lines of decency? The answer of course is in the relentless solicitations of public funds (and mostly funds alone) by candidates and their staffs who are on record as determined to avoid large donor influences.
The choice of “relentless” is no accident. My small sum donations win me an endless stream of text messages and emails from candidacies which have invaded every nook of my tiny media “empire,” sometimes asking me again for money within 10 minutes of my prior donation. I can only imagine what those with deeper pockets have to contend with in their daily feeds.
5. And yet this annoyance seems like a relatively small price to pay to drag some candidates with integrity across the finish line, even if some of their plans for reform have only a slight chance of being realized in a US Congress in which members of both parties tend to lose much interest in constituent needs past the first Tuesday in November. There is, to be sure, noticeable public progression from hopefulness to apathy as the winners in a sordid political process turn their attention to K street lobbyists and inflexible power dynamics within Chambers. But the more integrity we can vote into those spaces, the more integrity can become once again an expectation of governance rather than a token gesture of “honeyed words” fashioned mostly for the cameras.
As election day approaches in the US it is important to reflect on a democracy that more and more have distanced themselves from, leading to elections such as in 2024, where the landslide “winner” was those 90 million or so folks who could have voted but chose to sit it out. We simply cannot afford this level of apathy this time. Voting is not our full franchise, in the US but it is an important element therein. Use this part of your franchise, please, and encourage others within and outside your immediate circles to do likewise. The chance we have now to redirect ourselves is one that doesn’t come along often enough.
