Every other Harris sign has something like "save democracy" or "democracy depends on it". They have the same emotional resonance as "save puppies" or "the kittens depend on you voting for Harris". It has the same amount of truth content too. Like you said, it's religious in nature, and what a small god they worship.
Funny how one campaign’s slogan is “Make America Great Again” and the other side adopted the mantra “Noooo, were not going back” (to making america great, presumably).
But both slogans represent the religious idols of the parties.
Conservatives: America, and its imperial greatness and cultural swagger, that whole mythos. An amalgam from founding father underdogs to global navy juggernauts, which somehow fit together for them. And a mashup of 1980’s babes on the beach with 1880’s pioneer “traditional values” ancestors that somehow they also pretend fit together.
Liberals: “Progress”, literally time moving forward, the more higher the year number (2024) the better and the past is bad and scary. Past<Present day<Future. Future=change=good. Outcomes dont matter, facts dont matter, history doesnt matter, the almighty (insert present year here) is the god to be continuously placated with eternal cultural revolution.
Although I like the standards you propose for limiting the franchise, I think that, being realistic, the marriage/children and church endorsement ones aren’t very likely to take hold nowadays, even if they’re good objectives to work towards.
The economic equation one would be a lot easier to push through compared to the others, and I believe that basic logic and reading comprehension tests (to exclude mentally unfit people) and basic history and contemporary events tests (to exclude people who clearly have no interest in what brought us here and what’s happening around us from having a say in where we’re going) should also be part of it.
Of course it could and would. That used to be law in many many states of the US for people seeking office. Being a church member in good standing is extremely easy to parse out? Papist complaints about protestants are so intentionally facile. Even just using the Nicaean creed alone would serve as a solid basis to screen people for the right to vote. Roman Catholics who try to call mormons and JW as protestants just to smear Protestantism as if theres no doctrinal boundaries are being guileful. Dont be one of those guys.
However, I loved your article and totally agree with you! Great stuff. There will be no Constitutional changes in the current status quo. The most likely thing to happen in the next 5 years is a civil war and widespread famine and violence of extreme proportions. By God’s grace I pray, when Christian Conservatives emerge victorious from the tribulation, and reconstitute the republic- then they can reform enfranchisement and implement these ideas. Im a big fan of all three (except the biological child one is somewhat harsh against the infertile who want kids).
The issue with Protestants is that they legitimately have like a million denominations, and worse than that, many of their churches are non-denominational entirely. So in order to really give church membership the sort of teeth you'd want it to have, you would somehow have to sift through all of that and sort out the wheat from the chaff--we'd have to draw a line somewhere at exactly what counts as a legitimate Christian church or not, which would be insanely difficult to disentangle on its own, and then we'd have to figure out a means of vetting each individual church and denomination, which would run into the same problem that I described with the idea of simply banning the Democratic party--all the liberal churches will just pretend to go along with whatever criteria you've selected.
It's not totally impossible, in theory, but I think it's a bit short-sighted to pretend that it would be easy or straightforward. I have difficulty caring about it very much because I converted to Orthodoxy which does not have this problem. My religious qualification I think would be eminently reasonable in a nation that is majority and foundationally Orthodox. But, as with ethnicity, it seems far less workable in the United States (too much heckin' diversity).
I don't think there is a civil war or widespread famine or violence coming in the next 5 years, but that's a totally different subject lol.
I think the only reforms coming to the nation will be out of the crucible of conflict which now imminently encroaches.
But anyways, I think it would be pretty easy to establish whatever theological qualifications for voting that one wants. Lets say you considered only male pastors to be a high priority issue (egalitarianism is Biblically incorrect imo). Thats fine, the lib churches with lady pastors wouldnt change, they would cope and seethe instead. Other doctrines such as communion, trinity, etc are pretty simple to double check and enforce. Oneness pentecostals, no (modalist). Seventh Day adventist (annihilationist), totally fine. I believe in eternal conscious torment but wouldnt call them heretics. So you can create firm boundaries around whatever doctrines you decree primary.
I mean I think RCC and EO have some egregiously incorrect doctrine, but I would still want to allow qualified men of those faiths to vote. (I will assume your EO, as opposed to a branch of Oriental Orthodox.) Protestants dont think every single EO is anathema and condemned to hell, but that is required dogma for all EOs to believe about all protestants and RC’s. It does become rather easy to enforce both ecclesial and political “unity” when you anathematize everybody else. I just dont think thats just or proper Christian behavior. I consider you a Christian brother, even if you dont believe in penal substitutionary atonement (Col 2:13-14) or the Filioque (John 20:22).
