Elections are
sometimes portrayed as practically giving people automatic “remote
control” on the government. Elections kindly provide a chance
for people to pre-program the government for the following years.
The government will be based on the popular will, regardless of
the ignorance of the populace or the duplicity of the government.
President
Lyndon Johnson declared in 1965 that “the vote is the most
powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice
and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they
are different from other men.” But the fact that voting rights
helped undermine Jim Crow restrictions on blacks did not prevent
the government from ladling new restrictions and burdens on all
citizens. During the election campaign the prior year, Johnson had
promised, “We are not about to send American boys 9,000 or
10,000 miles away to do what Asian boys ought to be doing to protect
themselves.” The fact that parents could vote for or against
Johnson did nothing to stop him from betraying his promise and sending
their sons to die.
In his 1989
farewell address, President Ronald Reagan asserted,
“We the People” tell the government what to do, it doesn’t
tell us. “We the people” are the driver – the government
is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route,
and how fast.
But the American
people did not choose to “drive” into Beirut and get hundreds
of Marines blown up, choose to run up the largest budget deficits
in American history, provide thousands of anti-tank weapons to Ayatollah
Khomeni, or have a slew of top political appointees either lie or
get caught in conflicts of interest or other abuses of power or
ethical quandaries between 1981 and 1988.
On the eve
of his 1992 election debacle, President George H.W. Bush told a
Texas audience,
And tomorrow, you participate in a ritual, a sacred ritual of stewardship....
With your vote, you are going to help shape the future of this,
the most blessed, special nation that man has ever known and God
has helped create. And so, look at your vote – especially the
young people – look at your vote as an act of power, a statement
of principle.
Yet few of
the people who voted the following day were making a statement of
principle in favor of permitting the president to deploy troops
(or additional troops) abroad on his whim (as Clinton did in Somalia,
Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and elsewhere), permitting the government
to waive the Posse Comitatus Act and use military equipment against
American civilians (as happened at Waco), or permitting the government
to vastly increase its surveillance of the American people. Yet
voting in the 1992 election was still “a statement of principle,”
regardless of how much the winner scorned the voters’ principles.
Two days after
his 2004 reelection victory, President George W. Bush declared,
When you win, there is a feeling that the people have spoken and
embraced your point of view ... and the people made it clear what
they wanted.
But did voters
on November 2 “consent” to the destruction of Fallujah
in the following weeks? Did they consent to the nomination of a
Homeland Security czar who was openly hostile to any criticism of
politicians? Did Bush’s National Rifle Association supporters
consent to his nominating a man for attorney general who advocated
far more federal restrictions on gun ownership? Did voters consent
to the illegal wiretapping of the chief of the UN International
Atomic Energy Agency, as the Bush administration sought to discredit
and remove an impediment to a U.S. war on Iran? If Bush had made
“ending tyranny everywhere via preemptive U.S. military attacks”
the theme for his fall 2004 campaign, he very likely would have
lost the election. Instead, he downplayed this notion – until
his second inaugural address.
The only way
to suppose voters consented to such government actions is to assume
they granted Bush boundless power to use as he sees fit. But this
is the type of consent given by people who forfeit their rights
and accept a court-appointed guardian to run their lives.
Absolution
through election
Politicians
routinely invoke elections as absolutions. Shortly before his second
inauguration, a journalist asked Bush, “Why hasn’t anyone
been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for
what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments” on Iraq?
Bush replied,
Well, we had an accountability moment, and that’s called the
2004 election. And the American people listened to different assessments
made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the
two candidates, and chose me, for which I’m grateful.
An election
victory expunges all abuses from the official record. Unfortunately,
the more ignorant and negligent the citizens, the easier it becomes
for winners to invoke their election victories to shroud their abuses.
In the aftermath
of the November 2004 election, the refrain from both politicians
and editorial pages was that the result of the voting showed the
“will of the people.” But was it the will of the people
to have to choose between George W. Bush and John Kerry, or between
Al Gore and Bush, or between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole? (Third-party
candidates provided good protest votes but could not block career
politicians from office.)
