Voting Responsibility Quotes

Every election is determined by the people who show up.

The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.

Democracy is not simply a license to indulge individual whims and proclivities. It is also holding oneself accountable to some reasonable degree for the conditions of peace and chaos that impact the lives of those who inhabit one’s beloved extended community.

When the faithful are asked whether God really exists, they often begin by talking about the enigmatic mysteries of the universe and the limits of human understanding. ‘Science cannot explain the Big Bang,’ they exclaim, ‘so that must be God’s doing.’ Yet like a magician fooling an audience by imperceptibly replacing one card with another, the faithful quickly replace the cosmic mystery with the worldly lawgiver. After giving the name of ‘God’ to the unknown secrets of the cosmos, they then use this to somehow condemn bikinis and divorces. ‘We do not understand the Big Bang – therefore you must cover your hair in public and vote against gay marriage.’ Not only is there no logical connection between the two, but they are in fact contradictory. The deeper the mysteries of the universe, the less likely it is that whatever is responsible for them gives a damn about female dress codes or human sexual behaviour.

The job facing American voters… in the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it, to heal the wounds of a nation as opposed to aggravate its injuries, and to secure for the next generation a legacy of choices based on informed awareness rather than one of reactions based on unknowing fear.

My fault started two decades ago, the first time I didn't vote, the umpteen times I told Jackie I was too busy to go on one of her marches or make posters or call my congressmen.

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

You didn’t vote? How could you not vote?! You abdicated your responsibility as a citizen at the worst possible time! And now you want me to make you feel better?” Of course, I didn’t say any of that.

Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history... No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple.

Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.' But it is hardly strange. Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind. We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen. Washington himself appreciated Paine at his true worth. Franklin knew him for a great patriot and clear thinker. He was a friend and confidant of Jefferson, and the two must often have debated the academic and practical phases of liberty. I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. Although the present generation knows little of Paine's writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it. Truth is governed by natural laws and cannot be denied. Paine spoke truth with a peculiarly clear and forceful ring. Therefore time must balance the scales. The Declaration and the Constitution expressed in form Paine's theory of political rights. He worked in Philadelphia at the time that the first document was written, and occupied a position of intimate contact with the nation's leaders when they framed the Constitution. Certainly we may believe that Washington had a considerable voice in the Constitution. We know that Jefferson had much to do with the document. Franklin also had a hand and probably was responsible in even larger measure for the Declaration. But all of these men had communed with Paine. Their views were intimately understood and closely correlated. There is no doubt whatever that the two great documents of American liberty reflect the philosophy of Paine. ...Then Paine wrote 'Common Sense,' an anonymous tract which immediately stirred the fires of liberty. It flashed from hand to hand throughout the Colonies. One copy reached the New York Assembly, in session at Albany, and a night meeting was voted to answer this unknown writer with his clarion call to liberty. The Assembly met, but could find no suitable answer. Tom Paine had inscribed a document which never has been answered adversely, and never can be, so long as man esteems his priceless possession. In 'Common Sense' Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again. It must be remembered that 'Common Sense' preceded the declaration and affirmed the very principles that went into the national doctrine of liberty. But that affirmation was made with more vigor, more of the fire of the patriot and was exactly suited to the hour... Certainly [the Revolution] could not be forestalled, once he had spoken. {The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}

Today women have the rights and equality our Victorian sisters could only dream of, and with those privileges comes the responsibility of standing up and being counted.

The fewer responsibilities we have, the less free we are. Communism and democracy differ in this only by a matter of degree. We can vote away freedom as easily as it can be taken away.

Complacent eligible voters who abstained from voting because “I don’t like either candidate”— provided a deadly assist. You are the collective of assassins responsible for slaughtering the America of hope and progress. Afro Bo Peep

So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control--what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another.

I have not voted in a human presidential election for quite some time, Jonathan. Admittedly, it may not be my place. Still, do you know what really stops me from selecting a candidate?” Jonathan listened but mostly focused on containing his nausea. “It’s a paradox, I know. It just seems that anyone smart enough to know the responsibility of such a seat of power would never be dumb enough to apply for it.

Born as I was the citizen of a free state and a member of its sovereign body, the very right to vote imposes on me the duty to instruct myself in public affairs, however little influence my voice may have in them.

A final irony has to do with the idea of political responsibility. Christians are urged to vote and become involved in politics as an expression of their civic duty and public responsibility. This is a credible argument and good advice up to a point. Yet in our day, given the size of the state and the expectations that people place on it to solve so many problems, politics can also be a way of saying, in effect, that the problems should be solved by others besides myself and by institutions other than the church. It is, after all, much easier to vote for a politician who champions child welfare than to adopt a baby born in poverty, to vote for a referendum that would expand health care benefits for seniors than to care for an elderly and infirmed parent, and to rally for racial harmony than to get to know someone of a different race than yours. True responsibility invariably costs. Political participation, then, can and often does amount to an avoidance of responsibility.

In this image-driven age, wildlife filmmakers carry a heavy responsibility. They can influence how we think and behave when we’re in nature. They can even influence how we raise our kids, how we vote and volunteer in our communities, as well as the future of our wildlands and wildlife. If the stories they create are misleading or false in some way, viewers will misunderstand the issues and react in inappropriate ways. People who consume a heavy diet of wildlife films filled with staged violence and aggression, for example, are likely to think about nature as a circus or a freak show. They certainly won’t form the same positive connections to the natural world as people who watch more thoughtful, authentic, and conservation-oriented films.

Most people who voted for Trump and Brexit didn’t reject the liberal package in its entirety –they lost faith mainly in its globalising part. They still believe in democracy, free markets, human rights and social responsibility, but they think these fine ideas can stop at the border.

I have divided politicians into two categories: the Signposts and the Weathercocks. The Signpost says: 'This is the way we should go.' And you don't have to follow them but if you come back in ten years time the Signpost is still there. The Weathercock hasn’t got an opinion until they've looked at the polls, talked to the focus groups, discussed it with the spin doctors. And I've no time for Weathercocks, I'm a Signpost man. And in fairness, although I disagreed with everything she did, Mrs Thatcher was a Signpost. She said what she meant. Meant what she said. Did what she said she’d do if you voted for her. So everybody who voted for her shared responsibility for what happened. And I think that we do need a few more Signposts and few fewer Weathercocks.

I celebrate ideals of individual excellence, self-reliance, and personal responsibility… But rugged individualism alone did not get us to the moon. It did not end slavery, win World War II, pass the Voting Rights Act, or bring down the Berlin Wall. It didn’t build our dams, bridges, and highways, or map the human genome. Our most lasting accomplishments require mutual effort and shared sacrifice; this is an idea that is woven into the very fabric of this country.

Jefferson believed full citizenship was a privilege to be earned by each man, that it was not something given lightly nor to be taken lightly. A man couldn’t vote simply because he was a man, in Jefferson’s eyes. He had to be a responsible man. A vote was, to Jefferson, a precious privilege a man attained for himself in a—a live-and-let-live economy.

The Republican establishment is haunted by painful memories of what happened to Old Man Bush in 1992. He peaked too early and he had no response to “It’s the economy, stupid.” Which has always been the case. Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the military-industrial complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous “trickle-down” theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow “trickle down” to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.

