Op-Ed: You Thought Rank Choice Voting Was Bad – Part I

The following Op-Ed was submitted by R. Shelton. Op-Eds do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of those at the Idaho Dispatch.

The Rank Choice Voting movement got started in the early 1990s. After a lull during the Obama years, it (strangely?) ramped up when Trump was elected in 2016. It’s been gaining momentum ever since. By now, many are reasonably aware of how it works, and the danger it poses to Conservative politics. In this article I will contend that RCV is just a complement to a more serious evil: open primaries.

Liberals: If You Thought The Problem We Caused Was Bad, Wait Till You See Our Solution

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We do have a problem.

It’s the intense Divisiveness in society between Left and Right.

I say Liberals caused it. They would say the Right is at fault.

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But Liberals did cause it because the Left is, by nature, a “progressive” movement – to the point that ‘Leftist’ and ‘Progressive’ are almost synonymous terms. Leftists are always going farther Left, and lately they have put the pedal to the metal.

In contrast, ‘Rightist’ and ‘Conservative’ are also synonymous terms, but by definition a Conservative simply wants to maintain the status quo. Many indeed, in reaction to the present mad careening of Leftist lemmings to the cliff edge, want to roll things back to a more sane time rather than just stop the madness where it is, but this desire is perfectly correct because the basic political creed of Conservatives is simply Natural Law and common sense, and these things never change. We are already far from Natural Law and common sense, so just staying where we are is unacceptable.

Against this, the political creed of Liberals is based on nothing but the consensus of Liberal “thought” leaders. Whatever they propose, no matter how wacky, is blindly accepted by the great mass of Liberals.

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Today, the Liberal creed contains a number of tenets that are sheer insanity.

However, as always, they still insist that you believe what they believe…or else. In fact, the crazier the thing that they believe, the more they try to crush dissent. They have to crush it, because they are insecure. Experience tells them their positions crumble under scrutiny and exposure.

Here are a couple of articles of their present creed:

Men and women have the same physical capabilities.

The conclusions of almost 100 years of science concerning whether masks can slow the spread of viral diseases can not only be modified, but reversed overnight if Liberal “scientists” say so.

It’s impossible for any sane person – who has any gonads – to knuckle under and allow these lunatics to run the asylum. The result will be the total destruction of society itself. Sodom and Gomorrah will look like safe spaces in comparison.

Therefore there is no common ground worth talking about anymore between Left and Right. Leftists mentally live in their own society, and Rightists in theirs, but we all share the same physical order, and that order can only be stretched so far. For example, abortion is either murder or it’s not. If it is, it desperately needs to be stopped. If it isn’t, but is rather a “human right”, it desperately needs to be permitted.

There are only two alternatives for the future: peaceful separation into two physically different nations, or total war, where one side or the other gets substantially wiped out or completely repressed.

What Is A Primary?

Now after that cheerful look to the future, let’s get back to Open Primaries.

Again, Open Primaries are the Liberal solution to the problem of division that Liberals caused. There are several flavors of open primary, and we’ll have to restrict ourselves to looking at the generic idea, but to understand that completely we’ll also need to compare the open primary to the traditional closed primary.

The traditional primary is an election held by a political party, and restricted to members of that party, by which the party finalizes its choice concerning which of its candidates will run in an upcoming “general” election (actual election to political office). This is the original and entire purpose of a primary. Primaries have also been called “party primaries”, for a reason that’s obvious when you know what a primary really is.

This is extremely important. Why?

We have to look to the reason we have political parties in the first place.

Take a hypothetical case. Let’s say Joe Schmo thinks he has some great ideas that will improve society. He decides to run for office. He presents himself at public discussions and debates, and delivers speeches. He does all the usual stuff any candidate must do in order to have a chance of convincing voters that he is the best candidate.

And he does all this by himself. He is an Independent in the truest sense of the word, because he belongs to no party.

In the election, Joe loses, and loses badly. Is it because his ideas are bad? No! Joe has great ideas, and a lot of people would have liked them. Then he must have been a poor speaker, right? No! He was actually quite engaging, and good at getting his ideas across. He lacked money then? Yes. But not having enough money was just one result of something much more fundamental that he also lacked: People. He needed people to help him, not only with money, but with campaign strategy, managing finances, connections to other people that could aid his cause in various ways, etc. Joe didn’t have any of these resources because Joe ran a one-man operation. Joe was outspent and outgunned in every way. The money and the “guns” came from people…and organized people.