I think the future American Christendom should indeed have adherence to the faith and boundaries around it. But ecumenical councils did not feature bishops who agreed on every issue, instead it set boundaries around who were heretics. Its hard to imagine an American Christendom thats anything other than protestant ecumenism as its organizing bulwark. However in such a nation I would love for it to be a refuge for persecuted (upstanding/intelligent) Christians around the world, Coptic, Assyrian, Chinese, whatever. Sorry for the long response, its not even really necessary. I just started typing and it turned pedantic. I liked your piece and all your content in general. God bless
>I think the only reforms coming to the nation will be out of the crucible of conflict which now imminently encroaches.<
Unfortunately, I agree. I don't think it will take the form of an organized Civil War of the sort that people have in mind from the history books, but I agree that whatever change happens will not be done in a civilized or orderly fashion. History suggests that it will be chaotic, unpredictable, and unlikely to make anyone very happy in the long run, left or right.
I hope that you are correct in your optimism regarding Christian ecumenism and I will say that, if such a thing were hypothetically to be attempted, I'd give it my support as a worthy endeavor to try for, even if I don't think it is likely to work out in the end. I don't consider non-Orthodox to be anathema or anything like that and I do not think it is accurate to say that Orthodox believe all non-Orthodox are automatically consigned to hell, but I'd have to do some research and double-check the issue before I felt qualified to speak on that. Theology is not my strong suit.
Great article! Reminds me of the system of voting Rhodesia had in place, before the global west backed the communist insurgents to overthrow it. I agree a more limited franchise would produce more sensible decision making by the legislature and better governance.
I live in Australia, which is an outlier in that there is a mandatory franchise. Voting is compulsory by punishment of fine. Voter turnout consequentially is like 90-95%.
I initially thought it was a bad system as it was illiberal. I now think it’s a good system, because liberalism is retarded. Also, as the entire population bell curve shows up to vote, and the result somewhat reflects the view of the median voter.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but my perception is that the 60% most democracies have turning up to vote (US, UK) are skewed towards the zealous retard demographic. Probably why neither left or right in Australia are against the mandatory voting system.
My criticism of mandatory voting is that you're getting the opposite of the zealous retard--people who legitimately have no idea what is going on, don't care, and will just show up and pull any random lever to get it over with. I don't know if that's actually what happens with mandatory voting, but that's my intuition. I do know that studies have been done suggesting that the implementation of mandatory voting in the United States likely wouldn't change election outcomes very much.
I'm not the biggest fan of mandatory voting, but a somewhat reasonable rebuttal to this point is that the people who don't know and don't care will vote in ways that statistically cancel each other out, leaving the informed voters to decide the election. IIRC Australia deliberately lists the candidates in a different random order on each ballot, to prevent the first-listed candidate getting an advantage from people who don't care and just tick the top box because it's the top one.
I think my biggest criticism of compulsory voting is that voters staying at home is an important signal that the political class is ignoring their concerns, this is something that compulsory voting artificially suppresses.
I agree strongly with your assessment, especially through the lens of a separation of our modern states by accepting the divisions of """political leanings""" as a disguised / misunderstood form of religious profession and leaning into those - acknowledging that states must operate on a bedrock of shared spiritual values and that the only alternative to a peaceful seperation is some sort of war.
With that said, I must say that as someone who has learned much from the Bible, gained greatly from developing spiritualism, discovering a tremendous respect for Christian thinkers, an appreciation for the Christian of great creatives (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis etc.), and more than anything happy to have seperated from atheism a decade ago - I'm still not a Christian myself and doubt I ever will be.
To my understanding, Nietzche was correct that the Enlightenment killed God, and the Church of today is worshipping what remains of his corpse if you will. I find the Christian position empathetic, but ultimately I do not see it recovering, not at least without a transformation as dramatic as that which occurred to Jewry, and this may not be desirable.