Ultimately our problems will not be solved by the right man (or woman) in the White House. It simply doesn’t work that way. We live in a democracy, a representative form of government, where it’s as much if not more our responsibility to love and take care of our neighbors than our politician’s responsibility. Real and lasting change comes from knowing and loving the folks who live in the houses that sit next to ours rather than saving all of our longing and hope for the voting booth...Our ultimate hope is not in politicians or powers or governments, but in a day coming when all things will be made right. And our ultimate concern isn’t success but faithfulness.

what sets him apart and causes him still to fascinate today are not only his responses to the setbacks that he experienced at almost every step of the way, but how many of the Athenian voting public continued to believe in him despite suffering the consequence of his betrayals, how, knowing that he was the architect of their defeat, they still yearned to have him lead them, and, in the end, how his life both shaped and mirrored the fortunes of his city.

We don’t simply say something that’s untrue. We make statements so insane that there’s no possible intelligent response. Like arguing with some old fart in a rocking chair who claims we never landed on the moon. Any educated person can only laugh. Meanwhile, we’ve just won over all the non-moon-landing votes.

Politicians will always offer to handle education, health care, retirement, and so forth, as if they come at no cost. But there are caveats. If the government is the provider of “free” education, then the government will also decide what is taught and, potentially, how it is used. The fewer responsibilities we have, the less free we are. Communism and democracy differ in this only by a matter of degree. We can vote away freedom as easily as it can be taken away.

Think about it: If you have saved just enough to have your own house, your own car, a modicum of income to pay for food, clothes, and a few conveniences, and your everyday responsibilities start and end only with yourself… You can afford not to do anything outside of breathing, eating, and sleeping. Time would be an endless, white blanket. Without folds and pleats or sudden rips. Monday would look like Sunday, going sans adrenaline, slow, so slow and so unnoticed. Flowing, flowing, time is flowing in phrases, in sentences, in talk exchanges of people that come as pictures and videos, appearing, disappearing, in the safe, distant walls of Facebook. Dial fast food for a pizza, pasta, a burger or a salad. Cooking is for those with entire families to feed. The sala is well appointed. A day-maid comes to clean. Quietly, quietly she dusts a glass figurine here, the flat TV there. No words, just a ho-hum and then she leaves as silently as she came. Press the shower knob and water comes as rain. A TV remote conjures news and movies and soaps. And always, always, there’s the internet for uncomplaining company. Outside, little boys and girls trudge along barefoot. Their tinny, whiny voices climb up your windowsill asking for food. You see them. They don’t see you. The same way the vote-hungry politicians, the power-mad rich, the hey-did-you-know people from newsrooms, and the perpetually angry activists don’t see you. Safely ensconced in your tower of concrete, you retreat. Uncaring and old./HOW EASY IT IS NOT TO CARE

That's incredible...I don't know--okay, well, you know, nobody's probably voting for me. I mean, I'm not Richard. I haven't gone out of my way to be responsible or anything.

Awake, Arise and Vote.

We don’t vote for people because they are the exact embodiment of our values, but because they are likely to be the most responsive to them.

Active loyalists do not merely support the president but publicly defend even his most controversial moves. Passive loyalists retreat from public view when scandals erupt but still vote with the president. Critical loyalists try, in a sense, to have it both ways. They may publicly distance themselves from the president's worst behavior, but they do not take any action (for example, voting in Congress) that will weaken, much less bring down, the president. In the face of presidential abuse, any of these responses will enable authoritarianism.

The same people who wear shirts that read “fuck your feelings” and rail against “political correctness” seem to believe that there should be no social consequences for [voting for Trump]. I keep hearing calls for empathy and healing, civility and polite discourse. As if supporting a man who would fill his administration with white nationalists and misogynists is something to simply agree to disagree on. Absolutely not. You don’t get to vote for a person who brags about sexual assault and expect that the women in your life will just shrug their shoulders. You don’t get to play the victim when people unfriend you on Facebook, as if being disliked for supporting a bigot is somehow worse than the suffering that marginalized people will endure under Trump. And you certainly do not get to enjoy a performance by people of color and those in the LGBT community without remark or protest when you enact policies and stoke hatred that put those very people’s lives in danger. Being socially ostracized for supporting Trump is not an infringement of your rights, it’s a reasonable response by those of us who are disgusted, anxious, and afraid. I was recently accused by a writer of “vote shaming” – but there’s nothing wrong with being made to feel ashamed for doing something shameful.

Standing behind” a politician just because you voted for him or her does not make you patriotic, or loyal, or even smart—what it does make you is derelict in your responsibilities as a citizen.

Nineteenth-century liberalism had assumed that man was a rational being who operated naturally according to his own best interests, so that in the end, what was reasonable would prevail. On this principle liberals defended extension of the suffrage toward the goal of one man, one vote. But a rise in literacy and in the right to vote, as the event proved, did nothing to increase common sense in politics. The mob that is moved by waving the bloody shirt, that decides elections in response to slogans—Free Silver, Hang the Kaiser, Two Cars in Every Garage—is not exhibiting any greater political sense than Marie Antoinette, who said, “Let them eat cake,” or Caligula, who made his horse a consul. The common man proved no wiser than the decadent aristocrat. He has not shown in public affairs the innate wisdom which democracy presumed he possessed.

No government, no party, no law, no army is stronger than the people - the resolve of the people can defeat even the strongest of armies - such is the power of the people - the people who are considered ordinary - the people who are considered common.

What a country of lazy shits, with fucking hypocritical politicians claiming that people actually wanted to work if they could. Norwegians voted for the Socialist Party because it made it a human right to shirk their jobs, and who the hell wouldn't vote for a party that gave you three days off without a doctor's note, gave you carte blanche to sit at home and jerk off or go skiing or recover from a hangover? The Socialist Party knew, of course, what a perk this was, but still tried to appear responsible, preened themselves with their "trust in most people" and declared the right to malinger as some kind of social reform. The Progress Party was even more fucking infuriating, buying itself votes with tax cuts and hardly bothering to conceal the fact.

Back in 2007, former Fed chair Alan Greenspan had been asked by the Zürich daily Tages-Anzeiger which candidate he was supporting in the upcoming presidential election. His response was striking. How he voted did not matter, Greenspan declared, because “(we) are fortunate that, thanks to globalization, policy decisions in the US have been largely replaced by global market forces. National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces.

Change - I beg you - change for your children - for their health, sanity and prosperity. Stop buying every single new nonessential technology - stop wasting electricity - stop wasting fuel on carefree long drives - stop voting candidates impressed by their charm.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the state legislature set up the Southeast Flood Control Commission to come up with a plan for protecting Louisiana from floods. They concluded that the best course of action was to fill in the canals and repair the shore. Since this was a task the oil companies had in their contracts agreed to do, and had not done, in 2014 the commission did what had never been done: it sued the ninety-seven responsible oil companies. Governor Jindal quickly squashed the upstart commission. He removed members from it. He challenged its right to sue. In another unprecedented move, the legislature voted to nullify—retroactively—the lawsuit by withdrawing the authority to file it from those who had done so. A measure (SB 553) called for costs of repairs to be paid, not by the oil companies, but by the state’s taxpayers.

