Sure, elections matter but by the looks of it, they matter too much

We’re told that elections matter. In his eight years in office, President Obama always reminded us that “elections have consequences.” Yes, they do, but we have a arrived at a place in American culture where elections matter too much.

One only needs to look at the first 48 hours after the inauguration of Donald Trump to see that people hung their hopes on a political saviors that never came. And they took the loss hard. There was violence in the streets; windows smashed, cars burned, looting; cops were attacked; signs with the most vulgar obscenities were in the hands of women screaming in fear that their rights are no longer guaranteed. Celebrities warned that the end was nigh and suggested the best path to avoid being sold into slavery was to burn down the White House. All because they lost the election. It was nothing less than insanity.

And when the loss of an election is this personal and devastating to these individuals, it’s time to realize that they’ve become too dependent on the government.

University of Tennessee law Professor Glenn Reynolds writes about this in his latest piece for USA Today:

[I]f Americans increasingly find it intolerable that their political opponents control the government, that’s because government controls too much.

Then, of course, there was the weaponization of the IRS. When it was Tea Party groups being harassed, nobody cared much. But now Democrats fear that under Trump, the IRS might target them. And they should: Going back at least as far as FDR, as Jonah Goldberg noted in his book, Liberal Fascism, presidents have used the IRS and other parts of the bureaucracy to target opponents.

But now, of course, we’ve just finished eight years of a president who claimed the legal right to kill Americans, without a trial, anywhere in the world outside the United States. One who spied on journalists, and imprisoned those who leaked to them. One who openly boasted that with his pen and a phone he didn’t need Congress.

And that was fine with Democrats, until the other team took power.

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” as the old saying goes. But society has flipped that on its head and now looks to the government for its freedoms. May it never be. We should never rest when anyone takes office, whether it’s our favored candidate or not.

Here’s Reynold’s idea for a fix and I think it’s a good one:

Let those Democrats unhappy with the power possessed by Trump get together with those Republicans who were unhappy with how much power was possessed by Barack Obama and propose some real limits. Since they have to be limits that will apply no matter who is in power, they have to be limits that can’t be overturned by an election: Constitutional limitations.  We need amendments to the Constitution that will reduce the power of the government back to the point where… it doesn’t matter much which gang of crooks is running things. Maybe we should have a constitutional convention to discuss them.

Bingo.