If Christianity was built largely upon the best of the old Israelite faith mixed with salvageable (non-despicable) elements of European Paganism, then a new faith for those of us on the Right must in turn spring up, building upon the greatest religions of before in a direction that would allow people like yourself and myself to fully unite. The Left seems to have accomplished this long ago, which accounts for many of their cultural victories - I believe that the Right wing's counter resurgence since 2015 has been the beginning of our own new spirit coming together. A lot of the old shibboleths of the GOP had to be shattered, before the best could be resalvaged and tied into something newer.
(I feel like writing an article on this myself, but am given to pause given my current schedule and a feeling that I ought to introduce myself to Substack first.)
I agree that the right needs to unite and agree on its values in the same way as the left. The problem is that all of the people on the right who are still clinging on to certain liberal values--a fondness for sexual immorality, acceptance of abortion, etc.--all seem to be non-Christians. Whereas Christians like myself appear to be those who most thoroughly reject leftism. From my point of view, this basically means that atheists need to get with the program. If you refuse to acknowledge God, okay, I can work with that actually, but you need to stop tolerating abortion, promotion of LGBT stuff, etc. We can't have a proper spirit of our own if large parts of it are still carried over from leftism.
Some of your proposals on the franchise are bad enough that I won’t discuss them, you seem to contradict yourself in the same article.
On the net taxpayer thing if we are going to be truly that strict you’re likely talking a reduction in the franchise of a very large amount. 60%, 80%? Hard to say. Income taxes are extremely progressive. How would you handle intergenerational (olds are obviously net tax recipients, should they not vote). What about parents?
Let’s take a less extreme version of this. Taking Medicaid means you can’t vote while on the program. That’s a much lower % knocked out. I think that when I ran the math on that it would shift the 2020 election by millions of votes. It was less then bidens popular vote total, but enough for Trump to win the EC. This would be an improvement, but it wouldn’t fundamentally transform politics.
A far more impactful change would be granting married families votes for their children. This could be combined with the Medicaid rule, and a lot of the people on Medicaid are children.
This really would transform politics. The entire Democratic Party is carried on the back of its 68% support amongst single women. It really is the cat lady party.
>Some of your proposals on the franchise are bad enough that I won’t discuss them, you seem to contradict yourself in the same article.<
Where?
I think that proper voting restrictions might shrink the franchise by a very large amount, yes. If we are left with just 1% of the population that can vote, then *if that gets us to correct policy outcomes,* we should be comfortable with that. I don't think things would need to go to that extent. But shrinking the franchise to just 40% of the population, or even 20%? Sure, why not? Pareto principle suggests that about 80% of people are chaff in any given situation.
As for what the exact restrictions should be, sure, I don't doubt that people can come up with better ones than the ones I proposed here. The ones I proposed were very off-the-cuff and do not have a lot of thought put into them. The point of the article is that one should be willing to entertain such restrictions, and should do away with the religious devotion to a universal franchise. We can then proceed to figuring out what the restrictions will actually be, but we have to get to that starting point first.
This idea of having ideological tests and letting local pastors kick people in and out of the voting roles.
"if that gets us to correct policy outcomes"
We would probably just get the policy outcomes that favored that 1%, whether they were good for society or not. That's how we got universal franchise in the first place.
And sure, if you kick out people on Medicaid, give extra votes to married people with kids, you are probably going to end up with a franchise that proportionally excludes 50%.
Precisely. Taxes: economic contributors, not takers. Kids: Generational rootedness, not transients. Christian: Lovers of Truth and Virtue, not evil lies. These proposals would certainly exclude over 50% of current voters. But those voters are them who weaponize their vote to the detriment of society long term. Voting for more welfare, more debt, more cultural change, more perversion. The responsible, those who uphold society, should steward and shepherd it
The main reason that voting is bad is because it turns the peasantry against one another by enlisting us in the struggles between oligarchic cliques.
The only thing that we as peasants have going for us is our numerical advantage. This cannot be relied upon without solidarity. Participation in party squabbling undermines the solidarity.
That is the true social engineering aim of democracy.
There's no doubt that voters are lazy and gullible about almost every issue. I can't exclude myself from this group. But we didn't start worrying about this until the government threw off its traditional constraints and started telling us to wear our seat belts, to stop smoking, to eat sugar instead of fat, to wear masks, to not wear masks, to censor each other, to hate Country X, to unconditionally support Country Y, and so on. And it started borrowing money to remove all financial constraints on its power, saddling future generations with the "taxation without representation" far more egregious than what started the American Revolution. The solution isn't to restrict the franchise, it's to disempower the government to the point we just point and laugh at it, like we did 100 years ago.
