An Example of How Anti-Democratic Voting Rules Arguably Squash Political Change — and Our Republic’s Founders Might Have Wished It so

20 April 2016

Don’t want to let wild horses out of Establishment-owned Pasture, do we?

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton drubbed Senator Bernie Sanders 58 to 42 percent in New York’s just completed presidential primary.

But she did so with one anti-democratic administrative glitch that, in my opinion, harms the nation every time a noticeable force for even slight change is sweeping through us. New York State requires party members to register 6 months before the election.

This administrative requirement means that a surging candidate — like the previously unknown Sanders — probably has little chance of greatly influencing the New York election outcome.

This arguable misfortune further disadvantages him (and anyone else similarly situated) in the states that vote afterward. Previously gained political momentum is broken:

[I]n the end it was probably the state Democratic Party’s unfriendly and unbending rules requiring pre-existing voters to reregister as party members a half-year before its presidential primary to vote in it—the nation’s longest pre-election deadline to do so—that blocked independents and last-minute voters from flocking to Sanders, who has won in eight of the last nine states.

An estimated 20 percent of New York’s electorate was registered as independents.

The moral? — I am not whining on Senator Sanders’ behalf

I am just mentioning, again, how the United States does virtually everything it can to prevent democracy from really happening.

This “conservative” trait accords with the Founders’ basic intent. They wanted to protect the Elite’s property under the guise of a democracy that they could control after the Revolution’s intentionally indulged rabble-rousing. Can’t make successful revolt against George III’s army, without first quasi-swindling assistance from American cannon fodder.

Our post-Revolution institutional strait-jacketing of the rabble’s will is, however, arguably not actually Republic-preserving. Not even according to the Founders’ restrictive originating intent.

This may be what motivated Jefferson’s probably only quasi-serious quip about the necessity of spilling patriots’ blood from “time to time”. The rapaciously endowed buy charge of the Whole. And subsequently keeping them out of everyone else’s “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” cookie jar becomes impossible, without periodically spreading a swarm of Elite-directed musket balls around.

Is that what the president-to-be meant in 1787?

Probably. Foresightedly.

I wonder whether he also recognized that the very structure that he helped create would subsequently spawn the problem he foresaw. There is a difference between losing a democratic republic to public complacency and creating a democratic republic whose very cogs mandate its loss.

I think the Founders did the latter. New York’s anti-rabble primary process is merely a subtle example of the Founders’ institutionalized philosophical mistake.

PeteFree.com

An Example of How Anti-Democratic Voting Rules Arguably Squash Political Change — and Our Republic’s Founders Might Have Wished It so