We have a lot of veneration for democracy in this country. For much of human history, people were mainly ruled by arbitrary strongmen, but eventually democracy emerged and people finally had a say in who ruled over them.
Of course, not everyone always had a say. Maybe it was just the elite who got to vote. Or landowners. Or people of a certain race. Or just men (luckily, I don’t think there is an example of just women). But we tend to settle on allowing all adults to vote as we’ve come to consider voting to be an important right.
And that’s just dumb.
I have always had a very simple (and correct) view on rights in that they are things that you innately have and can only be infringed, not given. Thus, any right you have should also be a right you would have living alone on an island where no one could mess with you or your stuff.
Voting, though, is not like that. It requires a whole system — someone has to pay for all the ballots and voting machines and their tabulation. And voting is requiring someone else to do something in reaction to your vote. I guess you can vote living alone on an island, but you only get to vote on what you do (as is good and proper) and not what someone else should do.
Still, people will be like, “Yes, voting is a right! If the government gets to boss us around, then we need a say in that government!” And that thinking is not entirely wrong — it’s just focusing on the wrong injustice. The problem identified there is not voting — the problem is that the government feels it’s able to infringe your rights.
You see, voting is not a right — it’s a compromise. Since we have this entity that can infringe our rights, the compromise is we are given some small amount of say in it called voting. This isn’t ideal, though. What we should want is nothing infringing our rights — no worry that politicians will limit our freedoms or confiscate what we’ve earned. Not knowing how to reach that ideal (and many not even trying), we instead have the compromise we have now of voting. It’s a bit like we all were given pebbles to throw at a listing vessel in an attempt to steer it. And while this has kept the ship from crashing into rocks for some time, this is not the ideal state of things.
All this is to say that the distraction of treating voting like a right makes it feel like it’s an end in itself, when it never was. The end we should want is one where voting feels inconsequential. If we have a government that never infringes our rights, then we would feel that nothing much of consequence is at stake at each election. And in this ideal world, probably fewer people would bother voting because the results would have little effect on our lives.
So while so many people are trying to “rock the vote” and get the unmotivated out there voting, the world we really want is one where fewer people vote because who cares. We want a world where voting is as inconsequential as possible.
How do we get there? That’s a great question. I should probably think on that. We already have a bit of the architecture, though, with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. There we designate the government’s limited powers and then specify what the government absolutely does not have power over. The idea is our rights can’t just be voted away or taken at the whims of an elected politician. That’s what needs more strengthening: The parts of our government immune from democracy, which can never change with the winds.
Still, at the end of the day, even the Constitution is just a document and can’t protect us. What’s really needed are is a people dedicated to individual rights who will fight for and protect them. That means educating all citizens on what those rights are and why they’re important and making sure we only let people into this country who believe in freedom.
Actually, that sounds hard. How about we make up the government of AI robots programmed just on protecting our rights and completely rigid in their interpretation of them. That should work.
But until we have the technology to make those (probably not for four more months), I guess we’ll have to stick with democracy.