Voting is like loving: vital, and not to be taken for granted

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The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that.

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This quote from the book “On Tyranny” by Timothy Snyder is maybe the one that strikes me the most, the one that hits the deepest chord in me — possibly because of the comparison of voting (a right & duty super strongly ingrained in me since my youngest age) to love/love making. 

From Lesson #3, “Beware the one-party state”, in the book “On Tyranny — Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” by Timothy Snyder (published in 2017):

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The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office.

Thomas Jefferson probably never said that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’, but other Americans of his era certainly did. When we think of this saying today, we imagine our own righteous vigilance directed outwards, against misguided and hostile others. We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold of democracy, looking out for threats that come from abroad. But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end. The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips did in fact say that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’. He added that ‘the manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or is rotten’. 

The record of modern European democracy confirmed the wisdom of those words. The twentieth century saw earnest attempts to extend the franchise and establish durables democracies. Yet the democracies that arose after the First World War (& the Second) often collapsed when a single party seized power in a combination of an election and a coup d’état. A party emboldened by a favorable election result or motivated by ideology, or both, might change the system from within. When fascists or Nazis or communists did well in elections in the 1930s or ‘40s, what followed was some combination of spectacle, repression, and salami tactics — slicing off layers of opposition one by one. Most people were distracted, some were imprisoned, and other were outmatched. 

[…] Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningful free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last or, at least the last in the lifetime fo the person casting the vote. The Nazis remained in power until they lost a world war in 1945, the Czechoslovak communists until their system collapsed in 1989. The Russian oligarchy established after the 1990 elections continues to function, and promotes a foreign policy designed to destroy democracy elsewhere. 

Does the history of tyranny apply to the Unites States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of ‘eternal vigilance’ would have thought so. […] We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy — ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth. The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens. We believe that we have check and balances, but we have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of state houses. The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular — and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it. 

Another early American proverb held that ‘where annual elections end, tyranny begins’. Will we come to see one of our own elections much as Russians see the elections of 1990, or Czechs the elections of 1946, or Germans the elections of 1932? This, for now, depends on us. Much needs to be done to fix the gerrymandered system so that each citizen has one equal vote, and so that each vote can be simply counted by a fellow citizen. We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted. This sort of work can be done at the local and state levels. Any future elections will be a test of American traditions. 

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