Election
“We pledge 'our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor' to establish the rule of the majority, and end by finding that the minority ― a minority in morals, money, and men ― are our masters whichever way we turn.” – Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth, 1894
A Democracy With Everything but a Choice
“A new analysis of American elections finds that in half of all races for partisan offices, a candidate runs unopposed.”
“That analysis of electoral competition comes from three nonprofit groups that assembled a database of races in the 2022 election cycle for more than 29,400 partisan offices nationwide, from U.S. senator to members of local airport district boards. Of those offices, 14,450 had but one candidate.”
The Times continues, “No complete accounting of all the nation’s uncontested races exists.” No accounting in elections, military budgets, Wall Street, or corporate budgets, no accounting anywhere in America.
They continue,
“And though defending democracy was a dominant theme of the Democratic National Convention last month, in the 2022 midterms, Democrats failed to field a single candidate for fully half of all partisan offices — well over three times the rate of Republican no-shows.
No choice = no democracy (Greek), no republic (Latin), same word two different languages, a sad state of affairs in both. Despite the NYT’s headline scoop, it hasn’t happened overnight. I've been talking about the deterioration of democracy, of the election process, and resulting decline of the republic for over three decades, so far back I was still a Democrat.
You'd think over the last half dozen years as DC Democrats made democracy and republic saving a primary issue, I'd at least get one phone call, an email…hell, I use to know people. Nada one my fellow Americans.
The idea promoted of Trump being an American neo-Caesar I’ve always found immensely amusing, but hey, who knows, as that crazy 19th century German said, history repeats, first time tragedy and second time farce. If this republic can fall to a knucklehead like Donald Trump, it died a long time ago.
Power has been flowing largely unimpeded from the distributed democratic bottom to a centralized and increasingly unaccountable top starting at least as far back as Mr. Lincoln’s War. Though a half-century before, slave-holder and founder Jefferson claimed he could see this inevitable course written into the constitution itself.
The NYT fails to report how much money was spent in these no contest elections. Open Secrets says $14.4 billion was spent on the 2020 election. If a quarter of that was campaigns with no opposition, that’d be $3.6 billion spent completely pretending elections.
This election day, there will be no choice for over half the elected seats appearing on ballots. This republic has systemic problems that will not be fixed moving around the chairs or switching who sits in them — a thought that should, but won’t be in the forefront of every voter’s mind as they cast their ballot.
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