In denial? Isn’t it time to accept that elections won’t change anything?

By David McElroy · November 7, 2012

Now that Barack Obama has been elected to another four years in the White House, some people around me are in denial. Mitt Romney has gone down in flames, much like John McCain did four years ago. (Remember him?) And standing on the sideline are various libertarians saying, “If you had only nominated Ron Paul, we would have beaten Obama.”

Four years ago, a lot of people were upset with the election of Obama. Some didn’t like him because he’s black. But most who opposed him did so because they deeply disagreed with him about the direction for the country. A group of people loosely calling themselves the Tea Party emerged to say that the direction had to change. They were going to organize and march and demand lower taxes and smaller government.

Four years later, how’s that working out? That conservative backlash has helped the Republicans to hold onto the U.S. House, but that’s about the extent of it. Democrats hold the Senate and the White House.

What’s more, the Tea Party is a weird mix held together only by a hatred of the progressive left. Although the Tea Party had libertarian roots, it’s more of a mainstream social conservative group now. Yes, they still talk about economically conservative ideas, but social conservative ideas have taken more and more prominence in places where the Tea Party groups have been successful in gaining influence.

It’s the avowedly libertarian supporters of people such as Ron Paul who are really in denial. I’m sure it’s not all of them, but a substantial portion of them honestly because that the only reason the Republicans didn’t win Tuesday is that Paul wasn’t the GOP nominee. I heard this angry theme over and over from many of them late Tuesday night on Facebook.

About a year and a half ago, I started explaining why Ron Paul couldn’t win. I’ve also written a number of times about the fact that people do not want the freedom or limited government that libertarians want. Yet many of the libertarians I know persist in believing that if they’d just explain things differently, the majority would suddenly start agreeing with them.

It’s not going to happen. The majority don’t want what you want. They want a Nanny State to promise to take care of them. They might like small government rhetoric, but when push comes to shove, they want to simply talk about being self-reliant — while they count on government to come through with Social Security checks, Medicare, free prescriptions drugs and various other goodies.

Throughout the GOP primaries, these libertarians kept saying that primary voters really wanted Ron Paul. There was no evidence of that. In fact, each time primaries were held, Paul got relatively few votes. Still, his supporters remained in denial, believing that “the people” must somehow want what they want.

The truth is that if you want individual liberty — in some form or fashion — it’s not going to come through voting, because it’s not what people want. They’re not going to start wanting it, either. And if you keep telling yourself that working harder and investing more time and money is suddenly going to change that, you’re completely in denial.

It’s time to quit fooling yourself. If you want real change, you have to reject the system. You have to start looking for another solution. That solution is going to be found outside of the electoral system, not in working harder and harder to elect candidates that the public is never going to agree with.

You are not going to change the public’s mind. If you believe you are, you’re in denial. Isn’t it time to quit denying reality and instead start looking into alternatives to electoral politics?

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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