That is like
saying that it was the will of the Bulgarian consumer in communist
times to choose between an unreliable, ramshackle Trabant from East
Germany and an unreliable ramshackle Skoda car from Czechoslovakia.
Many American voters felt as frustrated by their choice of presidential
candidates as did Eastern Bloc car shoppers in the 1980s. The fact
that voters expressed a preference for Bush or Kerry proves nothing
about either candidate’s being the will of the individual voter.
King Louis
XIV of France declared, “Kings are absolute lords and naturally
enjoy the full and free disposal of all the possessions of their
subjects.” The only way that the 2004 election could exonerate
all of Bush’s first-term actions is if voting levers are naturally
vested with absolute power over everything. Voting levers cannot
legitimize violations of rights unless voters and election winners
have the right Louis XIV claimed for kings to use and abuse everything
in the nation.
Electing our
despot
The average
American voter had no recourse on November 2, 2004, to make the
federal government obey the Constitution or keep the peace. But
this was the same situation the voters faced on November 7, 2000,
November 5, 1996, and November 3, 1992. Instead, each voter was
merely asked to personally consecrate the continued violations of
the highest law of the land by whoever won. The current system of
government is structured so that voters effectively have to vest
near-absolute power in someone. This is simply how the rulers and
the establishment have fixed the game. Any choice that would deny
nearly boundless power to the rulers is kept out of the sunlight
by the powers that be.
Bush’s
reelection symbolized that the Constitution is now far less of a
restraint on presidential powers. The torture scandal, the power
to nullify all rights by using the enemy combatant label, and other
gross abuses of power were not major issues in the 2004 presidential
campaign. Thus, the first-term abuses became the starting line for
the second-term abuses. Bush’s reelection made clear that a
president’s proclaimed goals could exonerate his methods –
thus largely obliterating many of the safeguards built in by the
Framers of the Constitution. But elections based on the winner’s
receiving unlimited power are based on far different principles
than are elections in which winners remain subservient to the Constitution
and the law. This is the difference between voting for a master
and voting for a chief law-enforcement officer. America is far closer
today to what the Framers dreaded – “slavery by constitutional
forms.”
The more power
that voting levers confer, the more unreliable elections become
as a mode of governance. Instead of being antibiotics for the body
politic, elections become simply another quack cure.
French historian
Marc Bloch noted that, during the Middle Ages, “the notion
arose that freedom was lost when free choice could not be exercised
at least once in a lifetime.” The only freedom many people
sought was to pick whose “man” they would become. Medieval
times included elaborate ceremonies in which the fealty was consecrated.
With current elections, people are permitted to choose whose pawns
they will be. Voting is becoming more like a medieval act of fealty
– with voters bowing down their heads and promising obedience
to whoever is proclaimed the winner.
What
if being permitted to choose a master once every four years is the
primary “freedom” left? Are citizens merely choosing whose
vassal they will be? Many citizens today behave like slaves who
spent their time wishing for a good master, rather than scouting
up information on runaway routes.
America
was born as a republic – with limited-government powers, carefully
crafted checks and balances, and distinct roles for the people,
for legislators, for judges, and for the executive branch. Many
Americans these days are content with “democracy” –
regardless of how much of the strength and safeguards of the original
Constitution have been lost.
“Representative
government” is a phrase far less prone to induce mass delusions
than is democracy. “Democracy” sounds like automatic pilot
– that the government will serve the people simply because
that is part of the mission statement. In contrast, the term “representative
government” sounds more hit and miss. There is no transcendence
in the term “representative government” – nothing
to make people believe that government bureaus magically fulfill
the rhetoric of presidential speech writers. Representatives are
merely representatives, not incarnations of the General Will or
the voice of God. Instead, they are usually simply people who preferred
the pursuit of power to other ways of making a buck. Even when representative
government works tolerably well, it is difficult to inspire the
representatives to do much more than hustle for their own reelection.