I mean, I don't disagree, but 100 years ago we had just barely given women the right to vote (19th Amendment was 105 years ago). The limited government that we started out with, the one that didn't have all of this overreaching power that we complain about today, was the deliberate design of an *extremely* small and narrowly selected handful of men, men who were pretty clear in their opinion that universal franchise would be a disaster.
1. The franchise stays universal, everyone still gets to vote.
2. But you only get to vote for one thing, the brain surgeon in your town. And if you or anyone else in your town ever need brain surgery, you are required to use him.
3. Once a year, all the brain surgeons get together and decide all of the political offices.
4. Each brain surgeon's vote is weighted by the number of people in his town. So, if any town tries to vote for their brain surgeon based on his political beliefs, as that town dies off or goes brain dead as a result of bad operations, their vote counts for less and less.
I just don't think I can argue with this. Like you yourself said, you can't argue people out of their fundamental values.
I have long accepted this with respect to people's conservatism, and have on occasion had some success in finding common ground with them. But the gap I have as of yet been unable to bridge has been between my own pluralism, which allows room for self-doubt and philosophical flexibility, and other people's "I'm right, you're wrong" moral absolutism. If someone believes that there's no value in entertaining a different point of view, then suggesting that they entertain the different point of view that there is actually value in entertaining a different point of view - it's kind of a nonstarter.
You are unusually forthright and honest about being a moral absolutist; and it hugely benefits your writing (if I were writing this it would be bogged down with disclaimers and caveats all over the place!) However, what it doesn't do is enable the kind of discussion of ideas that is why I'm on this platform in the first place.
>However, what it doesn't do is enable the kind of discussion of ideas that is why I'm on this platform in the first place.<
I think I've had plenty of exchanges with you, so I'd question if that's really true.
I would return here to the distinction I draw between the religious and the political. On our top-level, fundamentally religious values, we are generally moral absolutists. However, there is plenty of room for doubt, philosophical flexibility, entertaining different points of view, etc., within the shared worldview that is enabled by common religious values. There are always things to disagree over--at one point in history, the primary political divide in the Byzantine Empire was over the veneration of icons, for instance. The reason that someone like me comes across as a moral absolutist is that my religious values are so far removed from the norm in this day and age.
As an example, consider the case of a person who is married to someone who is an unrepentant drug addict. Do I believe that they must stay married despite this because divorce is always wrong (i.e. moral absolutism)? No, not necessarily. If the behavior of their addict spouse is egregious enough, and they simply refuse to even try to get better, I think divorce can become the only proper course of action. This is consistent with Orthodox teaching, which is that divorce is a sin, but can be permitted due to "the hardness of people's hearts," essentially.
However, when I interact with the mainstream no-fault divorce perspective, I seem like a moral absolutist because my starting point is so radically different from that. Even someone like me can still find areas where my starting points overlap with the mainstream, though. For instance, my opposition to abortion is based on a simple principle that everyone shares, religious and secular alike--killing innocent people is wrong.
Economic elites would be subject to these voting restrictions just like the average citizen. Not married, or ever been divorced? Sorry, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc. No vote for you. We'd of course have to extend this to things like campaign contributions. The eventual result would be a dis-empowering of economic elites who refuse to abide by the moral standards that have been set. The dis-empowering might not be total, but there would be a fundamental divide between them and government officials, who would obviously have to abide by all of the voting qualifications just to get into office.
Before universal suffrage was granted, we already tried restricted voting. I would think that the people who are not allowed to vote will try hard to regain their voting rights.
Possibly, but history is path-dependent. Before universal suffrage, there was never any society which had universal suffrage, so we couldn't have fully predicted how it would play out. Currently, there is no society with universal suffrage which has then gone on to retract universal suffrage and restrict the vote. So we really can't be sure how that transition would play out either.
Every other Harris sign has something like "save democracy" or "democracy depends on it". They have the same emotional resonance as "save puppies" or "the kittens depend on you voting for Harris". It has the same amount of truth content too. Like you said, it's religious in nature, and what a small god they worship.
One in my area says “Were not going back!”
Funny how one campaign’s slogan is “Make America Great Again” and the other side adopted the mantra “Noooo, were not going back” (to making america great, presumably).