Self-government will not work unless the citizens bear the responsibility to vote in such a way that continues their freedoms and their ability to have free elections, that continues their economic prosperity. They have to vote in a way that does not trade the future for the present. This

But in the end we found it impossible to ignore the impassioned pleas of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolaño’s prose. That the popularity of the spicy tuna roll and a black American president were to white male domination what the smallpox blankets were to Native American existence. Those inclined to believe in free will and the free market argue that the Lost City of White Male Privilege was responsible for its own demise, that the constant stream of contradictory religious and secular edicts from on high confused the highly impressionable white male. Reduced him to a state of such severe social and psychic anxiety that he stopped fucking. Stopped voting. Stopped reading. And, most important, stopped thinking that he was the end-all, be-all, or at least knew enough to pretend not to be so in public. But in any case, it became impossible to walk the streets of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, feeding your ego by reciting mythological truisms like “We built this country!” when all around you brown men were constantly hammering and nailing, cooking world-class French meals, and repairing your cars. You couldn’t shout “America, love it or leave it!” when deep down inside you longed to live in Toronto.

As a people, we tend to feel very proud of ourselves because of democracy. We walk into that booth and cast our votes and wear that adhesive “I Voted” sticker as if it is a badge of honor. But the truth is more complex. We have as much responsibility coming out of the booth as we do going in. If the people we elect are sending people to their deaths or worse, sending other people half a world away—whom we never even consider because they don’t look like us or sound like us—to their deaths and we do nothing to stop it, aren’t we just as guilty? And if we want to see a war criminal all we have to do is look in the mirror.

The actual consumers of knowledge are the children—who can’t pay, can’t vote, can’t sit on the committees. Their parents care for them, but don’t sit in the classes themselves; they can only hold politicians responsible according to surface images of “tough on education.” Politicians are too busy being re-elected to study all the data themselves; they have to rely on surface images of bureaucrats being busy and commissioning studies—it may not work to help any children, but it works to let politicians appear caring. Bureaucrats don’t expect to use textbooks themselves, so they don’t care if the textbooks are hideous to read, so long as the process by which they are purchased looks good on the surface. The textbook publishers have no motive to produce bad textbooks, but they know that the textbook purchasing committee will be comparing textbooks based on how many different subjects they cover, and that the fourth-grade purchasing committee isn’t coordinated with the third-grade purchasing committee, so they cram as many subjects into one textbook as possible. Teachers won’t get through a fourth of the textbook before the end of the year, and then the next year’s teacher will start over. Teachers might complain, but they aren’t the decision-makers, and ultimately, it’s not their future on the line, which puts sharp bounds on how much effort they’ll spend on unpaid altruism . . .

The White House did not want me to introduce the bill. They wanted someone more senior to be in charge and responsible for passing it, someone on the Armed Services Committee, someone perceived as more conservative—specifically, Joe Lieberman. He had gravitas from years in the Senate; plus, he was an independent who could arguably bring in more Republican votes.

We do not understand the Big Bang – therefore you must cover your hair in public and vote against gay marriage'. Not only is there no logical connection between the two, but they are in fact contradictory. The deeper the mysteries of the universe, the less likely it is that whatever is responsible for them gives a damn about female dress codes or human sexual behaviour.

Almost from the moment votes are counted, lame-duck chief executives invariably recede into superfluity, but Lincoln’s hapless predecessor, James Buchanan, made procrastination into an art form. He could not have excused himself from responsibility at a more portentous moment, or left his successor with graver problems to address once he was constitutionally entitled to do so.

Since more people vote in reality television shows than in elections for the European Parliament or municipal authorities the response of politicians has been to try desperately to be more like television: conversational friendly emotional and not too demanding. How else can Congressmen and parliamentarians retain the interest of the young How else to be heard through the cacophony of information overload

On the contrary, the inflation itself is partly a response to the reaction. As it has become politically less attractive to vote higher taxes to pay for higher spending, legislators have resorted to financing spending through inflation, a hidden tax that can be imposed without having been voted, taxation without representation. That is no more popular in the twentieth century than it was in the eighteenth.

By all accounts the Angolan people, the great majority of them poor, illiterate and living in isolated villages or urban slums, carry out their civic responsibilities with great dignity and patience. The two voting days in Angola are another confirmation that anyone who mouths the cliché that Africans are not ready for democracy is simply ignorant of the facts. African politicians, however, are a different matter.

Sentences like the following are found in many mystical and reactionary writings though not as clearly formulated as by Hutten: ''Kulturbolschewismus is nothing new. It is based on a striving which humanity has had since its earliest days: the longing for happiness. It is the eternal nostalgia for paradise on earth . . . The religion of faith is replaced by the religion of pleasure.'' We, on the other hand, ask: Why not happiness on earth? Why should not pleasure be the content of life? If one were to put this question to a general vote, no reactionary ideology could stand up. The reactionary also recognizes, though in a mystical manner, the connection between mysticism and compulsive marriage and family: ''Because of this responsibility (for the possible consequences of pleasure), society has created the institution of marriage which, as a lifelong union, provides the protective frame for the sexual relationship.'' Right after this, we find the whole register of "cultural values" which, in the framework of reactionary ideology, fit together like the parts of a machine: ''Marriage as a tie, the family as a duty, the fatherland as value of its own, morality as authority, religion as obligation from eternity.'' It would be impossible better to describe the rigidity of human plasma!

I wonder what would happen if there were a United Organization of Organisms (UOO, pronounced “uh-oh”), where each species gets one vote. Would we be voted off the planet? The answer is pretty clear. When we irresponsibly exploit the Earth, disease, famine, and ecological collapse result. We face the possibility of being rejected by the biosphere as a virulent organism. But if we act as a responsible species, nature will not evict us.

As a contrast to this kind of democracy we have the German democracy, which is a true democracy; for here the leader is freely chosen and is obliged to accept full responsibility for all his actions and omissions. The problems to be dealt with are not put to the vote of the majority; but they are decided upon by the individual, and as a guarantee of responsibility for those decisions he pledges all he has in the world and even his life.

Democracy without accountability is nothing but rule by the mob. As long as we claim the right to vote, we also assume responsibility for that vote; and if an opinion is good enough to share, then it is good enough to defend, to challenge, and (most importantly) to change if and when need be. Social taboos against discussing those most consequential of topics for fear of collateral feelings amount to nothing but a cowardly kind of nihilism best abandoned.

So you don't think the government is responsible for anything?" "Oh, it's responsible," Rafferty says. "It's responsible for the sloppiness and imprecision of the War on Terror, for example. It's responsible for taking people's tax dollars and spending the country into debt on useless wars and pointless pork projects to buy votes. It's responsible for bailing out the banks instead of standing up for the people the banks cheated. It's responsible for plenty,

Not long ago Congress voted, with much patriotic rhetoric, for the imposition of severe penalties upon anyone presuming to burn the flag of the United States. Yet the very Congressmen who passed this law are responsible, by acts of commission or omission, for burning, polluting, and plundering the territory that the flag is supposed to represent. Therein, they exemplified the peculiar and perhaps fatal fallacy of civilization: the confusion of symbol with reality.

