If you get serious about it, being open-minded can be challenging.
I’m not talking about being “open-minded” about matters of fact. There’s no need to be open-minded about whether the earth is round, or whether the Holocaust happened. Holocaust denial is the norm on the street throughout much of the Middle East; this is an interesting fact but has no particular bearing on the facts of what happened in Europe in the middle of the 20th century.
Open-mindedness here only involves our attitude towards people who, for whatever reason, don’t know what’s what. Maybe someday a majority of Americans will think the earth is flat; that will be weird and fascinating, but the earth will still be round.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are matters of taste. If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool jazz buff, perhaps it would be “open-minded” of you to listen to a Beatles album with receptive ears. If you aren’t willing to take that step, maybe that’s your loss. Maybe not; either way, the stakes are relatively low. You can be closed-minded in matters of taste without causing any real problem.
It is in matters of belief, of philosophy and values that open-mindedness can be challenging but may be important. For instance, we Americans are supposed to be devoted to democracy, but perhaps we should be open-minded about it.
Our form of representative democracy has not been the norm throughout history, nor has it taken the entire modern world by storm. American politicians are required to aver that America is the greatest nation ever, and that bald chauvinism includes our system of government, so is it “un-American” to think that elections are not how we should be governed? Maybe, but those were dark times when people were blacklisted, fired, and generally persecuted for being un-American. Let’s be open-minded about democracy. There are definitely people who do not swear by it; maybe some of them live here.
The classic knock on democracy is that Hitler came to power that way. If your couldn’t-happen-here reflex prevents that from bothering you, try a more abstract hypothetical. What if democratically elected politicians enact policies you find completely intolerable? Not the extermination of your religious or ethnic group, maybe, but policies that would make you want to overthrow the duly elected government or else leave the country. Would you still swear by our system of government? Are you sure it couldn’t happen to you?
For some Americans, that’s not hypothetical: certain realities (or firmly-believed fictions) about America and its governance are intolerable already. Let’s not simply recoil at the idea of opposition to electoral democracy; let’s consider.
An American of that persuasion is stuck with our system for now. There are tactical ways to fight it, and there are strategic ways. The tactical approach concedes the fact that elections are crucial and tries to manipulate the outcome. This may involve trying to keep certain demographic groups from voting in a particular race. It may involve the dissemination of disinformation about one of the candidates. It may involve constantly re-shaping electoral districts where possible, so that the politicians choose the voters rather than the other way around. It may involve simply spending insane amounts of money, one way and another, to promote one candidate or beat down the other.
All of those things are happening. But if your view is that elections are basically a drag– say, because some of your party’s core policy objectives are known to be unpopular with a durable majority of regular folks– you may feel that there must be a better way. You start thinking strategically: let’s not concede that elections are crucial. It isn’t realistic to think about abolishing them outright; how can they be side-lined? Neutralized? Made irrelevant?
Here the focus shifts to after ballots are cast. There are procedures in place to count ballots, to certify the counts. Previously these were unexciting and non-controversial. Let’s change that. Why should the poll workers be just anybody who’s been trained to do the job? The poll workers should be our people!
Perhaps we can cause some commission or committee to be formed whose job will be to intervene when an election goes the wrong way. If the legislature in a given state seems reliable, let’s have a mechanism that puts the result in their hands if there’s any doubt– and then let’s make sure there can always be doubt. Elections have always required a certain level of public trust, and that trust has basically been there. Let’s change that too.
Over time, elections will wither away. As we convince some people that all elections are rigged and demonstrate to others that this is basically true– because the result will be arbitrated after the fact by some entity other than the electorate– people will vote less and less. This result can also be sped up by outlawing voting by mail and making it challenging and unpleasant to vote in person. The other side might call it voter intimidation, but our people are just guarding against voter fraud while enjoying their rights under the Second Amendment. Get the picture?
Okay. This concludes my good-faith attempt to put myself in the mindset of someone who cares deeply about America and doesn’t think elections are basically a good thing. Of course all of this is strictly hypothetical: just a little exercise in open-mindedness.
Eric Kuhn lives in Middletown.