David McElroy

If you listen to political pundits, the people who matter most in American politics are the swing voters. They’re the ones in the middle who sometimes vote for Democrats and sometimes “swing” to Republicans. I’m going to tell you why swing voters are really just suckers who get fooled every time.

There are some voters who are reliably with one party or the other. There’s a coalition of progressive left groups who are always going to vote for Democrats. There’s a coalition of social conservatives and economic conservatives who are always going to vote for Republicans. With few exceptions, the people in those groups are generally happy when their side is in power.

Then there are people who don’t fit into either of the mainstream camps. A lot of those people are libertarians (self-identified or otherwise) and a lot of them are simply moderates who don’t want to see either side of the mainstream become too dominant. And then there are people who don’t really know that much about what they believe, but they just don’t really like either side of the mainstream.

It’s the people in those middle groups who push elections one way or the other — as they swing from one mainstream party to the other. They were with Barack Obama in 2008, because they wanted almost any Democrat after eight years of George W. Bush, but they swung to Republicans heavily in 2010 congressional elections, because they didn’t like it that Obama had been doing what anybody should have known he was going to do as president.

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If you were a slave owner in the United States in the 19th century, you probably owed your wealth and continued income to the continuation of slavery. If someone made the case to you that slavery was morally wrong, your first thought probably would have been, “But if we free the slaves, who will pick the cotton?”

The idea of ending slavery was a scary thing to many people in Europe and North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many people owned human beings who had been brought from Africa in chains. Those people worked in their fields and did all sorts of manual labor for them. The idea was deeply ingrained in society and it was accepted by many people as right and moral.

The abolition movement was a challenge to all of that. The abolitionists didn’t try to explain to plantation owners how they could earn a living after the slaves were freed. They couldn’t offer completely pragmatic plans for how society was going to go through the transition from slavery to universal equality of rights among races.

They simply made the case that slavery was a moral abomination. Some of them used gentle persuasion. Some of them preached fiery sermons, but still advocated peaceful change. And some, such as John Brown, tried to spark slave rebellions through violent means.

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When armed men attacked Dan Halsted in the dark of night as he walked home in a safe neighborhood of Portland, Ore., he ran screaming for someone to call police. What he didn’t know is that his attackers were police officers — who tased him in the back five times and beat him.

Police were in the area looking for someone who had spray-painted graffiti on a nearby building. Halsted just happened to be walking by, so police attacked him instead.

“I was walking home and all of a sudden a flashlight came on in my eyes and I stopped, and I heard a voice say, ‘Get him!'” Halsted told Portland television station KATU. “And I heard footsteps coming at me, so I turned and I ran. I didn’t know what was going on. I was screaming to call the police the whole time, and I didn’t realize this was the police because they never identified themselves at all.”

In the arrest report, the officer made up a story about Halsted running down the street with a couple of other people. In reality, he had been in a restaurant with other people. He was never charged with any crime, but the city didn’t want to compensate him for the attack. So after four years, he finally sued.

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