You Should Only Complain If You Lose
Action is a pre-requisite for complaints
When the Biden vs. Trump matchup became inevitable, commentators couldn’t help themselves to bloviate about just how dissatisfied the American people are about this matchup. My favorite example comes from Pew Research. Pew showed that 49% of those polled would replace both Biden and Trump on the ballot. Do your exploration as well. Ask some friends: “Are you excited about the Biden v. Trump matchup in 2024?”
I’m not considerably excited about the matchup. I will not ever cast a vote for President Trump at this point and President Biden’s age, competence, and foreign policy complications make voting for him a tricky paradigm for me. I’ll vote for the current President, despite the host of issues I could discuss in another post.
I chose to participate in the process designed by Democratic Party to select the nominee. My choice, Dean Phillips, a young and relatively inexperienced Congressman from Minnesota, lost the primary by such a significant margin you’d think it was a college football exhibition game between a powerhouse and a local JuCo. Though disappointed, I appreciated the effort from Phillips (as tiny as it may be), to show that there are options in the primary process.
In the current state of our election process, if you don’t participate in the primary election in one of the two major parties, your personally preferred candidate for the general election will likely not be an option on the ballot. Through the primary process, parties, made up of everyday citizens like you and me and your cousin and Tom Brady, make decisions on who is put up to the general election. This process demands citizens to be responsible for their options through voting. If the people have preferences for or against specific candidates, it is up to individual citizens to participate in that process.
I’d venture to guess many Americans dissatisfied with our options did not even go so far as to participate in their primary or caucus in their home state. Check the data for yourself: the University of Florida’s Election Lab tracks data on turnout in each primary versus the voting population in that state. It isn’t pretty.
I could imagine a whole levy of complaints I resonate with. The two party system sucks! It’s stupid I have to join the party to vote for my candidate! The primaries are rigged! I don’t want to be a Republican/Democrat! Caucuses are unpractical for most people! Voting days should be federal holidays! All of these complaints state by state are variably valid and understandable. There are probably a lot more. However, we cannot escape the reality of our situation: the election process demands citizen participation and our process is designed through the primary/general election process through the two party system. The parties are the avenues through which elections happen, elections are the avenue through which government offices get decided, government offices are how political decisions are made, and every political decision, local, state, and federal, impacts each and every person in our country.
Ultimately, in a system that demands citizen participation to make decisions on who represents the people in government; we have far too few people participating in the primary process for how many lament the current state of how the government represents us. The most passionate, ideological, and crazed partisans participate in our primaries, and for the most part, it shows.
Earn your cynicism. Put some skin in the game. Show up to the primary ready to cast a vote, and be upset when you lose. Our representative democracy will only be representative if more and more people participate in the process; even if your option doesn’t get selected. Your lack of participation in the political process does not absolve you of your responsibility for the state of our situation, and in fact, I’d say it is your fault. So please, spare me, I’d prefer you don’t complain until you lose.