#also i don’t get why voting isn’t mandatory in america? cause the way amendments to the constitution work here is that both major parties

[introverting-rn]

To those in america who don’t vote as a protest:

On the 26th of October, 1917, Vladimir Lenin announces the Sovnarkom as the new Russian government, led by him. In response, the Mensheviks and moderate Social Revolutionaries left the meeting as a protest against Lenin’s authority.

He then held a vote to label them as counter-revolutionary and therefore criminals.

You are not doing yourself a favour. You are handing power to those who would, in this case, arrest opposition, oppose democratic systems and cause the deaths of tens of millions of their own citizens - more than the amount that died in the Holocaust - through enforced famine that especially targeted the population in Ukraine.

You are not helping anybody.

Sincerely, a modern history student <3

[tattooed-alchemist]

And the alternative? We do actually have a political tradition here in America that avoids the twinned follies of the Alt-Right and the Ctrl-Left, and arguably offers the best way out of the bitter and brittle polarization that has turned so much of American society into one vast ongoing shouting match. It’s been around for a good long time, and it has tolerably widespread support from ordinary Americans, though it’s suffered neglect in recent years. To continue the computer-keyboard metaphor, we can call it the Esc-Center.

(Those readers who would like a soundtrack for the following discussion, with a nod to the date and also to the spirit of what I’d like to communicate, may want to click here.)

What constitutes the core of the Esc-Center? I’d suggest these as starting points for discussion:

Individual Liberty. A country as vast and diverse as the United States will never be able to find a consensus on most social issues. It’s a waste of time to try to make one, and a source of useless conflict to try to impose one by government edict. That’s why the American tradition has, however clumsily and incompletely, embraced the principle of individual liberty in any situation where one person’s actions do not cause significant harm to another. Would-be social reformers, whether their motivation be religious or secular, are free to advance their agendas by trying to persuade others, but when they try to make their ideologies mandatory via the machinery of government, that act is an intolerable usurpation and should be stopped in its tracks.

Representative Democracy. We have a system to allow citizens to seek redress of grievances. It’s called politics, and it’s open to anyone who wants to get involved in it. The election of Donald Trump in the teeth of the united opposition of the political establishment shows that the political system in this country is far less broken than radicals on either side like to claim it is. (The way that so many of Trump’s opponents denounce him and his followers as “populists” shows that they know perfectly well what the score is. What’s the opposite of populism? Why, elitism, of course.)  If you want to change the way things are done, there are plenty of ways to find an audience for your ideas, build a constituency, and make things happen. If you’d rather just show up once every two or four years to vote for prechewed candidates, on the other hand, you can expect to get the government you deserve.

Political Federalism. Our Constitution, as revised by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, assigns the federal government certain duties and responsibilities, and leaves everything else to the states and the people. That’s been ignored time and again over the last two thirds of a century, but it remains very nearly the only way that a country this diverse can manage its internal affairs. There isn’t a single item of social policy that will be equally acceptable to the people of Massachusetts and Oklahoma, and rather than trying to ram Massachusetts law down Oklahoman throats, or Oklahoma law down Massachusetts throats, it really does work better to allow the people of each state to manage their own affairs through their elected officials. Does that mean that people in Massachusetts and Oklahoma will be horribly offended by the laws passed in each other’s states? Of course it does. Deal.

Equality of Opportunity. The word equality can mean two things—equality of opportunity or equality of outcome—and you can have one or the other but you can’t have both.  Equality of opportunity means that every person has the same chance in life as every other, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, social class, and so on. Equality of outcome means that every subgroup of society gets assigned an equal share in life, irrespective of talent or effort. The former is as essential as the latter is unjust. If gender, ethnicity, social class, or membership in other categories are used to exclude American citizens unfairly from education, housing, jobs, political representation, and the like, that’s a wrong that should be redressed—but people vary in their talents, their interests, and their willingness to work, and it’s not the business of government to override those differences in pursuit of an ideological goal.

Individual Responsibility. You are not responsible for who your great-grandparents were or what they did. You are responsible only for your own words and deeds—and no, you don’t get a free pass because of who your great-grandparents were, either.  The doctrine of collective guilt, by which all the members of a given group are blamed forever for the actions of some members of that group in the past, was invented by theologians in the Middle Ages to justify pogroms against the Jews, and every time the same notion has been deployed since then, the results have been comparable. If historical causes result in injustices in the present, those injustices need to be addressed, but the past can’t be changed retroactively, and once government has guaranteed equality of opportunity to every citizen and made such redress as may be voted into law, its responsibility toward the past is over.

Civil Society. Government action isn’t the best solution to every problem; in many cases, voluntary private organizations do a much better job. When Alexis de Tocqueville toured the young United States in the very early 19th century, one of the things he found that set the new republic apart from other nations was the enthusiasm with which Americans founded voluntary organizations to address social problems. That habit faded with the metastatic expansion of the federal government after the Second World War, but the framework remains in place and deserves much more use than it received during America’s misguided age of empire.

An End to Empire. The United States has no business being the world’s policeman, much less the world’s jailer. We’re currently wasting billions of dollars every year maintaining military bases in more than a hundred countries around the world while our domestic infrastructure collapses from decades of malign neglect. Most countries with empires—and yes, let’s be honest with ourselves, that’s what we have—end up collapsing economically once the cost of maintaining the empire outstrips the benefits. We’re perilously close to that, and need to follow the example of Britain and stand down from our global empire before it drags us down with it. Yes, that means that our allies overseas are going to have to pay the cost of their own defense or go under, and they’re free to choose which of those they want to do.

A Politics of Realism. The world will never be without suffering and injustice, nor can all social problems be solved. It’s incumbent on political leaders and citizens alike to redress grievances and correct injustices as best they can, but insisting that a political system is intolerably evil because it isn’t perfect is the logic of a spoiled child. Nor does it count as injustice when some subset of the citizenry can’t convince the rest of the population to give it everything it wants. We live in a world of limits, where tradeoffs are necessary and individual liberties inevitably come into conflict; the job of government is to broker compromises that share as many of the burdens and benefits of life in community as fairly as possible.

That’s a very rough first approximation of the Esc-Center as I see it: a set of approaches to social and political questions that’s worked tolerably well in the past—better, certainly, than the grand schemes that have replaced it in the political mainstream—and still has a great deal of support among Americans generally. It seems to me that getting these ideas back out in circulation now, as an alternative to the paired vagaries of the Ctrl-Left and the Alt-Right, is one way to help further the values some of us here in the US are celebrating this Fourth of July.