What will you do when ‘electing the right people’ doesn’t change things?

By David McElroy · April 14, 2014

Government would work great if we could just elect “the right people.” Right?

If we had honest, intelligent, principled people who believed “fill in the blank here” — whatever you happen to believe — the politicians would work for The People. Government would work for all of us. We would restore the Constitution and the meaning of the Republic. And on and on. All we need is to elect “the right people.”

Have you heard this song before?

As someone who makes the case that the existing system is broken by design — and is immoral by design — this is the response I hear most frequently from well-meaning patriotic people. Whether they’re on the progressive left or the social conservative right or some other position, they honestly believe the majoritarian system will produce what they want — if we can just elect “the right people.”

In the Republican primary here in Alabama’s sixth congressional district, voters have a chance this year to elect someone who is exactly what they always claim to want. Paul DeMarco is a two-term state representative with a spotless conservative record, and he’s a candidate for Congress following the retirement of the man who’s held onto the spot for years.

I know Paul well. Nine years ago, I worked as a consultant for his first campaign for the Legislature, and he became one of my favorite clients ever. (I dug up an old piece of his literature to show you the logo I designed way back then, although the colors are off in this snapshot. It was really PMS 200 and reflex blue, just in case anyone cares. The typeface is Folio, which was my trademark typeface at the time.) Paul is very intelligent, honest, principled and level-headed. He’s willing to listen to people who disagree with him, and he wants to understand other positions and come up with solutions that make everyone happy. He’s a problem-solver. He’s exactly what a civics textbook would dream of as the ideal politician.

Paul was unusual for a first-time candidate. He listened well and learned quickly. Because his campaign was a special election when no other races were going on, I spent more time with him than was typical in a campaign, so I got to know him well. It’s the last campaign I ever worked on that I actually enjoyed most of the time. (I also have fond memories of the campaign because I was falling in love with a woman that spring, so I was predisposed to being happy at the time.) Paul was one of the few clients I ever had who was exactly the same in private as he was in public. I came to respect him and like him. We’ve stayed in touch off and on since then and I consider him a friend.

In the last year or so leading up to his decision to run for Congress this year, we talked a number of times and I strongly encouraged him to run for the Sixth District seat if it came open. I thought he would be the front-runner for the seat and I think that’s come true. In fact, unless I’m badly mistaken, he’s going to win. His campaign announced Friday that it just raised nearly half a million dollars in the last reporting period, and money for television advertising is the name of the game in such a campaign. He’s getting the right kind of endorsements that you’d expect a front-runner to get. And I can guarantee you that nobody is going to outwork Paul.

I think he’s going to win the race and head to Congress next year.

Paul is an optimistic and idealistic man. He believes he can make a difference. Despite my strongly positive feelings about him — both as a person and as a politician — I know that the system won’t change. No matter how many people like Paul you elect, the system will grind them down and produce an advance of state power over your life, simply because that’s what people want. They might say they want smaller government, but they want a large and muscular government when it comes to the things they happen to want.

And even if I could magically decree a government full of politicians and bureaucrats like Paul — men and women who had the values and personal characteristics that I think make him an excellent choice for Congress — it wouldn’t make a difference. The system itself is bound to reflect the will of a majority who want to control other people.

Even if I could wave a wand and create that perfect government that would make all the choices I want it to make — in accordance with the Constitution as it was originally written — it still wouldn’t solve the fundamental moral problem. Any such system allows a political majority to control everyone else. Even though the original system protected the rights of some classes of people better than the current system does, there was nothing that protected any individual against the will of the majority. And there’s nothing that allows an individual (or a group of individuals) to withdraw themselves and their property from the authority of the state.

So if you live in Alabama’s sixth congressional district and still believe in the fairy tales you were taught in school about good government, I think you’ll find Paul DeMarco is a great choice in the June Republican primary. But even with a candidate this good — and even with a congressman as good as I believe he would be — the fundamental problems remain.

The politicians aren’t the problem we face. The real problem boils down to the system itself — which empowers a majority to get what it wants. Electing an entire government full of Paul DeMarcos won’t change that.

And after you’ve elected all of “the right people” and nothing changes, what next? Are you ever going to face the fact that the problem is the system itself?

Share on Social Networks

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

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.

Related Posts