Most people who voted for Trump and Brexit didn’t reject the liberal package in its entirety—they lost faith mainly in its globalizing part. They still believe in democracy, free markets, human rights, and social responsibility, but they think these fine ideas can stop at the border. Indeed, they believe that in order to preserve liberty and prosperity in Yorkshire or Kentucky, it is best to build a wall on the border and adopt illiberal policies toward foreigners.

George W. Bush gave this response to the question of ‘Why do they hate us?’: ‘…They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote…’ If these analyses are correct, it would appear that Bin Laden and his gang in Tora Bora had simply stumbled onto a copy of the Bill of Rights and gone berserk….We are not hated for who we are or what we believe; we are hated for what we do. It is not our principles that are despised; it is our policies.

it was clear that true freedom meant not just the ability to vote or choose one’s own political representatives, but the ability to build one’s own schools, to have accessible health care and jobs, to have clean air and water and energy in the control of the communities that utilize them. Of course, true freedom and independence also includes a free and fair judicial system, with responsible and accountable policing, fair legal process, and reasoned judgment and sentencing.

Much needs to be done to fix the gerrymandered system so that each citizen has one equal vote, and so that each vote can be simply counted by a fellow citizen. We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted. This sort of work can be done at the local and state levels. We can be sure that the elections of 2018, assuming they take place, will be a test of American traditions. So there is much to do in the meantime. 4 Take responsibility for the face of the world. The

governments budgeted anywhere from one-tenth to more than one-half of their economies to fight the pandemic. No taxpayers were called upon to foot the bill, no creditors were asked to lend them money. Governments voted for the budgets they considered to be necessary and their central banks made the payments. The size of the response was all the evidence one needed to grasp the monetary reality. Governments which issue and control their own currencies face no financing constraints and no threat of insolvency or default.

He spoke of Black suffrage: on April 11, 1865, he expressed a desire to allow some Blacks (those who had fought for the Union and, in a less appealing phrase, the “very intelligent”) to vote. Present at that speech was John Wilkes Booth, who fumed in response, “That means n***** citizenship” and “That is the last speech he will ever make.” Four days later Lincoln was dead—a martyr not for the cause of Union, but for Black citizenship. Andrew Johnson succeeded to the presidency, and public opinion hardened against the South.

At work, I was still attending all the meetings I always had while also grappling with most of the same responsibilities. The only real difference was that I now made half my original salary and was trying to cram everything into a twenty-hour week. If a meeting ran late, I’d end up tearing home at breakneck speed to fetch Malia so that we could arrive on time (Malia eager and happy, me sweaty and hyperventilating) to the afternoon Wiggleworms class at a music studio on the North Side. To me, it felt like a sanity-warping double bind. I battled guilt when I had to take work calls at home. I battled a different sort of guilt when I sat at my office distracted by the idea that Malia might be allergic to peanuts. Part-time work was meant to give me more freedom, but mostly it left me feeling as if I were only half doing everything, that all the lines in my life had been blurred. Meanwhile, it seemed that Barack had hardly missed a stride. A few months after Malia’s birth, he’d been reelected to a four-year term in the state senate, winning with 89 percent of the vote.

No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it. At the crest of their popular strength, in July 1932, the National Socialists had attained but 37 per cent of the vote. But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out.

There must be no majority decisions, but only responsible persons… Surely every man will have advisers by his side, but the decision will be made by one man*… only he alone may possess the authority and the right to command… It will not be possible to dispense with Parliament. But their councilors will then actually give counsel… In no chamber does a vote ever take place. They are working institutions and not voting machines. This principle—absolute responsibility unconditionally combined with absolute authority—will gradually breed an elite of leaders such as today, in this era of irresponsible parliamentarianism, is utterly inconceivable.21

If you feel genuinely impelled to vote the Republican ticket, that's not my affair, of course. Indeed, the Socialist party of this country constitutes only one branch of international socialism. But I do demand of you that you try to think for yourselves, if you are going to have the nerve to vote at all — think of it — to vote how this whole nation is to be conducted! Doesn't that tremendous responsibility demand that you do something more than inherit your way of voting? that you really think, think hard, why you vote as you do?... Pardon me for getting away from the subject proper — yet am I, actually? For just what I have been saying is one of the messages of Shaw and Wells.

How are we going to bring about these transformations? Politics as usual—debate and argument, even voting—are no longer sufficient. Our system of representative democracy, created by a great revolution, must now itself become the target of revolutionary change. For too many years counting, vast numbers of people stopped going to the polls, either because they did not care what happened to the country or the world or because they did not believe that voting would make a difference on the profound and interconnected issues that really matter. Now, with a surge of new political interest having give rise to the Obama presidency, we need to inject new meaning into the concept of the “will of the people.” The will of too many Americans has been to pursue private happiness and take as little responsibility as possible for governing our country. As a result, we have left the job of governing to our elected representatives, even though we know that they serve corporate interests and therefore make decisions that threaten our biosphere and widen the gulf between the rich and poor both in our country and throughout the world. In other words, even though it is readily apparent that our lifestyle choices and the decisions of our representatives are increasing social injustice and endangering our planet, too many of us have wanted to continue going our merry and not-so-merry ways, periodically voting politicians in and out of office but leaving the responsibility for policy decisions to them. Our will has been to act like consumers, not like responsible citizens. Historians may one day look back at the 2000 election, marked by the Supreme Court’s decision to award the presidency to George W. Bush, as a decisive turning point in the death of representative democracy in the United States. National Public Radio analyst Daniel Schorr called it “a junta.” Jack Lessenberry, columnist for the MetroTimes in Detroit, called it “a right-wing judicial coup.” Although more restrained, the language of dissenting justices Breyer, Ginsberg, Souter, and Stevens was equally clear. They said that there was no legal or moral justification for deciding the presidency in this way.3 That’s why Al Gore didn’t speak for me in his concession speech. You don’t just “strongly disagree” with a right-wing coup or a junta. You expose it as illegal, immoral, and illegitimate, and you start building a movement to challenge and change the system that created it. The crisis brought on by the fraud of 2000 and aggravated by the Bush administration’s constant and callous disregard for the Constitution exposed so many defects that we now have an unprecedented opportunity not only to improve voting procedures but to turn U.S. democracy into “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” instead of government of, by, and for corporate power.

For us, the possibility of kindly use is weighted with problems. In the first place, this is not ultimately an organization or institutional solution. Institutional solutions tend to narrow and simplify as they approach action. A large number of people can act together only by defining the point or the line on which their various interests converge. Organizations tend to move toward single objectives -- a ruling, a vote, a law -- and they find it relatively simple to cohere under acronyms and slogans. But kindly use is a concept that of necessity broadens, becoming more complex and diverse, as it approaches action. The land is too various in its kinds, climates, conditions, declivities, aspects, and histories to conform to any generalized understanding or to prosper under generalized treatment. The use of land cannot be both general and kindly -- just as the forms of good manners, generally applied (applied, that is, without consideration of differences), are experienced as indifference, bad manners. To treat every field, or every part of every field, with the same consideration is not farming but industry. Kindly use depends upon intimate knowledge, the most sensitive responsiveness and responsibility. As knowledge (hence, use) is generalized, essential values are destroyed. As the householder evolves into a consumer, the farm evolves into a factory -- with results that are potentially calamitous for both.