But both slogans represent the religious idols of the parties.
Conservatives: America, and its imperial greatness and cultural swagger, that whole mythos. An amalgam from founding father underdogs to global navy juggernauts, which somehow fit together for them. And a mashup of 1980’s babes on the beach with 1880’s pioneer “traditional values” ancestors that somehow they also pretend fit together.
Liberals: “Progress”, literally time moving forward, the more higher the year number (2024) the better and the past is bad and scary. Past<Present day<Future. Future=change=good. Outcomes dont matter, facts dont matter, history doesnt matter, the almighty (insert present year here) is the god to be continuously placated with eternal cultural revolution.
Although I like the standards you propose for limiting the franchise, I think that, being realistic, the marriage/children and church endorsement ones aren’t very likely to take hold nowadays, even if they’re good objectives to work towards.
The economic equation one would be a lot easier to push through compared to the others, and I believe that basic logic and reading comprehension tests (to exclude mentally unfit people) and basic history and contemporary events tests (to exclude people who clearly have no interest in what brought us here and what’s happening around us from having a say in where we’re going) should also be part of it.
Yes, the church one in particular I think is never going to happen, not in a Protestant society at least.
Of course it could and would. That used to be law in many many states of the US for people seeking office. Being a church member in good standing is extremely easy to parse out? Papist complaints about protestants are so intentionally facile. Even just using the Nicaean creed alone would serve as a solid basis to screen people for the right to vote. Roman Catholics who try to call mormons and JW as protestants just to smear Protestantism as if theres no doctrinal boundaries are being guileful. Dont be one of those guys.
However, I loved your article and totally agree with you! Great stuff. There will be no Constitutional changes in the current status quo. The most likely thing to happen in the next 5 years is a civil war and widespread famine and violence of extreme proportions. By God’s grace I pray, when Christian Conservatives emerge victorious from the tribulation, and reconstitute the republic- then they can reform enfranchisement and implement these ideas. Im a big fan of all three (except the biological child one is somewhat harsh against the infertile who want kids).
The issue with Protestants is that they legitimately have like a million denominations, and worse than that, many of their churches are non-denominational entirely. So in order to really give church membership the sort of teeth you'd want it to have, you would somehow have to sift through all of that and sort out the wheat from the chaff--we'd have to draw a line somewhere at exactly what counts as a legitimate Christian church or not, which would be insanely difficult to disentangle on its own, and then we'd have to figure out a means of vetting each individual church and denomination, which would run into the same problem that I described with the idea of simply banning the Democratic party--all the liberal churches will just pretend to go along with whatever criteria you've selected.
It's not totally impossible, in theory, but I think it's a bit short-sighted to pretend that it would be easy or straightforward. I have difficulty caring about it very much because I converted to Orthodoxy which does not have this problem. My religious qualification I think would be eminently reasonable in a nation that is majority and foundationally Orthodox. But, as with ethnicity, it seems far less workable in the United States (too much heckin' diversity).
I don't think there is a civil war or widespread famine or violence coming in the next 5 years, but that's a totally different subject lol.
I think the only reforms coming to the nation will be out of the crucible of conflict which now imminently encroaches.
But anyways, I think it would be pretty easy to establish whatever theological qualifications for voting that one wants. Lets say you considered only male pastors to be a high priority issue (egalitarianism is Biblically incorrect imo). Thats fine, the lib churches with lady pastors wouldnt change, they would cope and seethe instead. Other doctrines such as communion, trinity, etc are pretty simple to double check and enforce. Oneness pentecostals, no (modalist). Seventh Day adventist (annihilationist), totally fine. I believe in eternal conscious torment but wouldnt call them heretics. So you can create firm boundaries around whatever doctrines you decree primary.
I mean I think RCC and EO have some egregiously incorrect doctrine, but I would still want to allow qualified men of those faiths to vote. (I will assume your EO, as opposed to a branch of Oriental Orthodox.) Protestants dont think every single EO is anathema and condemned to hell, but that is required dogma for all EOs to believe about all protestants and RC’s. It does become rather easy to enforce both ecclesial and political “unity” when you anathematize everybody else. I just dont think thats just or proper Christian behavior. I consider you a Christian brother, even if you dont believe in penal substitutionary atonement (Col 2:13-14) or the Filioque (John 20:22).
