Election Day in the U.S.

[mousme]

Today, dear American friends, is the day you make history. Please remember that your voting system is believed by many to be... suspect, to put it politely, so your vote counts even more, no matter where you live or how "safe" you believe your preferred candidate to be.

My flist is filled with patriots. I know you're all going to go out and vote. Still, I feel that I can't let this day go by without cheering you on.

Go out there and do yourselves proud.

:)

Comments

Re: Non-voting is also a matter of principle.

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

People have fought, struggled, bled and died so that we can live in a democracy.

See, that's part of the problem. The U.S. was never founded to be a "democracy;" it was founded as a constitutional republic with absolute limits on the size, scope, and nature of government. Those limits and principles are neglected if not held in actual contempt by the average citizen and I would hold that there is a much higher duty to respect the rights-embracing constitution than there is merely to vote, so the invocation of "duty" is not going to be very convincing to me. In fact, democracy on a scale much larger than a mid-sized town inherently becomes morally problematical and detrimental to human rights and freedoms very quickly as the population in question increases. See sociological and economic concepts like Rational ignorance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance), The Peter Principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle), The Diffusion of Responsibility Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility), and Dunbar's Number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number) for explainations for this phenomenon. Voting in such a system is an immoral exercise in and of itself. It becomes a process, as noted by Frederick Bastiat, whereby "... everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else." There can be no duty to participate in the immoral so the duty argument fails in my case. It would probably be more accurate to say that we disagree on whether the system itself is or is not corrupt. I suppose that you believe, as most people throughout history have always believed, that "their system", upon which they have projected their own individual hopes and values, is on net "still good" or produces moral results. I disagree with people in the U.S. who hold that position about the U.S. government.

Just off hand, I would put it to you that restricting the franchise to one head of household was intended to limit the scope of government itself, not merely to empower men with respect to women, as it unfortunately but undeniably did back when the family was more of a coherent social institution than it is now. At any rate, the idea was to limit politics to intra-family relations and "stop it at the front door" so to speak. It was an attempt to recognize the fact that there are some relationships beyond the boundary of the political sphere — a fact which seems to have been inconveniently forgotten by persons of all sexual orientations when it comes to the issue of the State and gay marriage. At any rate, such a restriction of franchise to one-household-one-vote was a nice idea, but another of those concepts which are well-intentioned but doomed to failure when people attempt to practice them.