I’ve always thought the pre-Revolutionary system was more elegant, but it did concentrate too much power in the hands of one person. Keyes says that at least you knew who the man was then. The person who represents a Lobby in Congress is never the one who makes the real decisions; the real leaders are rarely identifiable and are never held responsible for their actions. If a puppet gets in trouble they sacrifice him and haul out another. I don’t doubt that that’s true, at least some of the time, but it’s certainly not the whole story. If a Lobby consistently acts against the public interest, its voting power dwindles away. Keyes says that’s a cynical illusion: all the polls reflect is how much money a Lobby has put into advertising.

Our vote for President of the United States (for those of you who are Americans) is important. We are held accountable, as we’ll discuss, for the discharge of our ruling responsibilities in this life. But our vote for President is less important than our vote to receive new members for baptism into our churches. A President is term-limited and, for that matter, so is the United States (and every other nation). The reception of members into the church, however, marks out the future kings and queens of the universe. Our church membership rolls say to the people on them, and to the outside world, “These are those we believe will inherit the universe, as joint-heirs with Christ.” That’s a matter of priority of each, not a pullback from either.

On the other hand, irrational fears are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. Here’s an example: when 152 people were infected with swine flu in Mexico in 2009, people around the world, prodded by the media’s manufactured hysteria, erupted in fear of an epidemic. We were warned that the threat was everywhere—that everyone was potentially at risk; however, the data showed these fears to be completely unwarranted. Weeks into the “outbreak,” there were around 1,000 reported cases of the virus in 20 countries. The number of fatalities stood at 26—25 in Mexico, and one in the United States (a boy who had just traveled to Texas from Mexico). Yet schools were closed, travel was restricted, emergency rooms were flooded, hundreds of thousands of pigs were killed, hand sanitizer and face masks disappeared from store shelves, and network news stories about swine flu consumed 43% of airtime.9 “There is too much hysteria in the country and so far, there hasn’t been that great a danger,” commented Congressman Ron Paul in response. “It’s overblown, grossly so.”10 He should know. During Paul’s first session in Congress in 1976, a swine flu outbreak led Congress to vote to vaccinate the entire country. (He voted against it.) Twenty-five people died from the vaccination itself, while only one person was killed from the actual virus; hundreds, if not more, contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome, a paralyzing neurological illness, as a result of the vaccine. Nearly 25 percent of the population was vaccinated before the effort was cancelled due to safety concerns.

Folkloric dances in the metro, innumerable campaigns for security, the slogan “tomorrow I work” accompanied by a smile formerly reserved for leisure time, and the advertising sequence for the election to the Prud-hommes (an industrial tribunal): “I don’t let anyone choose for me”—an Ubuesque slogan, one that rang so spectacularly falsely, with a mocking liberty, that of proving the social while denying it. It is not by chance that advertising, after having, for a long time, carried an implicit ultimatum of an economic kind, fundamentally saying and repeating incessantly, “I buy, I consume, I take pleasure,” today repeats in other forms, “I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned”—mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification.

King’s primary responsibility, though, was to issue a call for action, and stress the need to expand the struggle on all fronts. Up to now we have thought of the color question as something which could be solved in and of itself. We know now that while it [is] necessary to say ‘No’ to racial injustice, this must be followed by a positive program of action: the struggle for the right to vote, for economic uplift of the people. A part of this is the realization that men are truly brothers, that the Negro cannot be free so long as there are poor and underprivileged white people.… Equality for Negroes is related to the greater problem of economic uplift for Negroes and poor white men. They share a common problem and have a common interest in working together for economic and social uplift. They can and must work together.

If our first response to the receipt of gifts is gratitude, then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return. What could I give these plants in return for their generosity? I could return the gift with a direct response, like weeding or bringing water or offering a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind. I could make habitat for the solitary bees that fertilized those fruits. Or maybe I could take indirect action, like donating to my local land trust so that more habitat for the gift givers will be saved, speaking at a public hearing on land use, or making art that invites others into the web of reciprocity. I could reduce my carbon footprint, vote on the side of healthy land, advocate for farmland preservation, change my diet, hang my laundry in the sunshine. We live in a time when every choice matters.

The intriguing history of American applied toponymy includes a few notoriously unpopular sweeping decisions a year after President Benjamin Harrison created the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. Harrison acted at the behest of several government agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was responsible for mapping the nation's coastline, harbors, and coastal waterways. Troubled by inconsistencies in spelling, board members voted to replace centre with center, drop the ugh from names ending in orough, and shorten the suffix burgh to burg. Overnight, Centreview (in Mississippi) became Centerview, Isleborough (in Maine) became Isleboro, and Pittsburgh (in Pennsylvania) lost its final h and a lot of civic pride. The city was chartered in 1816 as Pittsburg, but the Post Office Department added the extra letter sometime later. Although both spellings were used locally and the shorter version had been the official name, many Pittsburghers complained bitterly about the cost of reprinting stationery and repainting signs. Making the spelling consistent with Harrisburg, they argued, was hardly a good reason for truncating the Iron City's moniker--although Harrisburg was the state capital, it was a smaller and economically less important place. Local officials protested that the board had exceeded its authority. The twenty-year crusade to restore the final h bore fruit in 1911, when the board reversed itself--but only for Pittsburgh. In 1916 the board reaffirmed its blanket change of centre, borough, and burgh as well as its right to make exceptions for Pittsburgh and other places with an entrenched local usage.

SUFFRAGE, n. Expression of opinion by means of a ballot. The right of suffrage (which is held to be both a privilege and a duty) means, as commonly interpreted, the right to vote for the man of another man's choice, and is highly prized. Refusal to do so has the bad name of "incivism." The incivilian, however, cannot be properly arraigned for his crime, for there is no legitimate accuser. If the accuser is himself guilty he has no standing in the court of opinion; if not, he profits by the crime, for A's abstention from voting gives greater weight to the vote of B. By female suffrage is meant the right of a woman to vote as some man tells her to. It is based on female responsibility, which is somewhat limited. The woman most eager to jump out of her petticoat to assert her rights is first to jump back into it when threatened with a switching for misusing them.

American politics is dominated by an enduring myth—that Democrats are the party of the common man; the voiceless, the powerless, the poor. That if you care about what happens to the least among us, you will cast your vote in the Democratic column. But the reality is this: the vast majority of voiceless, powerless and poor people are concentrated in Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, Atlanta, and America’s other large urban centers. All of them are run by Democrats and have been for 50 to 100 years. On the Democrats’ watch, these cities have become the equivalent of holding cells for the poor and minorities. Everything that’s wrong with America’s cities that can be affected by policy, Democrats are responsible for. There are poor to be helped, but Democrats have buried them deeper in poverty and powerlessness. There are minorities who seek opportunities, but Democrats have kept them second class citizens. Democrats have been the problem rather than the solution.

