I just found my write-in candidate.
The people who risked their lives protecting your right to vote appreciate it.
The people who promote democracy as one of the most, if not the most, important societal structure for man's freedom, appreciate the value you give it.
It might seem hard to appreciate democracy when you see the corruption (small and large c) of the elections. But it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
The real agenda of the rich - and therefore the right - is to increase cynicism among the people to not value government or democracy.
That's when a real, huge power shift occurs in their favor.
This point was made very well in the recent essay by the Republican staffer who left Congress:
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980)...
This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.
It's also made in Thomas Franks' "The Wrecking Crew", about why Republicans govern so badly.
Casting his eyes from the Bush administrations final months of plunder to the earliest days of the Republican revolution, Thomas Frank uncovers the deep logic behind the graft and incompetence of conservatives in power. He shows how leaders dedicated to a doctrine of government by entrepreneurship proceeded to sell off the state, channeling the profits to cronies and loyalists. He surveys the federal agencies doomed to failure by the inept and even hostile staff appointed to run them. He charts the practice of wholesale deregulation and the devastating results now clear for all to see. From political scandal to mortgage meltdown, Frank documents the consequences of enshrining the free market as the logic of the state.
http://tcfrank.com/books/the-wrecking-crew/
What could be more anti-American than the desire to attempt to reverse the core of the American system, replacing royal plutocracy with democracy for the people?
While the act of voting remains in place, they desire nothing less than the overthrow of the people by influencing who is actually elected, following their agenda.
Their strategy is simple, fund an ideology to be spread to our weaker voters, while preventing more and more other voters from participating.
It doesn't matter that a minority of good Congressmen will still be elected - the Bernie Sanders types - if they have a majority made up from both parties.
Not voting - voting for a 'write-in joke' - is what they want, if you don't vote for their candidates. You ARE in effect voting for their candidates.
And what it's going to lead to if they get their way is a crippling of the power of the people. It's already part of their ideology, what they say - government bad, don't pass regulations, eliminate agencies, and so on, which is the step before actually looking for ways to change the rules to prevent the elected government from having the power of these things on behalf of the people - under economic pressure, most likely. The effective destruction of American democracy.
What a far cry from the pro-democracy views of presidents who better represent the people - a John Kennedy, a Franklin Roosevelt, a Teddy Roosevelt.
Franklin Roosevelt pointed out that both parties agreed to the liberal policy agenda, to help the people prosper. Today, both parties' presidential candidates agree to the right-wing policy agenda, corporatism - with its policies that shift wealth from the public to the rich, and return 'austerity' to the people, debt used as a weapon.
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