I think the future American Christendom should indeed have adherence to the faith and boundaries around it. But ecumenical councils did not feature bishops who agreed on every issue, instead it set boundaries around who were heretics. Its hard to imagine an American Christendom thats anything other than protestant ecumenism as its organizing bulwark. However in such a nation I would love for it to be a refuge for persecuted (upstanding/intelligent) Christians around the world, Coptic, Assyrian, Chinese, whatever. Sorry for the long response, its not even really necessary. I just started typing and it turned pedantic. I liked your piece and all your content in general. God bless
>I think the only reforms coming to the nation will be out of the crucible of conflict which now imminently encroaches.<
Unfortunately, I agree. I don't think it will take the form of an organized Civil War of the sort that people have in mind from the history books, but I agree that whatever change happens will not be done in a civilized or orderly fashion. History suggests that it will be chaotic, unpredictable, and unlikely to make anyone very happy in the long run, left or right.
I hope that you are correct in your optimism regarding Christian ecumenism and I will say that, if such a thing were hypothetically to be attempted, I'd give it my support as a worthy endeavor to try for, even if I don't think it is likely to work out in the end. I don't consider non-Orthodox to be anathema or anything like that and I do not think it is accurate to say that Orthodox believe all non-Orthodox are automatically consigned to hell, but I'd have to do some research and double-check the issue before I felt qualified to speak on that. Theology is not my strong suit.
I always liked Robert Heinlein’s suggestion: You must deposit an ounce of gold to enter the voting booth, and solve a quadratic equation to vote.
If you solve the equation correctly, you get to vote, and you get your gold back.
If not, you don’t get to vote, a loud buzzer goes off, and you don’t get your gold back.
Great article! Reminds me of the system of voting Rhodesia had in place, before the global west backed the communist insurgents to overthrow it. I agree a more limited franchise would produce more sensible decision making by the legislature and better governance.
I live in Australia, which is an outlier in that there is a mandatory franchise. Voting is compulsory by punishment of fine. Voter turnout consequentially is like 90-95%.
I initially thought it was a bad system as it was illiberal. I now think it’s a good system, because liberalism is retarded. Also, as the entire population bell curve shows up to vote, and the result somewhat reflects the view of the median voter.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but my perception is that the 60% most democracies have turning up to vote (US, UK) are skewed towards the zealous retard demographic. Probably why neither left or right in Australia are against the mandatory voting system.
My criticism of mandatory voting is that you're getting the opposite of the zealous retard--people who legitimately have no idea what is going on, don't care, and will just show up and pull any random lever to get it over with. I don't know if that's actually what happens with mandatory voting, but that's my intuition. I do know that studies have been done suggesting that the implementation of mandatory voting in the United States likely wouldn't change election outcomes very much.
I'm not the biggest fan of mandatory voting, but a somewhat reasonable rebuttal to this point is that the people who don't know and don't care will vote in ways that statistically cancel each other out, leaving the informed voters to decide the election. IIRC Australia deliberately lists the candidates in a different random order on each ballot, to prevent the first-listed candidate getting an advantage from people who don't care and just tick the top box because it's the top one.
I think my biggest criticism of compulsory voting is that voters staying at home is an important signal that the political class is ignoring their concerns, this is something that compulsory voting artificially suppresses.
If that's true though, then why even bother forcing those "don't know, don't care" people to show up?
I agree strongly with your assessment, especially through the lens of a separation of our modern states by accepting the divisions of """political leanings""" as a disguised / misunderstood form of religious profession and leaning into those - acknowledging that states must operate on a bedrock of shared spiritual values and that the only alternative to a peaceful seperation is some sort of war.
With that said, I must say that as someone who has learned much from the Bible, gained greatly from developing spiritualism, discovering a tremendous respect for Christian thinkers, an appreciation for the Christian of great creatives (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis etc.), and more than anything happy to have seperated from atheism a decade ago - I'm still not a Christian myself and doubt I ever will be.
To my understanding, Nietzche was correct that the Enlightenment killed God, and the Church of today is worshipping what remains of his corpse if you will. I find the Christian position empathetic, but ultimately I do not see it recovering, not at least without a transformation as dramatic as that which occurred to Jewry, and this may not be desirable.
