I don't get a flu shot every year.
I got one a couple of weeks ago, but there have been years when I have let it slide. I'm busy, I'm not wild about standing in lines, sometimes getting a flu shot can make you feel bad (though it doesn't, every health-care worker in the country wants you to know, give you the flu; the shot contains only the part of the flu virus that triggers your body's immunological response to the flu) and I have a superstitious confidence in my ability to avoid the flu on my own.
While I might slip up and not get a flu shot every year, I do vote every chance I get. This year, my plan is to vote before this column is published; early voting started Monday in Little Rock and I expect to be at the polls early in the morning. To get it out of the way.
I'm not going to tell you how I voted. You might think you can guess, but an awful lot get it wrong. My tendency is to vote for the person--for the intellect, the imagination, the demonstrated capacity for empathy--rather than engage in tactical voting.
But I'm not naive. I try to vote what philosopher Allan Gibbard would call my "sincere ballot," but there are cases when I'll vote for a candidate who appears to be stronger in an attempt to avoid a bad outcome. Congressional races don't take place in a vacuum; there are lots of out-of-district interests involved. While my instinct is to judge candidates on character and talent, sometimes you also have to look at who they're hanging out with, who's giving them money and buying them dinner.
And whose actions they're giving a pass.
Sometimes you have to consider what they're not saying. Good people don't defend bad behavior just because it's convenient or because they think there's some risk associated with criticizing bad actions. It's pretty simple, good people don't do bad things.
But nothing is simple. If the world weren't complicated, it would be easy to identify the right thing to do. Maybe it would still be hard to do it, but we would at least know what's right. These days we've built industries around rationalizations; you can find cover for every creepy thing you would like to excuse.
We're all compromised--that's what I keep hearing. That it's naive to expect people not to be corrupted by the small glamour of elected office. That there's no reason to expect them to resist the legalized bribes they're offered, no reason to expect them to pay more than lip service to the notion that they are actually public servants, not members of some favored elite.
A political scientist was saying recently that the whole idea of elections was flawed, that we'd be better off if we just drew citizens at random to serve in these positions. Just do it like jury duty--when your number comes up you represent your neighbors on the city board or in Congress. Or you offer some excuse to get out of it. But if we paid people the same relatively modest salaries we pay public servants, we'd probably have a pretty high rate of acceptance.
They call that system "sortiton" and it was the basis for ancient Athenian democracy. Aristotle talks about this in Politics; maybe you've seen him quoted on Twitter: "It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election."
What Aristotle meant was that in practice, administrations created by popular vote disproportionately represented the interests of the wealthy. (Sound familiar?) So the Greeks put their faith in the proposition that all citizens were created equal and chose their elected officials from what was essentially a list of volunteers. Some positions, such as military leaders, required applicants to meet certain prerequisites, but the general opinion was that just about anyone could represent their neighbors.
I think this is true. We don't need our best and brightest applying themselves to running for and attaining high office. We need our best and our brightest making art and curing cancer. The government can get by with well-meaning, competent people who take the task seriously.
There are some obvious advantages to this system. No campaigns. Since individuals acquire power through random selection they wouldn't be beholden to any political party, just to their individual conscience. We wouldn't hold any illusions about the elected somehow being better than the population at large. Sortition would provide more diversity in our government since women, ethnic minorities and economic classes would presumably be represented in the government in roughly the same proportion they exist.
There would still be opportunities for corruption, but limited terms would mean bad actors would be replaced at regular intervals.
Best of all, it would protect us from people who really, really want to make big decisions about how we should and ought to live.
Not that I'm advocating sortition--it's a practical impossibility given that we already have a government largely made up of mediocre people convinced of their particular specialness and dedicated above all to holding onto their phony jobs so they might continue to do the bidding of their moneyed clients. And politics is, as the generals say, the art of the possible. So let's not waste time advocating for what's not going to happen.
Let's just be clear about what is happening: if you really want things to change you've got to buy a congressman, not just vote for one. I've got other things I'd rather spend my discretionary income on.
Still, I always vote. Not because it it makes that much of a difference. Like a flu shot, it doesn't guarantee anything, but it only stings a little.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 10/23/2018