Why Voting for Democrats is a Faustian Bargain
If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is - because there's always a catch where the American left is concerned.
I was thinking this morning how antithetical the Democrat orthodoxy is to what America was designed to be. I don’t mean to say that America has achieved everything it was designed to achieve or that it is without limitations or faults, but we were set on a path that never included giving up increasingly larger slices of our liberty in exchange for getting anything from government.
It occurs to me the reason Democrat adherents consider everything through a zero-sum lens (if you have something, you must have taken it from someone else), is largely because in their world, everything IS a zero-sum game.
It certainly seems that everything Democrats promise comes with a catch:
We can provide you with freedom, but we get to protect you from “disinformation” by controlling and constraining what you can see, hear, say, smell, taste and learn.
We will give you a government of the people, for the people and by the people, but we get to choose who “the people” are.
We will provide a universal basic income, but we get to determine how much that is and under what conditions you can keep getting it.
We will spend some of your tax dollars on things you want, but most of it will be spent on things we want.
You will have the freedom to do anything you want, but only if it is something we need you to do.
We will help you plan your life and your families, but only if we can kill your children in the womb.
We will hurt your political enemies, but only if we get to decide who those enemies are.
We will take care of your children, but we are going to teach them what we want them to know, and you don’t get a say in that.
We will protect you domestically, but only against crimes we care about.
We will defend you internationally, but you don’t get a say with whom we go to war.
We will protect you from racism but only if we can segregate you by race.
If you don’t challenge our orthodoxy, you can be in our club – at least until we decide you can’t be in our club.
Sadly, it seems American society has become far more transactional (what can you do for me in exchange for what I am willing to give) than philosophical (what is best for all within the bounds of our principles and values), and that transformation supports the “tit for tat”, zero-sum ideology of the contemporary Democrat political party.
I just mentioned to a friend that most archeologists and sociologists have said that the first evidence of civilization was the discovery of a 15,000-year-old healed human femur bone.
Why?
Because 15,000 years ago, a broken leg was very likely a death sentence. A broken femur that has healed is evidence that another human took the time to stay with the injured person, bound up the wound, carried the person to safety and tended them through recovery. A healed femur indicates that someone has helped the injured, rather than abandoning them to the wild to save their own life - in what amounts to a selfless act.
One might infer from that healed femur that civilization also requires selfless acts to exist.
When I read the histories of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution that followed, the pages are filled with people who committed their lives to selfless acts. Their concern was not for themselves, but for the people population the colonies who had a right and a desire to live free, to decide for themselves what their lives would be and mean.
If you can find any of that selflessness in the actions and proposals of the Democrat Party, I would be shocked. Unfortunately, there isn’t much selflessness left in the message of the Republican Party either. Both have fallen into a bastardized system of political “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” transactionalism as a means to power.
I believe this is one reason, if not the reason, political campaigns cost so much to wage. It certainly is why our governmental budgets have ballooned – trading free stuff for votes and loyalty is expensive.
Until we return to the idea that liberty is immune from burden or recompense, we just dig our hole a little deeper each day.
No doubt. Put the shovel down.
Have you done a deep analysis on the push for globalism vs. nation state independence? Is a global no-borders economy possible? I ask because it is related to today's editorial: yes the US originated on exceptional ideals that have led directly to the life we currently enjoy (the one the left seems to want to destroy) but nation state competition for resources along with human greed, narcissism and religious zealot-ism, all seem to perpetuate strife (most humans are mostly good but there will always be assholes and con artists).
1000 years from now, I can't imagine a world with nation states intact, but if it is not based on the American ideals of liberty, equality and freedom, then it is certainly something to die fighting against.