If Christianity was built largely upon the best of the old Israelite faith mixed with salvageable (non-despicable) elements of European Paganism, then a new faith for those of us on the Right must in turn spring up, building upon the greatest religions of before in a direction that would allow people like yourself and myself to fully unite. The Left seems to have accomplished this long ago, which accounts for many of their cultural victories - I believe that the Right wing's counter resurgence since 2015 has been the beginning of our own new spirit coming together. A lot of the old shibboleths of the GOP had to be shattered, before the best could be resalvaged and tied into something newer.
(I feel like writing an article on this myself, but am given to pause given my current schedule and a feeling that I ought to introduce myself to Substack first.)
I agree that the right needs to unite and agree on its values in the same way as the left. The problem is that all of the people on the right who are still clinging on to certain liberal values--a fondness for sexual immorality, acceptance of abortion, etc.--all seem to be non-Christians. Whereas Christians like myself appear to be those who most thoroughly reject leftism. From my point of view, this basically means that atheists need to get with the program. If you refuse to acknowledge God, okay, I can work with that actually, but you need to stop tolerating abortion, promotion of LGBT stuff, etc. We can't have a proper spirit of our own if large parts of it are still carried over from leftism.
Some of your proposals on the franchise are bad enough that I won’t discuss them, you seem to contradict yourself in the same article.
On the net taxpayer thing if we are going to be truly that strict you’re likely talking a reduction in the franchise of a very large amount. 60%, 80%? Hard to say. Income taxes are extremely progressive. How would you handle intergenerational (olds are obviously net tax recipients, should they not vote). What about parents?
Let’s take a less extreme version of this. Taking Medicaid means you can’t vote while on the program. That’s a much lower % knocked out. I think that when I ran the math on that it would shift the 2020 election by millions of votes. It was less then bidens popular vote total, but enough for Trump to win the EC. This would be an improvement, but it wouldn’t fundamentally transform politics.
A far more impactful change would be granting married families votes for their children. This could be combined with the Medicaid rule, and a lot of the people on Medicaid are children.
This really would transform politics. The entire Democratic Party is carried on the back of its 68% support amongst single women. It really is the cat lady party.
>Some of your proposals on the franchise are bad enough that I won’t discuss them, you seem to contradict yourself in the same article.<
Where?
I think that proper voting restrictions might shrink the franchise by a very large amount, yes. If we are left with just 1% of the population that can vote, then *if that gets us to correct policy outcomes,* we should be comfortable with that. I don't think things would need to go to that extent. But shrinking the franchise to just 40% of the population, or even 20%? Sure, why not? Pareto principle suggests that about 80% of people are chaff in any given situation.
As for what the exact restrictions should be, sure, I don't doubt that people can come up with better ones than the ones I proposed here. The ones I proposed were very off-the-cuff and do not have a lot of thought put into them. The point of the article is that one should be willing to entertain such restrictions, and should do away with the religious devotion to a universal franchise. We can then proceed to figuring out what the restrictions will actually be, but we have to get to that starting point first.
"Where?"
This idea of having ideological tests and letting local pastors kick people in and out of the voting roles.
"if that gets us to correct policy outcomes"
We would probably just get the policy outcomes that favored that 1%, whether they were good for society or not. That's how we got universal franchise in the first place.
And sure, if you kick out people on Medicaid, give extra votes to married people with kids, you are probably going to end up with a franchise that proportionally excludes 50%.
>This idea of having ideological tests and letting local pastors kick people in and out of the voting roles.<
Where do I contradict myself?
Precisely. Taxes: economic contributors, not takers. Kids: Generational rootedness, not transients. Christian: Lovers of Truth and Virtue, not evil lies. These proposals would certainly exclude over 50% of current voters. But those voters are them who weaponize their vote to the detriment of society long term. Voting for more welfare, more debt, more cultural change, more perversion. The responsible, those who uphold society, should steward and shepherd it
The main reason that voting is bad is because it turns the peasantry against one another by enlisting us in the struggles between oligarchic cliques.
The only thing that we as peasants have going for us is our numerical advantage. This cannot be relied upon without solidarity. Participation in party squabbling undermines the solidarity.
That is the true social engineering aim of democracy.
