The Problem Is Not The Process

Moderates everywhere are, once again, complaining.  “They are all corrupt.”  “There are no good choices.”  These are the complaints one usually hears on the street.  They are complaints with which it is easy to sympathize.  They are complaints that contain a considerable amount of truth.  They complain about the “flaws” in the process.  And yet Churchill had a heck of a point.  What is the average voter to do?

Recently commentators have been joining this chorus.  Earlier this week, Erick Erickson penned a profanity ridden diatribe urging abstention.  His reasoning:

In 2000, George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Afterward, his team concluded that millions of evangelicals had stayed home, and they reordered both their policy agenda once in office and their 2004 strategy. The reordering was intended to win those voters back. The evangelicals who sat it out sent a message, and the campaign that barely survived them heard it loud and clear. Adoption reform, PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), education reform, Christian social service access to government funds, and other items all became priorities. Campaigns study who shows up, who stays home, and who skips a race on the ballot.

Yeah, well – that was a presidential election.  The numbers simply are not there to do such studies or draw such conclusions in a senatorial race in a small state or any house race, and really not there in a local election.  And it is the small stuff where the shenanigans get very, very real.

Today, the Editorial Board of The Free Press chimed in on the legal wrangling surrounding the now proven, shockingly by the NYTimes, corrupt appearance of a decoy candidate in the Alaska senate race.  Their closing thought:

It’s become a familiar pattern. Trump and many of his allies earned their reputation for dishonesty after a failed campaign to overturn elections in 2020, yet ever since, Democrats have sought to cast themselves as saviors of democracy, hoping voters will forget their many attempts to subvert public choice. That includes suppressing stories about Hunter Biden and conjuring flimsy indictments to discredit Trump. The tale of two Sullivans is only the latest example, and a reminder that there was never any high ground to begin with.

Firstly, I am not sure “dishonesty” is the best word to describe team Trump’s 2020 efforts – I think “disillusionment” would be a better term.  But I do not want to litigate that in this post – it is the conclusion that there is no political/moral “high ground” that I want to focus on.

Long before Trump was on the political radar, I had a fascinating conversation with someone that became one of Trump’s allies referred to above.  That conversation centered on just how much honor is required for our Constitution to actually function.  Think about it – neither the judicial or legislative branches have any power to enforce their will – they must rely on the executive to do that.  If a truly dishonorable individual took hold of the executive, they could ride roughshod over the other two branches on a whim – assuming everyone in the executive branch followed orders – which is a big assumption.  But the point remains, our government functions on more than simply the Constitution – it requires decency, honor and character to work well.

The problems all these moderates are complaining about are not actually about the system or the process (as Churchill implied) – they are about people and their decency, honor and character.  And that applies not just to the candidates, their staffs, the parties and their staffs, or the bureaucrats – it applies to the voters as well.  Politics is a mirror of society and culture – if politics is ugly, it is because we are ugly.

Example – one of the reasons lousy people seek office right now is because it has become quite lucrative to hold office.  Therefore, many suggest changing the rules to make it harder to profit from office holding.  Yet, it is impossible to regulate sufficiently to address every eventuality – such regulation stands to make matters worse, not better.  No, the answer is to make sure our candidates are more about public service than profiting – and that requires decency, honor and character.  The same argument applies to voters that vote their pocketbook rather than studying the situation and looking for the best solution.  Decency, honor and character all the way down.

Politics is a mirror, if we want to improve it, we have to improve that which it reflects.  The Free Press editorial board is right in noting the circular nature of our ever lowering political standards – something outside the political process has to fix things.  Fix our society and culture and our politics will correct in reflection.  That is why religion matters so much in this nation – especially now that education has become so terribly politicized.  Further the rise of the Islamosocialist candidate is demonstrating that which religion we rely upon to shape our society and culture matters more than we might have suspected.

In sum – if you want to fix what is wrong with our political system right now – go to church, and invite others to join you.  That is the only place a high ground is to be found.  The high ground lies not in the system, but in the people operating the system  Anything less and the downward spiral will continue.