Explaining the election results to the grandkids (ages 9 and 7), I decided to use a metaphor.
Imagine that there are two pirate crews — Bluebeard’s crew, and Redbeard’s crew — who go house to house to (1) steal your money and (2) tell you what kinds of behaviors you can and can’t engage in, or must engage in. And they claim that both of these have to be done, against your will, ‘for your own good.
Every now and then, you get to vote on which crew will get to deprive you of your property and your liberty. The crew that gets the most votes has control until it’s time to vote again. We call that an election.
About half the people seem to prefer Bluebeard to Redbeard, while about half seem to prefer Redbeard to Bluebeard.
As a result, the crews switch places every few years, creating the stability and predictability of a rowboat in which two people are rowing at the same time but in opposite directions.
More precisely, about half the people seem to hate Redbeard more than Bluebeard, while about half seem to hate Bluebeard more than Redbeard. Which is how the pirates can keep the deal going, even though practically everyone hates both of them.
(Is there any other way to explain what happened in Pennsylvania, where nearly half the people voted ‘for’ a guy who was an idiot even before being incapacitated by a stroke?)
So we choose the lesser of two evils, but in a way that lets the winner claim that he has the support of everyone who didn’t vote against him.
(Imagine you’re in a room full of people who decide that there should be a vote on whether to break your arm or your leg. How should you vote? And if you vote for either of those options, in what sense do you support it?)
This will continue to be the case until we change how voting is done, to let people vote against the pirates they hate more instead of forcing them to vote for the pirates they hate only slightly less.
But is the pirate story really just a metaphor? If you change ‘pirate crew’ to ‘major political party, isn’t it simply an accurate description of what’s going on?
The main difference is that instead of going door to door, the Bluebeard and Redbeard parties operate by threatening to send armed employees — whose salaries are paid by you — to force you into submission.
I’m done using the labels Democratic and Republican to refer to the major parties when the labels Bluebeard Party and Redbeard Party more accurately reflect their natures.