Power has always been a temptation, and I want to argue that majority rule in America carries with it an empire temptation for many Christian citizens. Those of us who know our American history might be tempted to say, “That’s precisely the opposite of what our democracy, or representative democracy, stands for.” True enough, at one level, because giving everyone a voice vastly surpasses anything less. But take any heated political issue, from abortion to same-sex marriage to national health care to free-market enterprise to nuclear build-up for security, and you may glimpse what I’m trying to say. The political left takes one posture on issues while the political right draws swords from another posture. If we step back we see that each side seeks to impose its view on the minority. This is ruling over the other. Now to a few questions. Is this imposition of power over others consistent with following Christ? Do we ever wonder if the right to vote is the right to coerce and impose, the right to use the power of the majority against the minority?17 Is the power of the majority that different from the power of King Charles when the pilgrims and Puritans left England to establish the “city on a hill”? We would all agree that empowering the people improved the conditions, but I want to ask another question: Does it make the political process of voting the source of seeking for power over others? What is the best Christian response to the drive for power? I call this quest for power through the political process the “eschatology of politics”—that is, the belief that if we usher in the right political candidates and the right laws, then kingdom conditions will arrive. Every two years America goes through convulsions as one candidate after another promises (all but) the kingdom if he or she is elected. Every two years Americans go through the same convulsions as they lather up for the election because they believe if they get their candidate, not only will they win, but (all but) the kingdom will come. This is idolatry and yet another example of Constantinianism

Once again, in response to a major disruption in the prevailing racial order—this time the civil rights gains of the 1960s—a new system of racialized social control was created by exploiting the vulnerabilities and racial resentments of poor and working-class whites. More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote. The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born.

No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it. At the crest of their popular strength, in July 1932, the National Socialists had attained but 37 per cent of the vote. But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out. The Communists, at the behest of Moscow, were committed to the last to the silly idea of first destroying the Social Democrats, the Socialist trade unions and what middle-class democratic forces there were, on the dubious theory that although this would lead to a Nazi regime it would be only temporary and would bring inevitably the collapse of capitalism, after which the Communists would take over and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Fascism, in the Bolshevik Marxist view, represented the last stage of a dying capitalism; after that, the Communist deluge!

In this march through a virtual lifetime, we’ve visited school and college, the courts and the workplace, even the voting booth. Along the way, we’ve witnessed the destruction caused by WMDs. Promising efficiency and fairness, they distort higher education, drive up debt, spur mass incarceration, pummel the poor at nearly every juncture, and undermine democracy. It might seem like the logical response is to disarm these weapons, one by one. The problem is that they’re feeding on each other. Poor people are more likely to have bad credit and live in high-crime neighborhoods, surrounded by other poor people. Once the dark universe of WMDs digests that data, it showers them with predatory ads for subprime loans or for-profit schools. It sends more police to arrest them, and when they’re convicted it sentences them to longer terms. This data feeds into other WMDs, which score the same people as high risks or easy targets and proceed to block them from jobs, while jacking up their rates for mortgages, car loans, and every kind of insurance imaginable. This drives their credit rating down further, creating nothing less than a death spiral of modeling. Being poor in a world of WMDs is getting more and more dangerous and expensive.

The year 2020 will mark the end of the U.S. presidency and the executive branch of the government. Let’s just say the American public will finally be fed up by then and leave it at that. The legislative branch will essentially absorb the responsibilities of the executive branch, with a streamlined body of elected representatives, an equal number from each state, forming the new legislature, which will be known simply as the Senate. The “party” system of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, et al., will un-complicate itself into Liberals and Conservatives, who will debate and vote on each proposed bill and law in nationally televised sessions. Requirements for Senate candidates will be stringent and continuously monitored. For example, senators will be prohibited from having any past or present salaried position with any company that has ever had or might ever have a professional or contractual connection to federal, state, or local government, and each senator must submit to random drug and alcohol testing throughout his or her term. The long-term effects of this reorganized government and closely examined body of lawmakers will be a return of legislative accountability and public trust, and state governments will follow suit no later than 2024 by becoming smaller mirror images of the national Senate.

The individual citizen had no chance to voice his protest or his opinion, not even his fear. He could only leave the country - and so people did. Those who used 'I' instead of 'we' in their language had to escape. It was this fatal difference in grammar that divided them from the rest of their compatriots. As a consequence of this 'us', no civic society developed. The little there was, in the form of small, isolated, and marginalised groups, was soon swallowed up by the national homogenisation that did not permit any differences, any individualism. As under communism, individualism was punished - individuals speaking out against the war, or against nationalism, were singled out as 'traitors'. How does a person who is a product of a totalitarian society learn responsibility, individuality, initiative? by saying 'no'. But this begins with saying 'I', thinking 'I' and doing 'I' - in public as well as in private. Individuality, the first-person singular, always existed under communism, it was just exiled from public and political life and exercised in private. Thus the terrible hypocrisy with which we learned to live in order to survive is having its backlash now: it is very difficult to connect the private and public 'I'; to start believing that an individual opinion, initiative, or vote could make a difference. There is still too big a danger that the citizen will withdraw into an anonymous, safe 'us'.

We venerate centrists, moderates, independents. In a telling experiment, Samara Klara and Yanna Krupnikov cued subjects to think about political disagreements and then handed them photographs of strangers, some of whom were identified as independents and others of whom were said to be partisans. The independents were rated as more attractive, “even when, by objective standards, the partisans were actually more attractive.” In another test of the theory, Klar and Krupnikov found that Americans are nearly 60 percent more likely to call themselves “independents” when they’re told they need to make a good impression on a stranger. Being independent isn’t about whom you vote for. It’s about your personal brand. Our appreciation of independents reflects our denial of the substance of partisanship. We want to wish away the depths of our disagreements, and it is convenient to blame them instead on the maneuverings of misguided partisans. But partisans aren’t bad people perverting the political system through irrationality and self-interest. They’re normal people—you and me—reflecting the deep differences that define political systems the world over. And the more different the parties are, the more rational partisanship becomes. What has happened to American politics in recent decades is that the parties have become visibly, undeniably more different, and the country has rationally become more partisan in response.

In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them. Donald Trump did not trigger this militant turn; his rise was symptomatic of a long-standing condition. Survey data reveal the stark contours of the contemporary evangelical worldview. More than any other religious demographic in America, white evangelical Protestants support preemptive war, condone the use of torture, and favor the death penalty. They are more likely than members of other faith groups to own a gun, to believe citizens should be allowed to carry guns in most places, and to feel safer with a firearm around. White evangelicals are more opposed to immigration reform and have more negative views of immigrants than any other religious demographic; two-thirds support Trump’s border wall. Sixty-eight percent of white evangelical Protestants—more than any other demographic—do not think that the United States has a responsibility to accept refugees. More than half of white evangelical Protestants think a majority nonwhite US population would be a negative development. White evangelicals are considerably more likely than others to believe that Islam encourages violence, to refuse to see Islam as “part of mainstream American society,” and to perceive “natural conflict between Islam and democracy.” At the same time, white evangelicals believe that Christians in America face more discrimination than Muslims. White evangelicals are significantly more authoritarian than other religious groups, and they express confidence in their religious leaders at much higher rates than do members of other faiths.