There's no doubt that voters are lazy and gullible about almost every issue. I can't exclude myself from this group. But we didn't start worrying about this until the government threw off its traditional constraints and started telling us to wear our seat belts, to stop smoking, to eat sugar instead of fat, to wear masks, to not wear masks, to censor each other, to hate Country X, to unconditionally support Country Y, and so on. And it started borrowing money to remove all financial constraints on its power, saddling future generations with the "taxation without representation" far more egregious than what started the American Revolution. The solution isn't to restrict the franchise, it's to disempower the government to the point we just point and laugh at it, like we did 100 years ago.
I mean, I don't disagree, but 100 years ago we had just barely given women the right to vote (19th Amendment was 105 years ago). The limited government that we started out with, the one that didn't have all of this overreaching power that we complain about today, was the deliberate design of an *extremely* small and narrowly selected handful of men, men who were pretty clear in their opinion that universal franchise would be a disaster.
For amusement sake, consider this alternative:
1. The franchise stays universal, everyone still gets to vote.
2. But you only get to vote for one thing, the brain surgeon in your town. And if you or anyone else in your town ever need brain surgery, you are required to use him.
3. Once a year, all the brain surgeons get together and decide all of the political offices.
4. Each brain surgeon's vote is weighted by the number of people in his town. So, if any town tries to vote for their brain surgeon based on his political beliefs, as that town dies off or goes brain dead as a result of bad operations, their vote counts for less and less.
I just don't think I can argue with this. Like you yourself said, you can't argue people out of their fundamental values.
I have long accepted this with respect to people's conservatism, and have on occasion had some success in finding common ground with them. But the gap I have as of yet been unable to bridge has been between my own pluralism, which allows room for self-doubt and philosophical flexibility, and other people's "I'm right, you're wrong" moral absolutism. If someone believes that there's no value in entertaining a different point of view, then suggesting that they entertain the different point of view that there is actually value in entertaining a different point of view - it's kind of a nonstarter.
You are unusually forthright and honest about being a moral absolutist; and it hugely benefits your writing (if I were writing this it would be bogged down with disclaimers and caveats all over the place!) However, what it doesn't do is enable the kind of discussion of ideas that is why I'm on this platform in the first place.
>However, what it doesn't do is enable the kind of discussion of ideas that is why I'm on this platform in the first place.<
I think I've had plenty of exchanges with you, so I'd question if that's really true.
I would return here to the distinction I draw between the religious and the political. On our top-level, fundamentally religious values, we are generally moral absolutists. However, there is plenty of room for doubt, philosophical flexibility, entertaining different points of view, etc., within the shared worldview that is enabled by common religious values. There are always things to disagree over--at one point in history, the primary political divide in the Byzantine Empire was over the veneration of icons, for instance. The reason that someone like me comes across as a moral absolutist is that my religious values are so far removed from the norm in this day and age.
As an example, consider the case of a person who is married to someone who is an unrepentant drug addict. Do I believe that they must stay married despite this because divorce is always wrong (i.e. moral absolutism)? No, not necessarily. If the behavior of their addict spouse is egregious enough, and they simply refuse to even try to get better, I think divorce can become the only proper course of action. This is consistent with Orthodox teaching, which is that divorce is a sin, but can be permitted due to "the hardness of people's hearts," essentially.
However, when I interact with the mainstream no-fault divorce perspective, I seem like a moral absolutist because my starting point is so radically different from that. Even someone like me can still find areas where my starting points overlap with the mainstream, though. For instance, my opposition to abortion is based on a simple principle that everyone shares, religious and secular alike--killing innocent people is wrong.
Voting doesn´t matter. Isn´t that the result of a study conducted by Gillens and Page?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B#article
Economic elites would be subject to these voting restrictions just like the average citizen. Not married, or ever been divorced? Sorry, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc. No vote for you. We'd of course have to extend this to things like campaign contributions. The eventual result would be a dis-empowering of economic elites who refuse to abide by the moral standards that have been set. The dis-empowering might not be total, but there would be a fundamental divide between them and government officials, who would obviously have to abide by all of the voting qualifications just to get into office.
Before universal suffrage was granted, we already tried restricted voting. I would think that the people who are not allowed to vote will try hard to regain their voting rights.
Possibly, but history is path-dependent. Before universal suffrage, there was never any society which had universal suffrage, so we couldn't have fully predicted how it would play out. Currently, there is no society with universal suffrage which has then gone on to retract universal suffrage and restrict the vote. So we really can't be sure how that transition would play out either.
We should definitely disenfranchise corporate CEOs, Bankers, and the billionaire classes.