Why vote? and other great thoughts

Shut up, SJWs, a National Review columnist is talking

© 2016 FreeConcordRaw, used under a Creative Commons license

Democrats, whom I never tire of pointing out are microcephalic (look it up, idiots), are once again shrieking and mewling that the many new laws passed by Republicans in order to (so they bleat, and whine) deprive such pathetic creatures as are inclined to support the party of Walter Duranty and Hillary Clinton of their so-called “right to vote.” Tedious as it is for a superior intellect such as myself to engage such stupidity, I shall bestir myself to answer, for as the decidedly middlebrow but not utterly lacking in charm Van Halen opined, beats workin’.

The vote-fetishists’ argumentum ad ignorantiam is that voting is good because... why? Here they fail us; they stand there, looking stupid, a crudely-rendered question mark appearing above their fat head, snot running down their oversized upper lip, no better equipped to answer my question than my stepfather’s wife was when I foreclosed on the house she lived in and asked, in one of those sallies of which I am perhaps unduly proud, here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?

Whither, then, this overestimate of voting? I suppose it is born of sentimentalism, which is what the riff-raff have instead of the lofty thoughts that so elevate my own discourse. Sentimentalism can be harmless when properly penned and directed; when the rabble truckle to Jesus or Moses or (on a strictly limited basis) Allah, for example, they neither pick my pocket nor break my leg; when they are in their place of worship, they are in the broader sense in their place, and out of my way; better praying in their seats than marching in the streets

But once they meander from their traditional opiates, the people (or “The People,” as I’m sure it appears in the thought balloons above the heads of the hairy-legged coeds and lissome nancy-boys who enforce cancel culture at our once-proud universities) start to imagine themselves capable of judgments higher than which brand of cola to purchase or what ugly outfit to wear to whatever wretched nightclub they favor; they imagine themselves equipped with a conscience, affected by injustices, and capable of making moral decisions.

Of this brand of sentimentalism is born the cheap popular idea of “patriotism” — not the simple neurolinguistic programming ploy we use to hypnotize helots into military service, to which I have no objection, but a vulgar patriotism of the sort instilled by the tendentious movies of that bathetic hack Frank Capra, and carried forward by caterwauling hippie tunes asking whither America, and obnoxious TV showrunners using extended metaphors to compare capitalism to the Mafia and suggest the miserable fates of “urban” untermenschen have some relevance to their own comfortable lives.

This jumped-up Jesuitry leads the rabble to imagine that their vote is not just something they barter to confidence men — here I remind you that I dislike Trump, thus burnishing my political authority — for whatever team-spirit thrills such people get from the cheap popularity contests we call elections, but something valuable that must “count” — that is, be given the same weight whether cast by a mouth-breathing social-justice jackass or by someone like, for example, me. If they had any idea how the Founders (again, like me) despised the common people, especially those whom they wisely decided to count only three-fifths — but ah, you’re not going to catch me out that easily! As John Derbyshire knows, even Rich Lowry will only put up with so much.

For reasons that need not be explained, because either you’re smart enough to already know or too stupid to ever learn, the status quo in which people who vote the way my editors recommend have far more electoral pull (and more all the time) than people who vote for race pimps and mountebanks, while it may be “unfair” or “anti-democratic” or “minority rule” or whatever the hoi polloi call it or think they mean by it, is certainly preferable to any other state of affairs that could possibly be brought to bear or even imagined. In short, voting is stupid, you’re stupid, and if you think you can “step to me,” as the urchins say, the Fleisch-Kincaid score for this column is 20.1.