Good Guys

Voting Machine

I would like to offer a reflection on the upcoming presidential election.

When I was a little kid, my parents would go out to vote in the presidential election, and when they got back I always had two questions to ask them: (1) You voted for the good guy, right? and (2) Did the good guy win or lose? Yes I was only six or seven years old at the time and my knowledge of politics was...weak at best. But interestingly enough, I think those two questions have, in a way, come to define not only the way that adults vote for candidates, but also how the candidates appeal to the voters.

We'll start with how candidates appeal to voters, as this is generally the launching point of this particular political process. The candidates go about this appeal in two ways: tell the community how great they and their accomplishments are, and/or destroy their opponent with semi-factual invective. They promise to do great things and to do them better (or drastically differently) from the opposition, utilizing the powers of the office they are running for to do so.

The flip-side is also true. Voters are pitched pervasive ideas of the goodness or evil of one candidate or the other, and begin to finalize their choice. They look at the good that one promises to do with the powers of office, or they recoil from the evil that another is said to be planning with the same office. One candidate becomes the “good guy” and the other the “bad guy.” The voter weighs the different facts and/or emotions involved with one guy or the other, and finally makes his choice for one because that one will use the office to get things done, to do good things, to go against the flow.

In essence, with a presidential election nowadays it boils down to this: utilizing the extraordinary powers accumulated by the office of the president, our candidate can do a much better, far more fantastic job of getting things done and moving things along than your guy. Our guy will be more vigilant in killing terrorists than your guy, more creative in stimulating the economy than your guy, more hard-nosed about regulating businesses than your guy, more concerned for the environment than your guy. Our guy will increase defense spending into the stratosphere to keep us safe, or our guy will increase the funding of the EPA one hundredfold to keep our kids safe. And all because our guy uses absolute power for good, and yours uses absolute power for evil.

Perhaps this is a small exaggeration, but I have heard all of these arguments enough times from enough prominent people to believe that frighteningly little of what I just laid out is hyperbole. Did you vote for the good guy, and did he win? Because if he wins, he's gonna do good stuff with his power.

The question manages to almost entirely miss the point. What we might want to look at a little more closely first is not the things our candidates promise to do once in elected office, but the powers of that office that allow them to promise such insane things in the first place.

Since when was the president of the United States authorized to hunt down, indefinitely detain or kill individual people, be they terrorist or otherwise, Americans or otherwise? President Obama just signed that one into law at the beginning of this year, with Republican help. I am sure a Republican president would have found such a law to be just as tempting to sign.

Since when was the president of the United States ever supposed to have the power to stir the economic pot any which way he chose? Within this past decade both President Bush and President Obama have tried doing just that, with stimulus packages, bailouts, takeovers, and government loans. And Mitt Romney is touting his experience as a businessman as a factor of electability, experience he promises to use as president. All of these men either have meddled or propose to meddle to greater or lesser degrees.

And since when has the president had the gall to insist that the people involved in religious institutions violate their consciences?

The list of inflated and ridiculous presidential powers continues to grow with each passing presidency, be it Republican or Democrat. So before we ask whether one guy's policies or positions will be better than the other, let's ask first if they should even have the power to put those policies and positions into practice.

As the saying goes, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” There will never be a choice between a strictly “good guy” and a strictly “bad guy,” just between handing the reins of the same power to a better man or a worse man. Those powers should not be any more tempting to abuse than they already are.

Whose Democracy?

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

On December 6th, 2011, the Associated Press put out a story about Hillary Clinton's comments concerning the first elections in Egypt after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. The story suggested that the United States leadership considered the elections in Egypt to be fair, especially in juxtaposition to the concurrent Russian parliamentary elections. However, Clinton warned in the story that democracies need to hold as unviolable the human rights of their citizenry, in particular their women, and that certain parties who had won majorities in Egypt were a potential roadblock to the establishment of a just democracy.

While this may look like a well-reasoned response to groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Nour, both of which are demonstrably hardcore "Islamists," the reality is that the problems with her statement are manifold. In fact, Clinton's reprimand and warning is not only deceptive and naive, but also almost entirely laughable. Forgive me if it seems like I call anything dealing with the revolution in Egypt laughable; quite frankly, I see nothing to laugh about with anything going on in that country at the moment. I do, however, feel compelled to laugh when I hear something as ridiculous as Mrs. Clinton's statements.

The reasons for my bitter mirth all spring from the same error, and Mrs. Clinton carries the consequences of her error in several different directions and so must my answers tend as well. I will start from the error and move towards its consequences.

The problem with her statement lies in her profound misunderstanding of the term "democracy" which she is so fond of throwing around especially in regards to the Arabs and their so-called "spring." A democracy is, as I have always been taught, direct rule by the people by majority vote, where every single person receives representation by the mere fact of their having one vote to cast and one voice to add to the discussion. (The ancient Greek philosophers characterized a democracy as the least good form of government and the closest kind of society to anarchy, but that discussion is for a different time.)

Now, I say she misunderstands democracy not necessarily because she doesn't understand the definition I gave above. Her misunderstanding is made clear in the assumptions she draws from democratic elections.

The first example of unclear thinking that she offers is that she immediately jumps to talking about the universal rights of man and how democracies and transitions to democracies must respect them, especially the rights of women snd free religious expression. Huh? I fail to find in the definition of a democracy the charge that "all democracies must respect human rights to be true democracies." Ironically, a purely democratic government is not terribly interested in human rights, it is only interested in what the majority of the people want.

This first erroneous assumption leads directly into the second, which is that the majority of people always desire what is good. This is historically provable to be untrue. An angry mob does not usually display sound judgment or moral rectitude in its actions, but hey, the mob's will is the will of the majority of its members.

Mrs. Clinton's second mistake translates very neatly into her third, which is that all democracies must conform to our American revolutionary ideas in order to be just and true. This means in effect that if a democracy emerges overseas in the Arab world and the majority of the people elect a party that is hostile to the United States' policies, that democracy is suddenly null and void.

Her thought process suddenly becomes a ridiculous oxymoron. The Egyptians can have their democracy, as long as the majority of people in said democracy elect to follow policies that conform to American ideas.

The icing on this idiotic cake is the Secretary of State's naive idea that just because the Egyptians desire free and fair elections, that they also desire a state which tolerates other religious groups besides Islam and that women will be treated fairly and justly. This is in fact a fantasy of alarming proportions. Nations governed by Sharia law have historically been at odds with Western ideals, and Egypt is no different. In fact, the elections suggest that Egyptians (at least Egyptian men) desire the establishment of Islamic law as the law of their land judging by the votes they freely and democratically cast.

Hillary Clinton in effect would give America the option of voting for its mores and its way of life, and effectively deny any other democracy the right to do the same. It is peculiar that a staunch feminist and renowned liberal like Mrs. Clinton would show such little tolerance to another, when all that she and her party will preach about is tolerance and fairness.

Henry Ford, the premiere supplier of affordable transportation back in his day, once famously said that you could have his Model T in any color, so long as it was black. The same is true with America's leadership, both the current and the previous administrations. Mrs. Clinton and the rest of us must erase from our minds the idea that freedom and democracy is something we grant to other nations as something that is uniquely American branded and conditional. To persist in such a way of thinking is not only unpatriotic, but is the allowance of a "soft" tyranny of the United States over the rest of the world.