Protest Vote

Protest Vote

Sometimes we want to use our vote to oppose something else. The problem with protest voting is that we get what we vote for, not the opposite of what we voted against. For example, the proponents of the Leave campaign in the United Kingdom incited anger towards immigrants and fear of terrorism as reasons for leaving the European Union. But they didn’t explain what would happen to the country if it threw away a quarter-century of trade relationships and progress. The pound plummeted. It’s not enough to know what you’re voting against, if you have no idea what you’re voting for.

In our country, too many people support Donald Trump to express their hatred of President Obama and their fear of terrorism. They might be very surprised to learn what they’re voting for. There are only two ways to govern a really diverse country: politics and dictatorship. In politics, the major factions have to compromise, so each gets a bit of what they want and nobody gets everything they want. Otherwise, it takes a dictator to hold a diverse country together. In Iraq, we toppled a dictator without creating politics to take his place. We broke the country, and failed to put it back together – which led to death, destruction, and the rise of the Islamic State.

Since the election of President Obama, the Republicans abandoned any possibility of compromise. They openly vowed to make him a one-term president, even if it ruined the country. Their failure to compromise as fiscal deadlines loomed brought the country to the brink of defaulting on our obligations, which harmed our credit rating and our standing among nations. I don’t know why charges weren’t brought against them. Doing deliberate damage to the country in order to spite the sitting president sounds like treason to me.

Fortunately, there were enough Democrats in Congress during the first term to pull the US and the world back from the financial mess that the Bush administration had left us in. However, the Republican refusal to negotiate and compromise has resulted in total Congressional gridlock since then. Guns cannot be controlled even after horrific massacres of children, despite nearly total support from voters. Immigration reform is impossible. Nothing happens in Congress except futile votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

If politics can’t work, dictatorship is the only alternative for governing a diverse nation. That is why Trumpism is so popular. He’s not a politician, he has no use for compromise. He says that he’ll fix everything, and some voters believe him, because of his pathological self-confidence and vast experience with failed businesses. Anyone with the least sense of history is reminded of Germany in the 1930s. Trumpism is Fascism, and he is running not for president of a republic, but for dictator. Vote for him only if that’s what you want.