The Hayes-Tilden deadlock and the fate of Radical Republican administrations in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana eventually were resolved in Washington with Senator John B. Gordon playing a large role. Gordon apparently helped forge a “bargain” under which the South agreed to certification of the election of Hayes on an understanding that the new President would evacuate the last Federal occupation troops from South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. This would remove Federal protection from those states’ Reconstruction administrations, giving Gordon’s friend Hampton the disputed South Carolina governorship and another Democrat, F. T. Nicholls, the governorship of Louisiana. This compromise completed the so-called “shotgun” political enterprise for which the Ku Klux Klan had been organized a decade before. The extended campaign of terror, led first by the Klan and then by myriad imitations or offshoots, swept the last troops of Federal occupation from the South, leaving the Southern Democratic power structure free to impose upon the region the white-supremacist program it desired. The New York Times had been proved essentially correct; even though Tilden had not been declared victorious over Hayes, the white South had nevertheless won its long struggle to begin the return of blacks to a status tantamount to their antebellum chains. In an economic sense, their new “freedom” would become worse than slavery, for with all Federal interference removed they soon would be allowed to vote only Democratic if at all—and this time there was no master charged with responsibility for providing them at least rudimentary shelter, food, and clothing.

Societies that permit the existence of parallelthe girl’s situation did not meet the requirements for coercive measures under the law, and if the girl would not voluntarily move away from her husband, it could not force her to. As a direct consequence of the case, the social services in Mönsterås had to move to a different location after receiving threats.14 This is a blatant breakdown in the rule of law. This girl’s rights were not protected by those who are paid by Swedish taxpayers to enforce the law against child marriage. And there are many more like her. In the United States, an estimated 248,000 children, some as young as 12, were married between 2000 and 2010.15 In Germany, too, the problem of child marriage arose as asylum-seeker numbers increased. In 2016, the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community reported that 1,475 refugee minors were married, three-quarters of them girls and 361 of them under the age of 14.16 In response to these figures, the following year, the German government passed a law stating that the minimum marriage age is 18 years. In an attempt to pander to Muslim constituents, both the Left and the Greens voted against the law for being “too general.”17 SHARIA COUNCILS AND LEGAL DOUBLE STANDARDS Societies that permit the existence of parallel communities resign themselves to the growth of parallel legal systems. This is the case with sharia courts that apply Islamic law to the marital affairs of believers. Dutch researcher Machteld Zee’s study of sharia councils in the United Kingdom estimates that between ten and eighty-five sharia councils operate there.18 Zee documents cases of women seeking divorce being sent back to abusive husbands by sharia courts and being denied the legal protections that non-Muslim wives receive under UK law.

Stay involved in democracy. Fight for democracy. It can be messy and frustrating, believe me, I know. I understand why many Americans are frustrated by government and feel like it doesn’t make a difference. It’s not perfect, and not supposed to be. It’s only as good as we are, as what we choose to care about, as the people we elect. We’re never going to get 100 percent of what we want right away. But what if we got some of it right away, and protected it, and kept moving forward until we got the rest? That’s what voting is about. It’s not about making things perfect; it’s about making things better. It’s about putting us on track so that a generation from now, we can look back and say, “things got better starting now.” Voting is about using the power we have and pooling it together to get a government that’s more concerned, more responsive, more focused on the things that matter. This precious system of self-government is how we’ve come this far. It’s worth our time and effort. It’s worth protecting. I was heartened to see voter turnout leap this year over where it usually is. That’s great. Now imagine if we did that every time? Imagine if sixty or seventy percent of us, or even more, voted every time. We’d have a government that looks more representative, that’s full of life experience that’s more representative, that understands what people are going through and how we can work together to make people’s lives better. We’d have a government full of people who could corral a pandemic, who believe in science and have a plan to protect this planet for our kids; who care about working Americans and have a plan to help folks start getting ahead; who believe in racial equality and are willing to do the work to bring us closer an America where no matter what we look like, where we come from, who we love, or how much money we’ve got, we can make it if we try. That’s not science fiction. It’s possible! We just have to keep at it. Dec. 2020

In the fall of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in the run-up to the Gulf War, Americans were sickened by a story that emerged. On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old refugee from Kuwait appeared before a congressional Human Rights Caucus.23 The girl—she would give only her first name, Nayirah—had volunteered in a hospital in Kuwait City. She tearfully testified that Iraqi soldiers had stolen incubators to ship home as plunder, leaving over three hundred premature infants to die. Our collective breath was taken away—“These people leave babies to die on the cold floor; they are hardly human.” The testimony was seen on the news by approximately 45 million Americans, was cited by seven senators when justifying their support of war (a resolution that passed by five votes), and was cited more than ten times by George H. W. Bush in arguing for U.S. military involvement. And we went to war with a 92 percent approval rating of the president’s decision. In the words of Representative John Porter (R-Illinois), who chaired the committee, after Nayirah’s testimony, “we have never heard, in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of inhumanity, and brutality, and sadism, as the ones that [Nayirah had] given us today.” Much later it emerged that the incubator story was a pseudospeciating lie. The refugee was no refugee. She was Nayirah al-Sabah, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The incubator story was fabricated by the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government with the help of Porter and cochair Representative Tom Lantos (D-California). Research by the firm indicated that people would be particularly responsive to stories about atrocities against babies (ya think?), so the incubator tale was concocted, the witness coached. The story was disavowed by human rights groups (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) and the media, and the testimony was withdrawn from the Congressional Record—long after the war.

Numbers express quantities. In the submissions to my online survey, however, respondents frequently attributed qualities to them. Noticeably, colors. The number that was most commonly described as having its own color was four (52 votes), which most respondents (17) said was blue. Seven was next (28 votes), which most respondents (9) said was green, and in third place came five (27 votes), which most respondents (9) said was red. Seeing colors in numbers is a manifestation of synesthesia, a condition in which certain concepts can trigger incongruous responses, and which is thought to be the result of atypical connections being made between parts of the brain. In the survey, numbers were also labeled “warm,” “crisp,” “chagrined,” “peaceful,” “overconfident,” “juicy,” “quiet” and “raw.” Taken individually, the descriptions are absurd, yet together they paint a surprisingly coherent picture of number personalities. Below is a list of the numbers from one to thirteen, together with words used to describe them taken from the survey responses. One Independent, strong, honest, brave, straightforward, pioneering, lonely. Two Cautious, wise, pretty, fragile, open, sympathetic, quiet, clean, flexible. Three Dynamic, warm, friendly, extrovert, opulent, soft, relaxed, pretentious. Four Laid-back, rogue, solid, reliable, versatile, down-to-earth, personable. Five Balanced, central, cute, fat, dominant but not too much so, happy. Six Upbeat, sexy, supple, soft, strong, brave, genuine, courageous, humble. Seven Magical, unalterable, intelligent, awkward, overconfident, masculine. Eight Soft, feminine, kind, sensible, fat, solid, sensual, huggable, capable. Nine Quiet, unobtrusive, deadly, genderless, professional, soft, forgiving. Ten Practical, logical, tidy, reassuring, honest, sturdy, innocent, sober. Eleven Duplicitous, onomatopoeic, noble, wise, homey, bold, sturdy, sleek. Twelve Malleable, heroic, imperial, oaken, easygoing, nonconfrontational. Thirteen Gawky, transitional, creative, honest, enigmatic, unliked, dark horse. You don’t need to be a Hollywood screenwriter to spot that Mr. One would make a great romantic hero, and Miss Two a classic leading lady. The list is nonsensical, yet it makes sense. The association of one with male characteristics, and two with female ones, also remains deeply ingrained.

