An Australian Dream

By Peter Pavarini

The Meaning of the Australian Elections.

I woke this morning from a most unusual dream – almost prophetic in a way.  In it, Australia’s Labor Party lost an “unlosable election.” All the pollsters had predicted that the center-right parties would be swept out of power, ushering in a Progressive Era that most Australians said they wanted. For some reason, it didn’t turn out that way. Collusion? Fraud? Who can say?

Unlike Americans, Australians are required to vote.  While the penalty for not voting is a rather modest $20 fine, the Australian system does seem to get most people to fulfil their duty as citizens.  It is reported that 96% percent of voting age Australians are registered to vote, and approximately 90% of them actually vote in their national elections.

After my first cup of coffee, my Australian dream caused me to wonder what would happen in the US if 90% of Americans voted in 2020.  Although the media remains fixated on which of the 23 Democrats seeking the office of president will emerge as their party’s standard-bearer, I suspect next year’s electoral outcome will have more to do with voter turn-out than the identity of who faces Trump. 

Americans Who Don’t Vote.

I’m still perplexed by the fact that only 58% of eligible voters cast a vote in the 2016 presidential election, which arguably was the most consequential election in my lifetime. Although 86% of eligible Americans claim they were registered to vote that year, only 81% actually were.  That left 23% (at least 46,000,000) of voting age Americans on the sidelines. Imagine how different the results might have been had only a few percent of the no-shows bothered to vote. What could possibly explain this?  Whether or not you buy the Left’s claims of voter suppression or the Right’s claims of fraudulent voting, you must admit the United States is neither Russia nor Venezuela.  Our elections may not be entirely clean, but they more accurately measure public opinion than elections in most countries.

Up until the early Twentieth Century, voting participation in the US – although always voluntary – approached Australian levels.  Since then, we’ve struggled to bust out of a mediocre 50%-70% range. Although electoral non-participation has been the subject of numerous studies, in my opinion, none of these have cracked this enigma. A study by the Pew Charitable Trust in 2017[i] did, however, make a few interesting discoveries. According to Pew, 62% of unregistered Americans claim that, despite Motor Voter laws and other governmental/governmental inducements, they’ve never been asked to register. Is this evidence of voter suppression?  Although I can’t remember being invited to register to vote, I clearly remember receiving a letter from the Selective Service telling me to register for the draft. In any event, there’s certainly more we can do to get our fellow citizens into a habit of voting .

Growing Aversion to Politics.

A more disturbing take-away from the Pew Study was that 44% of unregistered Americans say they are “just not interested in politics.” Okay, that’s fair. I’m sure there are many things in life more interesting than listening to politicians and pundits, but are these folks so detached from society that none of the issues listed below resonate with them? Pew also found that 40% of unregistered Americans say they ”dislike politics”.  That makes more sense even though I have to believe there’s a high degree of overlap between these two groups.  Although I have no benchmark to compare the 40% figure with, the number of Americans people who say they dislike politics has undoubtedly grown in recent years.

Apart from studies like this, I can see why many Americans don’t believe their votes really matter.  In a country of 330 million people, give or take 10 million – maybe more – one can easily conclude that his or her individual vote is inconsequential in the face of larger, more powerful forces that shape our political sphere. However, as we have often seen in recent years, some of the most important elections have been decided by just a handful of votes.

What’s at Stake in 2020.

This brings me back to the 2020 election. Speaker Pelosi recently said “everything will be at stake” in next year’s election. I don’t often agree with her, but on this point, I believe she’s right. Given the events of the past few days, any hope of bipartisan action on key legislative issues seems to have evaporated. If, as some have said, the presidential election of 2016 was a political turning point on par with the most important events in American history, 2020 is shaping up to be a national referendum on the most contentious issues of the modern era.

To that end, I’ve started to compile the following list of issues (in no particular order) I believe will be on the ballot come November 3, 2020.  Forgive me if I’ve missed one of the issues you consider important. I plan to supplement and amend this list over the next 18 months.

1. Use of our national security agencies to spy on political opponents
2. Use of our criminal justice system to seek revenge against political opponents
3. Elimination of the attorney-client privilege in political cases
4. Extension of LGBTQ rights to all aspects of society at the expense of other constitutional rights if necessary
5. Confirmation of a woman’s right to end her pregnancy at any time and for any reason up until and including the time of birth
6. Expanded gun control including wholesale confiscation by force
7. Acceptance of anti-white racial demagoguery as recompense for past injustices against minorities
8. Economic reparations for slavery and other historic wrongdoing, such as Native American genocide
9. Proliferation and acceptance of hate crime hoaxes for political gain and media attention
10. Permanent open borders and unlimited immigration
11. Equalization of the rights of citizens and non-citizens residing within our borders
12. Abolition of ICE and other agencies that interfere with the free flow of migrants into the US
13. Elimination of the all remaining vestiges of American exceptionalism
14. Return top income tax brackets to 70% to 90% without the deductions, credits and offsets that existed when rates previously were as high
15. Government confiscation of all accumulated wealth (including pensions, 401k’s, trusts) above certain levels
16. Elimination of private health insurance and establishment of socialized medicine for all
17. Abolition of all fossil fuel use by 2030
18. Elimination of air travel except for certain elites
19. Limitations on family size and other population controls
20. Curtailment of all religious expression outside the home
21. Restrictions on free speech in schools, social media and workplace
22. Elimination of the Electoral College
23. Reduction of the voting age to 16
24. Abolition of all citizenship requirements for voting
25. Removal of all public monuments deemed to be offensive to certain protected groups
26. Wholesale revision of history books to diminish if not expunge the importance of Western Civilization in American culture
27. Free college for all without regard to merit-based admission criteria
28. Free childcare for all working parents
29. Employer-paid family leave up to 52 weeks per child
30. Guaranteed jobs for everyone who wants one regardless of their skill or ability
31. Guaranteed minimum income for all regardless of their contribution to society
32. Making social justice the primary goal of all law enforcement activities
33. Adopting net neutrality and other limits on free market dissemination of information and ideas
34. Making the Common Core curriculum mandatory in all schools
35. Abolishing the right to home-school your child
36. Making parental rights secondary to a child’s right to self-determination
37. Forgiveness of all student debt and ending all student loan programs in the future
38. Expansion of Social Security to other segments of the population by extending FICA taxes to all earned or unearned income
39. Redefining the right of privacy to protect only politically-favored activities
40. Legalize marijuana at federal level for both medicinal and recreational uses
41. Eliminate the filibuster in the US Senate
42. Expand the US Supreme Court from 9 to at least 15 seats
43. Fund massive infrastructure projects through a carbon tax
44. Repeal all tariffs and trade regulations that interfere with achieving a unified, global economy

        No matter where you stand on these issues, the 2020 elections are bound to present you with a binary choice (even if there are credible third-party candidates for president). Unfortunately, there’s no longer a middle ground in the political spectrum.  Like me, you might be exhausted if not fed up with all the political bickering the past few years.  Or it might seem like too much trouble to make an informed decision about so many issues.  No matter why you think not voting in 2020 remains an option, there are really only two legitimate reasons for not voting – death on or before November 3, 2020 or renunciation of your American citizenship.  Even then, I’m sure there will be a number of jurisdictions still willing to count your vote.

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[i] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2017/06/why-are-millions-of-citizens-not-registered-to-vote