Goodbye Red State/Blue State, Hello Barack Obama

Now that the 2008 U.S. election is over and Barack Obama is in office, I'm done with the Red State/Blue State thing. Apparently, I'm supposed to hate other people just because they voted for someone different or because they live in a state where a lot of people voted differently than I did. As a registered Independent, I find this offensive. That curtain over the voting booth is there for a reason and I will vote however I like, thank you very much. I reserve the same right for others, including those who don't vote "my way". Now that the elections are over and Barack Obama has been inaugurated as our new president, I hear mutterings about how terrible Obama will be, but this time, at least the new president of the United States doesn't seem interested in fostering the same kind of divisive atmosphere as George W. Bush.

So, let's ditch Red State versus Blue State and move on.

When did people forget that the political process is not a popularity contest? You're not voting for your favorite sports team, your favorite star in Hollywood, your favorite color or even Class President. You are voting people into office who will hopefully execute the will of the people--you being one of the people. If someone disagrees with you and votes differently based on the same information, that person is not an enemy of the state, but just doing his or her job as a citizen. When everyone votes the same way and nobody argues about it, then it's time to worry.

Democracy is messy and labor-intensive. It requires the personal involvement of the citizenry in the process of government at the most basic level--deciding who will run its daily operations. You can't sit back and just let it happen, not if you are an adult citizen. That's why democracy so often slides back into tyranny: people get lazy. The reason why democracy always comes back, though, is because once people lose their rights to self-determination, they start to miss them and wonder where they went. Then the whole painful process of moving back to democracy starts all over again.

What frightened me about American governance of the past eight years was that the Bush Administration seemed to forget how they got there and what their true jobs were. Leaders of a country are elected to exercise the will of the people, not their own whims or those of their cronies (the former is tyranny, the latter, oligarchy). When our leaders feel safe in ignoring the will of the people, something is very wrong. You can cite apparent mavericks like Lincoln and Roosevelt, but even when they apparently ignored the will of the people, they were really ignoring the will of those people who were shouting the loudest and throwing their weight around. If Lincoln and Roosevelt had truly ignored the will of the people when they issued the Emancipation Proclamation or instituted the New Deal, those acts would have gone nowhere. This is why some historians will always complain that Lincoln and Roosevelt, far from being visionaries, didn't go far enough. Maybe so, but getting ahead of the people wasn't their job, was it?

I feel hopeful about the election of Barack Obama for two reasons that have nothing to do with ideology (I might have voted for McCain if he had not shown such a tin ear for the will of the people--those who were sick and tired of a stupid war and a bad economy). First, Obama's election has revitalized democracy in the U.S., especially among the allegedly apathetic young. Sure, some of them voted for Obama because he was charismatic. But a lot of them voted for the issues. The pundits were so busy castigating Independents like me for messing up their nice, neat predictions that they failed to see what was good about us. We demonstrated a general trend away from voting along party lines and toward voting for candidates and issues. Considering the hidebound nature of the two major parties in the U.S., the Democrats and the Republicans, this is a good thing. Now, candidates may actually have to work at their real jobs, which is doing the will of the people and getting everybody to work together instead of separating along party lines and duking it out while scarfing up pork left and right.

Second, as the new president, Barack Obama may have many faults, but one thing he's good at is getting people to work together. We need that. After eight years of partisanship, look where we are. We need solidarity. We need to start talking to each other again. We need to start showing political civility again. Even when we don't like it.