Americans are proud of their heritage as a free people. We are fond of distancing ourselves, in political terms, from the rest of the world; and one of the ways in which we do this is to contrast our system of "open elections" to that which prevails in other countries. We are also fond of exporting democracy, insisting that "free and fair" elections can be the cure-all for the world's ills. In doing this, we elevate a process above the philosophical underpinnings of that process--much like touting injections as the cure for all diseases. Of course, it matters just what is in the syringe: is it penicillin; or is it heroin; or is it air?

Elections in America are, in fact, open; and that is just one of the characteristics that makes them so fundamentally unfair. It is common to allow voters of any affiliation to vote in a party primary. It is also common to forbid asking for voter identification. How these laws were ever successfully presented to the American people as progressive or good would make a horror story in itself; much worse is the fact that the American people were convinced. It was like going to the vampire and asking to be bitten.

Worse still is the common insistence that the process of voting is a bulwark of freedom; that the exercise of voting by a greater number of people will somehow make us more free; and that voting--in and of itself--is the common cure for our domestic problems--that if we remain patient, we can simply vote our way out of any difficulty. For voting, of course, is nothing more than the registration of a choice in an official, government-sanctioned venue--a logical extension of the idea that men have the right to run their own lives. If we have a right to make our choices in the voting booth, it is only because that right existed before the voting booth did. Not voting is also a choice, and a valid one, when the possibilities are as odious as those customarily offered. And when the choices are radically limited before they are ever presented to us--hell by the fastest road, or hell by the scenic route--then voting begins to take on the nature of suicide.

But the process of "democracy" in America is so rotten that no amount of vote reform will fix it. The evils of our present government are not caused by the way in which issues are decided; they are caused by the widespread acceptance of the idea that all issues should be decided by, or through, government--that all issues may be properly put to a vote. "Let the people decide" is our battle cry--not understanding that the guns are pointed inward. When unalienable rights and irrevokable responsibilities are put to a vote, we lose before the ballots are even counted: for we have lowered rights to the status of privileges, and ourselves to the status of wards. Our Founding Fathers rightly feared a descent into democracy, and did everything in their power (they thought) to prevent it. We are living through their worst nightmare.

The mistake which modern Americans make is to confuse the process with the goal; even more: the profane with the holy. For freedom is holy; rights are holy; the governmental system, whatever form it may take, is mere earth. A blind allegiance to democracy above rights is nothing other than political idolatry. Those who practice it deserve nothing better than the common fate of idolaters in all times and places: disappointment, disillusion, desolation.