The Fraudulent Ideology of Voting

by Angelo Mike 

Exclusive to STR

February 20, 2007

There’s something very peculiar about every democratic election. In every one, at least one candidate tells you that they are the right man or woman for the job. They say that you should vote based on your conscience, but vote for me above all. While they believe that the moral imperative always demands that their ideas be adopted and enforced by the government, they agree that law should be decided by consensus. There should be little cost to making laws for most people, who on their own would dominate the weak or be dominated and would make war. Therefore, they must be able to secretly vote for someone to do that for them.  

Setting aside an anarchist’s view of the immorality of the views of politicians, we may judge them by their own standards of conduct to show the contradictions systemic in the state. By the measure of their own conduct, they are immoral.  

For instance, Hillary Clinton is running for president. She has written books and given speeches on the ideas she thinks are necessary to adopt and enforce, such as compulsory health care and state child rearing. She clearly believes this and believes in the state apparatus itself as just and necessary, presumably for the standard Hobbesian and Lockean arguments for, at the very least, an ultimate arbiter over disputes because people can’t be trusted when left to their own devices. And, of course, somehow we aren’t left to them now when states can disarm us, take our money, and forcibly forbid us from doing this or compel us to do that as often as they like.  

It is this very same gullible, weak constituency that she thinks ought to determine whether people like her are fit for office. The very people who don’t have a right to raise their own kids how they like! In the words of Mikhail Bakunin, what “An unworthy hoax!”  

In every politician, we then have at least two competing logical structures. On the one hand, a politician believes in his own morality, and that wavering or flip-flopping for popular approval is morally outrageous. By this measure, democracy is morally bankrupt.  

On the other, people need to be ruled over and herded, their thoughts directed by the state’s schools, and people must think that they are a legitimate part of this process of rule making. And it is the state who counts the votes and vested party interests who manipulate votes.  

We have either democracy or dictatorship, it seems. But the truth is a democratic dictatorship. Every dictatorship arises on some popular movement. The truth is that people, being as ignorant and thoughtless as they often are, cannot be trusted with the power to vote.  

Legislation by democratic consensus being considered the ethical norm, it then seems perfectly reasonable that someone like Hillary Clinton, who tells us she mistakenly voted for the Iraq War in 2002, should be trusted with power now, since that was a mere mistake.  

And yet, should Enron have made the mistake of killing over 600,000 Iraqis among other numerous crimes, we would have bounties on the heads of the men and women who ordered such aggression and would consider them outlaws and murderers. They could not possibly claim that they are essential to our well being, and that for our own good we will be under threat of violence and imprisonment if we decide we don’t want their services of protection, which seem to only invite more and more aggression.  

No, in the private sector people have too much sense for this. They know that is mass murder, and that the benefit of the doubt cannot be given to a company that depends upon having a good reputation with us for patronage. The state, on the other hand, depends upon the lack of your consent, for it threatens you with violence if you dare resist it.  

Should any private firm attempt such a thing, it would go to show in the minds of people how evil such a corporation is. It must maintain its well being at the expense of hundreds of thousands or millions of lives. But for a government, this is essential to our welfare, lest any mythical Union fall apart.  

And it’s just too bad for all those Iraqis and dead Americans who were sent to war because of mistaken people like her. No, do not consider it murder. Without that benefit of the doubt always given to the state, they would be condemned to inaction. Then who could protect us?  

By even submitting to such majority votes, men and women like Hillary Clinton suppose that though they are right (though sometimes mistaken, to the detriment of the lives of untold millions), they should defer to the judgment of all of us, the same people who can’t be trusted to smoke a joint in our own home or buy alcohol on Sundays. We cannot be armed, but we must arm them.  

Is it any wonder why democratic dictators, arising with popular support, and even open elections, such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, could proclaim how virtuous democracy is, and still murder untold millions? Can there be any doubt that the Germans could not be trusted to vote in 1933? That, however bad they may have been in appraising the consequences of actions taken in their personal and professional lives, the solution was and is not to then enable them to elect a very honest and consistent politician, since they will choose the consistently insane and honestly murderous ones?  

Must it come as a surprise that a nation full of enlightened and as civilized people as ours will elect men and women who keep finding new Hitlers to be destroyed, will engage in war, but insist that they, of course, are not the tyrants they would perpetually protect us from?  

I will sum up my position with the brilliant anti-state Albert Jay Nock’s comments in “The Criminality of the State”:  

“No, ‘democratic’ State practice is nothing more or less than State practice. It does not differ from Marxist State practice, Fascist State practice, or any other. Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: you get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you. A citizenry which has learned that one short lesson has but little more left to learn.”