“Why Vote Republican?”

     Jack Kerwick asks us, directly and plainly. Here’s the Sunday Punch:

     How exactly is voting Republican a matter of “fighting the Left,” or “fighting for the heart and soul of America?” Notice that GOP politicians and conservative media personalities are always glaringly vague on this point. They just treat as axiomatic that a vote for a Republican is a vote to retard the advances of the Left. In point of fact, however, we know nothing could be further from reality.

     Even now, with a red tsunami forecasted for November, not a single Republican or Big Conservative media scribbler or talking head is so much as hinting at what Republicans plan on doing when they regain Congress (let alone how they plan on doing it). Nor are they saying what they surely will say if and when this forecast comes to fruition, that while they have the Congress locked up, they don’t yet have the presidency, so it’s unrealistic for their constituents to expect for them to do all that much (I’m not prophetic, it’s just that I’m old enough to have seen this movie on more than one occasion).

     Many Americans have asked themselves the questions Kerwick asks in his angry, cynical column. There are no satisfactory answers — answers, that is, that would satisfy us. There are answers, however.

     “Vote Republican!” “Why?” “Because…well…because we want our turn! We want the committee chairmanships! We want the cocktail parties! We want to be the featured guests on the talking-heads shows! We want to be first in line at the Big Taxpayer-Catered Buffet once again!”

     No period of Republican federal dominance has done anything of consequence to reverse the trend of government expansion. Washington’s destruction of our rights, our economy, and our sovereignty has been relentless. Donald Trump tried his best, knowing that as an “outsider” we expected him to do what the political Establishment would never entertain: reduce the size, expense, and arrogance of the Omnipotent State. Yet even he, with all his energy and resolve, was unable to make permanent any of his admittedly laudable goals. The executive orders he issued have all been reversed…and quite a number of Republican legislators are happy about it.

     Politicians are people who have made the pursuit of power their highest aim. They love power, even more than they love the perquisites that come with it. And regardless of the letter after their names, they will never, ever do anything to reduce the power of the Omnipotent State. They merely want their hands on its levers.

     Time was, there was a West Coast supermarket chain that emblazoned its bags with a heart-lifting bit of advice:

     The truth in those six words is self-evident. What, after all, have politicians been hectoring us about for decades now? Low voter turnout. What have all the “public-service pitches” been telling us: Feel the power, America! Get out there and vote! And what, exactly, does it all amount to, beyond their desire that we endorse their chosen enterprise through the ballot box?

     The immense balloting fraud of the 2020 elections may have been intended, at least as a minor consequence, to reinforce the notion that “we” support the system as it stands. After all, never have more votes been tallied in any American election. People wouldn’t vote in such numbers if they didn’t believe in the importance and trustworthiness of the electoral process, would they? Never mind that a lot of those ballots were cast by the unenfranchised, or by the dead, or by persons who voted many times, or were filled out by machines and trucked across the country to those states where they could swing the results.

     By the way: how many times have you heard some opinion-monger talk about “our two-party system?” Take careful note of each word. “Our?” Who do you mean by that? “Two-party?” How did it get to be only two – and who benefits most from the marginalization of “minor” parties? “System?” In what way is it a system? What mechanisms exist to keep it that way — and who benefits from its perpetuation?

     Do not look to government as a solution to the evils of government — and do not look to politicians to undo the evils created by politicians. They are of a single breed: one that should be exterminated to the last man, so that the rest of us can get on with the business of living freely and in peace.