One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politicsis that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
- Attributed to Plato (The Republic, 1:347)
Among his myriad contributions to the development of the discipline of psychology was Sigmund Freud's identification of the id as a fundamental component of human personality. Many of us may have first learned about this construct - of ego, super-ego and id - in a high school psychology course long ago, during which time it was quite popular to regarded ironically, but, in hindsight, that is truly an error in judgment. Why? Because today we see the id run amok in the person of someone who is supposed to be our leader - which, heretofore, has meant that he should embody the best in us - but whose actual behavior seems largely ungoverned by any humane restraint of the ego or super-ego. In sum, we have elected our id to be president and the impacts of this lapse in judgment are as horrifying as they are far-reaching.
Who among us believed just a few short years ago that an admitted sexual predator could be elected to our nation's highest office? Who among us believed that a man so thoroughly and utterly committed to the perpetuation of the -isms that continue to plague our society would be given the largest platform in the world in order to do so? Who among us believed that we could choose to elevate someone whose behavior is so thoroughly unworthy of emulation? And yet all of this has occurred and so much more….
According to Wikipedia,
The id (Latin for "it", German: Es) is the disorganized part of the personality structure that contains a human's basic instinctual drives. ... The id contains the libido which is the primary source of its eventual force that is unresponsive to the demands of reality.
The id 'knows no judgments of value: no good or evil, no morality. ... (It contains) the death instinct, (which) would thus seem to express itself - though probably only in part - as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world and other organisms' through aggression.
One can't but help notice the parallels between 45's behavior and this description of the id. For example, we can debate whether he is immoral or amoral, but there's no question that he demonstrates "an instinct of destruction directed against the external world and other organisms through aggression." Further, there is no arguing that he often appears to be "unresponsive to the demands of reality."
"So what?," you may be tempted to ask … which is actually a fair question, so let's address it:
Our very society and the rules by which we've negotiated it in this country for centuries are under siege. Our government, which was ostensibly to be drained of the swamp creatures who steered its focus to narrow and private benefits, has instead been morphed into a platform for corruption and for repression on an unparalleled scale: how else can one describe the self-serving policy prescriptions of so many Cabinet members and the president himself, as well as the abject inhumanity that has been consistently on display, especially relative to People of Color, be they citizens, immigrants, asylum-seekers or simply neighbors from other parts of the world?
Also in, our financial well-being is being rent asunder as massive tax cuts for the few who have the most will be paid for by the children and grandchildren of the many who have increasingly less. In less than two years' time, this administration has made our society measurably more unequal and less democratic, and its judicial appointments will likely serve to maintain if not expand this for quite some time.
And our standing in the world has been greatly eroded, in no small part due to the horrifying and morally indefensible embrace of autocratic leaders around the world, coupled, ironically, with the creation of testy and thus frayed relations with historical allies. As if we believe that in a completely globalized world we can engage in a sort of isolationism that will allow us to reap the benefits of progress without paying any of its costs.…
I could go on, but what's the point?
Just this: that when you take democracy for granted and assume that progress is inevitable, you end up learning the hard way that the forces of regression may ebb but they never disappear. Further, you learn that ignorance is hideously costly, as the enthusiastic embrace of 45 and his policies that denigrate the very quality of life of his supporters demonstrates: perhaps we would be OK watching this train wreck if it weren't so palpably clear that it affects virtually all of us as well. Unless you're among the elite, the impacts of the strategic choices will diminish your quality of life in the present and that of your children and grandchildren in the future. After all, they're going to be paying for our deficits for decades to come.…
So if we choose to learn this lesson in real time, among many things, it means that we cannot and will not take democracy for granted, especially by failing to exercise our franchise consistently. The recent midterm elections highlighted several things that are of import to our more effective embrace of the entirety of our rights, including that our system has flaws that we need to address and that despite these flaws a more significant exercise of our right to vote can result in meaningful, positive change.
This is not a partisan statement, but a democratic one: I urge everyone to vote, especially so that whatever the results we can rest assured that they reflect the true will of the people ... which is not the case when a minority of us choose to cast our ballots.
So, in this spirit, let's put an end to a self-harming fiction to which too many of us have subscribed over the years: every vote does indeed count. In fact, there have been few periods of history that demonstrate this more clearly than the 21st century: from the "hanging chad" debacle in Florida in 2000, to the election of President Obama driven by an historic number of newly registered voters in 2008, to the failure to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016 because many of the more recently enfranchised did not return to the polls as powerfully and consistently (which, when combined with the flaw of the Electoral College, resulted in the election of yet another [Republican] president who lost the popular vote). In this latest instance, 70,000 additional votes in three battleground states would have ushered in a very different result (which, given the realities of the current administration, is virtually impossible to argue that it would be worse...).
And let's stay mindful of the proof that occurred earlier this month: the midterm elections, featuring a much higher participation rate by eligible voters (many of whom were new registrants) - sound familiar? - resulted in a very distinct curb - if not rebuke - of the current administration and its inhumanity. It is absolutely critical that we continue to build on this momentum, especially as we work to repair the damage that the Id-in-Chief and his minions have so joyfully inflicted upon us. Don't get me wrong, we can still argue over policy, but we cannot support the active disenfranchisement of the many by the few, as this is, ultimately, self-harming and -defeating.
In sum, it's up us to be the ego that curtails the actions of the cadre of id-enabling sycophants who've infested our government ... until such time that we learn from our mistakes and hold aspirants to our highest offices to standards of character and competence that inure to the benefit of the many, too. Will the few always have an outsized influence in our society? Yes, in all likelihood. But it is very much possible to effect a far better and more sustainable balance than we have now, which is our collective charge: to restore the small "d" democracy in our large "D" one ... and thereby to live out the promise of our founding creeds for all of our fellow citizens and those who aspire to be alike....
Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.
- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)
