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Are US national elections too long? Indeed, they are, and this is one of the most important, unanswered questions of the last decade and more.
The question is unanswered largely because the shortening of elections would represent a dollar lost to precisely those people who have been enriched by endless elections. In fact, “too long” is a misleading understatement. Our elections are seamless and unbroken.
Trimming the election period would benefit everyone but politicians and media elites.
The most recent American presidential election ended with the swearing in ceremony of President Donald Trump on January 20. Campaigning for the office ended shortly after the Electoral College toted up votes and pronounced Trump the winner of the campaign. That announcement should have put a period to the campaigning.
It didn’t -- and won’t. Those who lost the election will not stop campaigning. Former President Joe Biden’s odd Farewell Address was a farewell only for him, and he managed by a wave of a wand to turn defeat into victory for the neo-progressives who had overwritten his nearly fifty years as a liberal Democrat in the fashion of former President John F. Kennedy.
Since Kennedy, assassinated in 1963, left office, the Democrat Party has moved further left towards Vermont socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’ anti-capitalist utopia.
Nearly the whole of Biden’s four-year presidential stretch may justly be characterized as neo-progressive, a political philosophy properly characterized during Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign as creatively indifferent to traditional liberal values.
Harris felt – and said many times, both before and after her failed presidential campaign, that the nation should focus fiercely on “What can be, unburdened (emphasis mine) by what has been.” This is a view that cannot be sustained beyond tomorrow. It is not possible to recreate the whole of Western Civilization anew every day. The past is a guide rather than a burden. G.K Chesterton put it best when he wrote in Orthodoxy: “Tradition is the democracy of the dead. It means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes: our ancestors.”
Kennedy, it may be recalled, wrote Profiles in Courage, a book awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1957 that praises past courageous US senators, our liberal ancestors.
There are a number of dangers inherent in a sclerotic political system that maintains in office what some call a conspiracy of political dunces – the solipsists among us who genuinely believe the past should not be a prelude to the future.
Campaigning, we all know, is not the same as governing. During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden presented himself as a Democrat who would moderate and bridge the country’s political divide. Just the opposite, it turned out, was true. Biden, his most ardent political media supporters now affirm, was the most radical president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His legacy will be an episodic one, jarringly off center.
The Democrat Party has not stopped campaigning since the first election of former President Barack Obama, a somewhat more modest neo-progressive than Biden. Trump’s undisputed victory in the recently concluded national election was owing, almost entirely, to Biden’s far left campaign, and Biden’s governance in office was an unholy mess.
What the nation needs just now is a George Orwell, a committed socialist and a writer who well knew that corruption of any kind always begins with the intentional corruption of the language.
The following passage is from Orwell’s Politics and the English Language: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia… But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
A media devoted to politics rather than lucidity and purity of speech and thought is – a hackneyed phrase, I know – “part of the problem.”