There is a name for such a group of people: it’s called a Political Party. A political party is a type of sub-society within the larger society which we all belong to.

And what is a society?

A society is a stable group of people working together for a common goal.

Understand: if you have even just one person helping you (e.g. a campaign Treasurer), you are a group of people working together for a common goal. You two therefore constitute a society. And since your goal is to get a candidate elected to political office, you are also that kind of society called a political party. Granted, you’re not much of a party. You may not even have a name. Still, by definition, that’s what you are.

In politics, we learned ages ago that, in any government where a great many people have a vote, loners don’t get anything done. Political societies do get things done, and they get more things done in proportion to the number of members they have, and especially in proportion to the perfection of their organization, which brings unity of action.

Each party is a society with a common goal: to get chosen people among its members elected to government office, so that the party’s ideas on what the goals of the government should be may be realized as much as possible. That’s because the lawmaking, judicial and executive powers of government set the liberties and limits on what everyone, including members of various sub-societies such as political parties, can and cannot do. A political party wants to make the parameters set by government power sync as much as possible with its own ideas of what life is all about.

The party primary is a very useful tool in helping the party decide which of its candidates has the best chance of winning an upcoming election. The candidate, of course, represents and tries to forward the goals that the party members hold in common.

Now we can see why the traditional party primaries are so important.

Get this: Without political parties we would have a politically directionless mob, and that would mean a directionless government.

As we will see in the next part, open primaries turn the sole purpose of a primary on its head.

You Thought Rank Choice Voting Was Bad – Part II

What Is An Open Primary?

In an open primary, any voter, of any party (or none), can vote for a candidate of any party he pleases. Evidently, this system encourages a party and its candidates to try to appeal to independent voters and those of other parties, at least whenever there are enough of them to make the difference between winning and losing. This means compromising the party’s principles. But if there is a dominant party which wins most elections, having enough support that it doesn’t need to compromise, this system encourages members of other parties to vote in the dominant party’s primaries. This is because, having little chance of getting their own candidates elected, the only influence available is in trying to get candidates of the dominant party selected that are as much in line with their own ideas as possible.

It used to be that people had enough honesty to refrain from abusing open primaries in the way just described, but those days are mostly gone, and they are entirely gone among leftists.

Open Primaries: Is The Liberal Solution Really A Solution?

As said before, the mainstream Left is now simply crazy, and thus the divide between Left and Right is extremely wide, with tensions running high. Both Leftists and many of those in the middle of the political spectrum want to think that open primaries will help defuse the situation.

Will it?

The short answer: No.

The long answer follows.

The Liberal Solution: Let’s Lean Leftward

I mentioned that the Liberal Creed is simply the consensus of Liberal “thought” leaders. It turns out that if you wanted to design a political tool that would bring about a society wherein the Liberal Creed reigns supreme, it would be hard to imagine anything more effective than Open Primaries.

Why is that?

The first thing to note is that Liberals pride themselves on being open-minded. A supposed liberty of thought is what makes someone a Liberal, and being a Liberal supposedly leads to the New Ideas that in turn lead to “Progress”. Again, that’s why ‘Liberal’ is synonymous with ‘Progressive’.

The problem with an “open” mind is twofold: ideas get in too easily, and they leave too easily also. Liberals are blown about by every wind of doctrine. What they call “free thinking” is mostly just mental instability.

Why this instability?

It comes from the poisonous philosophical atmosphere of our times; specifically, Agnosticism. Agnosticism can be summed up in the following dictum:

The Only Truth We Know Is That Nobody Knows The Truth.

Now, this is incredibly stupid, for if nobody really knows the truth, we also can’t know the “truth” that nobody knows the truth, and if we could know it, then there is no logical reason why we can’t know other truths as well. But that aside, we have to note that Liberals do reserve for themselves at least one (also illogical) exception:

If Most Liberals Agree On A Thing, Then That Thing Is Infallibly True.

You see, the Liberal has no confidence in his personal ability to know truth, so he clings to the notion that, well, we can’t all be wrong as a whole, because…evolution. He forgets that evolution itself can’t be known as true, because “the only truth we know is that nobody knows the truth”. He forgets also that the whole only gets its knowing power from the parts.

