"Nothing good comes easy" is a root concept quote that has prompted numerous variations. The core principle of the phrase was once nearly synonymous with American self-government ideals as one of our unofficial national mottoes.
Everything about our nation's founding was hard. Colonial Americans who championed independence braved the penalties of treason. Continental soldiers challenged the world's greatest military. Convention delegates in Philadelphia devised a revolutionary framework to unite the republic. And early U.S. citizens everywhere faced uncharted territory as self-governing pioneers.
Discipline is a key factor in democracy, because self-government without self-restraint is destined to fail. Wherever discipline declines, situational stability declines.
Time and again, easing the demands and requirements of discipline have been harmful, not helpful. When discipline tanks in school classrooms, so do learning and test scores. When law-abiding discipline gets lax, crime goes up. When workforce discipline slumps at factories, productivity plummets and accidents escalate.
Increased degree of difficulty has been rightly recognized and rewarded in life, from Olympic gymnastics and diving to higher education curricula and attainment to business achievement and financial performance. That's why rags-to-riches stories make the news and capture accolades more often than riches-to-more-riches stories do.
However, this time-proven philosophy of "discipline as a vital democratic virtue" where doing hard things actually makes life better and easier is more out of vogue than ever among today's progressive political class.
They propagandize difficulty as oppression, and sensationalize the reaped results of sown irresponsibility as liberty denied. Their latest target: voting.
The right to vote is a foundational constitutional right. Even so, U.S. voter apathy as defined by turnout has been an issue for decades, if not centuries, and yet our nation's progress and accomplishments have established global standards and exceeded rival countries. We are the gold standard for self-government, and have been since 1776, despite stunted "voter turnout" rates.
But defining apathy only in terms of the mathematical formula of votes cast divided by registered voters distorts analysis. Voters don't vote for a lot of different reasons, not all of them bad.
Sometimes voters don't feel knowledgeable about a ballot issue or race, and choose not to vote rather than cast an uninformed vote. Sometimes people don't vote because they don't like either choice. Sometimes they truly are apathetic--either simply not interested or unconvinced their vote will matter.
The most beneficial model for increasing voter turnout would be to increase voter interest and education overall. To focus, in other words, on producing better voters.
But that's not what most politically driven turnout advocates want at all. They only want more voters that support them.
The last thing Planned Parenthood wants is more anti-abortion voters. Indeed, if they could figure out a way to legally do so, they'd suppress that faction in a heartbeat. The last thing the NAACP wants is more Black Republican voters. Most special-interest groups that support more "voting rights" only really want to open more doors of opportunity and loopholes they can exploit for their cause.
In short, they value their agenda and its ballot-box success more than they value voter integrity. If they could truck in an illiterate registered sex offender felon who favors making pedophilia legal to vote for their candidate, that's good enough for them.
But is that good for the country?
There's plenty of bipartisan blame to go around on the subject of special-interest voter-mining, but conservatives in general have shown repeatedly in studies that they place a higher priority on voter integrity.
Even when they support special-interest groups such as the NRA, conservatives also support measures that help strengthen voter integrity. If voting is a paramount right, then abuse of that right is a paramount offense.
Like apathy, fraud has been a pervasive issue in American elections. The overlooked word in all the court decisions regarding former President Donald Trump's legal claims is the term "widespread."
Courts have ruled there wasn't evidence of organized widespread election fraud in Trump's case. But no court has ever ruled there wasn't any fraud in 2020; there's fraud in every election.
Voting in America is very easy. Everyone knows far in advance when Election Day is, and 46 states allow early voting. The polls are open past business hours so people don't have to take off work, and 29 states require employers to give employees time off to vote. Major campaigns are multimillion-dollar extravaganzas that dominate our media and screen-time.
That's why the progressive clamor to make voting "easier" is merely a masquerade for making election manipulation easier. No democratic nation needs more uneducated, uninterested, uninformed or fraudulent voters (though single-agenda special-interest groups will take them).
"The easy way out" is used almost universally in a pejorative context. We devalue things we take for granted, and treasure things we have to work to maintain.
Making it easier to get an A in school doesn't produce better education, and making it easier to vote won't produce a better electorate. Precedent suggests that to strengthen democracy, our national goal should be to bring more discipline, not less, to exercising the right to vote.
Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.