You need to go out and vote today.
This election is just too important.
You need to vote because there are serious matters at stake, as I discussed yesterday. But there is a broader question at stake today in this election: whether we are a nation that wants to be dynamic, or whether we want to slide into senescence. Are we a nation that wants an economy of innovation, or one of redistribution and stagnation? Are we a nation that wants a foreign policy of strength, with powerful allies and our enemies in retreat? Or are we a nation that wants to abandon the world stage, handing power to our enemies as the light dies? Are we a nation that wants to build on the roots of family and community, or one that wants to trade the institutions that make life worth living in favor of top-down dictation from a self-appointed elite who believe that their untried values ought to supplant time-tested virtues?
Most of all, you need to vote because you owe it to both your ancestors and your progeny to do so.
See, here’s the thing: Democracy, in the general sense, is totally unnatural.
The earliest beginnings of democracy were in ancient Athens, but of course, the vote was heavily restricted; the same was true in ancient Rome. Modern democracy has its roots in Magna Carta, in the Estates General of France — but didn’t reach full fruition in the way we think of democracy until the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
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It takes centuries to inculcate the values of democracy, and the rights of the people to be free of arbitrary government — which is what lies at the heart of Western democracy. We are not subjects. We are citizens. We are citizens with rights and duties. We build social fabric together in order to share those duties and to enable the functioning of those rights. And governments are instituted by men in order to protect those rights and to enshrine those duties.
That is what lies at the heart of the American experiment. That is why we have checks and balances too, why we are small-R republicans and not just pure democrats. The founders, you see, were cautious about democracy: They knew its promises and its perils. That’s why the single most important paragraph ever written on the American system can be found in Federalist 51, by James Madison, framer of the Constitution:
But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controuls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to controul the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to controul itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary controul on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
The founders instituted those checks and balances. But, Madison is right in the end: The primary control on the government is a dependence on the judgment of the people.
And that is the thing we must agree upon in order for democracy to work.
This struck me last week when I was standing in line with my wife to vote. People of every age and race were in that line, all agreeing to a common principle: that we would abide by the collective decision about who would represent us, for president, for Congress, for the Senate. That we shared a nation together, and that if we lost, we would understand that next time we might win. That we were willing to delegate some of the highest-stake decisions in life to a system that values the opinions of our fellow citizens.
See, democracy only works when both sides are invested in the bargain. If one side always believed they would lose, they wouldn’t buy in: They’d revolt. That’s when democracy breaks down. Jefferson says in the Declaration that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. That consent can only continue if we all believe enough in one another, and in our system.
That system is fraying, for certain. For a thousand reasons that we all know.
But it’s not breaking down today. We’re all going to the polls. Thanks to the checks and balances of the framers — who understood both the value and the dangers of democracy — we can rest assured that if the other person wins, yes, things will get worse, but we will survive. This will not be the last election.
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With that said, this vote matters more than most. While this won’t be the last election, it is an inflection point. We can continue down a path of polarizing the country by race, sex, and identity — or we can reverse that process. We can continue to tear apart the country by indicting each other as oppressors and pretending our own oppression — or we can seize the future together. We can continue to retreat from the world — or we can remember that America remains the last, best hope of mankind.
And so today, you should vote.
You should vote because you can — and because that is an immense privilege, earned by the blood of others and still denied to most of humanity today as we speak. And you should vote because you should: because your vote will certainly matter.
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