It’s all really an exercise in a pathetic, blind faith; a thing which, ironically, Liberals often accuse Conservatives of practicing, because Conservatives are behind the evolution curve, and “closed-minded”.

Which is why Conservatives are not included as contributing to the gestalt supermind that gives Liberals access to the truth that they lack as individuals, but obtain through the consensus of Liberal “thought” leaders.

This pretended infallible Groupthink leads to three things:

First, an intolerance of all those who do not hold to the Liberal Creed du jour.

Second, a messianic zeal to mold society to conform to that creed…because, after all, it’s infallibly true.

Third, and most dangerous, the Doublethink needed to support the Groupthink. Liberals blindly believe the most errant nonsense whenever it happens to be pushed by enough “thought” leaders.

Open Primaries: The Leftward Lean Locked In

When there are open primaries, political parties have their principles, but in strategizing to win elections, they must do two things:

1) Purge their platform of anything that will be considered “radical” by any amount of voters that might vote against their candidates and cause them to lose.

2) Choose only candidates that will not be considered “radical”, when voters that don’t like “radicals” exist in numbers that might cause “radicals” to lose.

The first thing means that, over time, their very principles will become diluted by the general consensus-of-the-day as to what “reasonable” politics is.

That consensus is merely a less up-to-date form of the ever-“progressing” Liberal Creed.

The second thing means that candidates of all parties must either actually believe along the lines of the leftward lean, or…not believe – and then lie about not believing.

If political parties and their candidates fail to do these things, their lack of conformity to the general consensus will lead to a loss of political offices, and hence power. They will begin to die.

So two things happen: The various parties move toward holding the same principles; they become a Uniparty. Much worse, open primaries encourage lying, for strategic purposes, both by candidates and by voters. Liberals call this “civility”.

Lying is not civil.

The Results: Legalized Lying. The Uniparty.

These two things are the worst thing about open primaries…and no one is talking about them.

Consider what they mean: First, both voters and office holders will become habitual liars. Secondly, there will be a Uniparty, and it will be Liberal, and as such dominated by Groupthink and Doublethink. This one-party system will become a permanent tyranny, for Liberals, as said, zealously push their Groupthink because they believe it’s infallible.

If you think open primaries will simply break the power of the major parties, and lead to more choice for voters, you don’t understand human nature. Human beings are social animals. That means they organize. The logic of open primaries favors “nice” Liberal ideas. Liberals will organize to maximize that. But even if they don’t, some super-rich person, or plutocratic clique, seeing there is no dominant party with huge financial resources, will provide those resources – to whomever will serve them. We will then have a Corporate-Fascist State, with its paid apparatchiks fronting its tyranny.

The Liberal Solution Is Worse Than The Problem

To Liberals, of course, this doesn’t sound like a bad deal at all. Even the Corporate Fascism thing will be OK provided it’s a liberal fascism. We’re already well on our way to it, in fact, and it certainly doesn’t bother the Liberal “thought” leaders…yet. Maybe it never will.

Of course, it does bother normal people (Conservatives) who want to live by Natural Law and/or some religion. And it will eventually bother at least the Moderates.

Hence the Division will increase, not decrease.

Eventually though, the logic of tyranny will lead to absolute and arbitrary power – which Liberals will be fine with, since they will hold it. The resultant dystopia will likely be some hybrid of those portrayed in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. On the one hand you will be born and bred to be satiated by mere animal pleasures, and steered to conformity by the natural desire to fit in, as well as by artificial social pressures, such as habitual lying, stigmatization, etc. On the other, if you rebel, you will be gaslighted, canceled, character-assassinated, lawfared and mentally tortured. If you persist, you will be physically tortured, and then murdered.

If such a dystopia appeals to you, hop onto the Open Primary bandwagon. It’s going directly where you want to be.

As for Conservatives, hopefully we’ll take an opposite path. Remember: A society is a stable group of people working together for a common goal.

Liberals and Conservatives just don’t have one.

Oil and water can be forced to mix only with continual agitation. There’s just no need for that. The oil and water can go their separate ways – before the agitation gets violent. We can start very simply. Let Conservatives migrate to red states, and Liberals to the blue, and form physically separate societies.

Let’s see which thrives.