There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the civil war to defend slavery. And its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery they argued Ad nauseam was the foundation for a virtuous biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states. When 19th century deep southerners spoke of defending their “traditions”, “heritage”, and way of life they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the center piece of all three. Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower class people should be enslaved regardless of race for their own good. In response to Yankee and midland abolitionist the Deep South’s leaders developed an elaborate defense for human bondage. James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers where happier, fitter and better looked after than their free counter parts in Brittan and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists. Free societies were therefore unstable as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up creating a fearful crisis in republican institutions. Salves by contrast were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist or testify, ensuring the foundation of every well designed and durable republic. Enslavement of the white working class would be in his words a most glorious act of emancipation. Jefferson’s notion all men are created equal, he wrote, was ridiculously absurd. In the deep southern tradition, Hammond’s republic was modeled on those of ancient Greece and Rome. Featuring rights and democracy for the elite, slavery and submission for inferiors. It was sanctioned by the Christian god whose son never denounced the practice in his documented teachings. It was a perfect aristocratic republic, one that should be a model for the world. George Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people. Aristocrats, he explained, were really the nations Magna Carta because they owned so much and had the affection which all men feel for what belongs to them. Which naturally lead them to protect and provide for wives, children and slaves. Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular declared he was quite as intent on abolishing free society as you northerners are on abolishing slavery.

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them. Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits? Have you ever wondered why if all politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes? You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The president does. You and I don’t have Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does. You and I don’t write the tax code. Congress does. You and I don’t set fiscal policy. Congress does. You and I don’t control monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Bank does. One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices — 545 human beings out of 235 million — are directly, legally, morally and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country. I excused the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered by private central bank. I exclude all of the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislators’ responsibility to determine how he votes. Don’t you see the con game that is played on the people by the politicians? Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party. What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of Tip O’Neill, who stood up and criticized Ronald Reagan for creating deficits. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it. The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating appropriations and taxes. Those 545 people and they alone are responsible. They and they alone should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses — provided they have the gumption to manage their own employees.

No sound strategy for studying fascism can fail to examine the entire context in which it was formed and grew. Some approaches to fascism start with the crisis to which fascism was a response, at the risk of making the crisis into a cause. A crisis of capitalism, according to Marxists, gave birth to fascism. Unable to assure ever-expanding markets, ever-widening access to raw materials, and ever-willing cheap labor through the normal operation of constitutional regimes and free markets, capitalists were obliged, Marxists say, to find some new way to attain these ends by force. Others perceive the founding crisis as the inadequacy of liberal state and society (in the laissez-faire meaning of liberalism current at that time) to deal with the challenges of the post-1914 world. Wars and revolutions produced problems that parliament and the market—the main liberal solutions—appeared incapable of handling: the distortions of wartime command economies and the mass unemployment attendant upon demobilization; runaway inflation; increased social tensions and a rush toward social revolution; extension of the vote to masses of poorly educated citizens with no experience of civic responsibility; passions heightened by wartime propaganda; distortions of international trade and exchange by war debts and currency fluctuations. Fascism came forward with new solutions for these challenges. Fascists hated liberals as much as they hated socialists, but for different reasons. For fascists, the internationalist, socialist Left was the enemy and the liberals were the enemies’ accomplices. With their hands-off government, their trust in open discussion, their weak hold over mass opinion, and their reluctance to use force, liberals were, in fascist eyes, culpably incompetent guardians of the nation against the class warfare waged by the socialists. As for beleaguered middle-class liberals themselves, fearful of a rising Left, lacking the secret of mass appeal, facing the unpalatable choices offered them by the twentieth century, they have sometimes been as ready as conservatives to cooperate with fascists. Every strategy for understanding fascism must come to terms with the wide diversity of its national cases. The major question here is whether fascisms are more disparate than the other “isms.” This book takes the position that they are, because they reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy. The community comes before humankind in fascist values, and respecting individual rights or due process gave way to serving the destiny of the Volk or razza. Therefore each individual national fascist movement gives full expression to its own cultural particularism. Fascism, unlike the other “isms,” is not for export: each movement jealously guards its own recipe for national revival, and fascist leaders seem to feel little or no kinship with their foreign cousins. It has proved impossible to make any fascist “international” work.

In the darkest days of the Second World War, when America’s very future was at risk, writer E. B. White was asked by the U.S. Federal Government’s Writers’ War Board to write a short response to the question “What is democracy?” His answer was unassuming but inspiring. He wrote: Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the “don’t” in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

On the sunny day that I spent walking its streets I was reminded that Philadelphia (Mississippi) is still the headquarters of the Mississippi Klan. I easily found the headquarters and the free leaflets. "...It's a Klansman's responsibility to register to vote, campaign, and vote for conservative pro white candidates who will put America first and defend our nation's borders.

The Electoral College, made up of locally prominent men in each state, would thus be responsible for choosing the president. Under this arrangement, Hamilton reasoned, “the office of president will seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” Men with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” would be filtered out. The Electoral College thus became our original gatekeeper. This system proved short-lived, however, due to two shortcomings in the founders’ original design. First, the Constitution is silent on the question of how presidential candidates are to be selected. The Electoral College goes into operation after the people vote, playing no role in determining who seeks the presidency in the first place. Second, the Constitution never mentions political parties. Though Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would go on to pioneer our two-party system, the founders did not seriously contemplate those parties

American democracy depends on its citizens participating in the voting process. It is the only way to ensure that our government continues to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. If you have become an American citizen, you can vote and should vote. In fact, it is your responsibility to vote. Some people will try to pressure you to vote according to your ethnicity alone. They will insist that because you are an immigrant you are, by default, expected to vote in a particular way, but there is no such thing as a “particular way” for immigrants to vote.

not going to attempt to offer an analysis of the results. I won’t try to speculate about who was responsible or what was unfair. I just wish more people had turned out to vote. And I will always wonder about what led so many women, in particular, to reject an exceptionally qualified female candidate and instead choose a misogynist as their president. But the result was now ours to live with. Barack had stayed up most of the night tracking the data, and as had happened so many times before, he was called upon to step forward as a symbol of steadiness to help the nation process its shock.

If the government is the provider of “free” education, then the government will also decide what is taught and, potentially, how it is used. The fewer responsibilities we have, the less free we are. Communism and democracy differ in this only by a matter of degree. We can vote away freedom as easily as it can be taken away.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.” As he described them, they were people who were “dependent upon government, who believe they are victims, who believe government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe they are entitled to health care, food, to housing, you name it.” These were “people who pay no income tax,” he said, and so “our message of low taxes doesn’t connect.” He seemed to be implying that nearly half the country consisted of parasites. This was no slip of the tongue. Romney was expressing what The Wall Street Journal described as the “new orthodoxy” within the Republican Party. In a new twist on the old conservative argument against government aid for the poor, it denigrated nearly half the country as what the Journal called “Lucky Duckies” freeloading off the rich. This startling theory held that because many members of the middle class and working poor received targeted tax credits, such as the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, which reduced their income taxes to zero, they were “a nation of moochers,” as the title of a book written by a fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute put it.