Legitimate government

The idea that a government is only legitimate if the people consent to its decisions sounds great. In practice, however, it leads to the kind of fragmentation we have today.

A certain business in Wolfeboro, NH, displays a shrine to the Trump administration and a banner saying "Wolfeboro is taxation without representation." The banner is because the individuals involved keep failing to get elected to town government positions. The voters reject them. The majority makes its choice. They feel unrepresented. Therefore, the government of Wolfeboro is illegitimate in their eyes.

 The right wing malcontents who like to carry guns and hoist intimidating flags view any government action that they don't like as illegitimate. They did not consent, therefore the policy in question should not apply to them. They like to agitate supporters over "free speech" issues that don't exist, but also oppose real mechanisms to prevent discrimination in practical matters like hiring, real estate, lending, and education. The fake war on Christmas, the idea that they are forbidden to say the n-word, and the fact that they can get in legal trouble for slapping their waitress on the ass, are used to create public support against a tyranny that was never official. 

In the representative democracy that is the United States, individual voters elect representatives and senators to go to Congress and make decisions based on positions the voters liked in the election. These elected officials have the actual power to enact legislation and approve government expenditures, and set tax rates to secure the funding for government operations. This is the republic beloved of people who like to shout "we're a republic, not a democracy" whenever someone complains about the loss of American democracy. By their reckoning, they consented to the government even if it fails to satisfy their every wish.

Government will always fail to satisfy your every wish. Even the oligarchs, currently ascendant, don't always get exactly what they want the instant they want it. They're streamlining the system to improve response times, but it's still not quite there. As for the rest of us, there's a lot of conflicting dissatisfaction.

In the USA, we hate cheaters, except when they're cheating on their taxes. No one likes paying taxes. Some of us want the rich to pay more. Some of us openly or secretly admire those rascals for getting away with what all of us wish we could. Even if you expect to get most or all of your withheld taxes refunded, you have to fill out a tax return to get your refund. If you're super wealthy, the return is long and complicated. You have to pay one or more accountants to avoid paying any taxes. It's an annual pain in the ass.

In every other category, we want people to play by the rules. Whether it's from a genuine sense of fairness or because you've figured out how to manipulate the rules to beat out the drones who still play by them, Americans get really mad at anything they perceive as cheating. You see it in road rage incidents, college admission scandals, outrage over the proper inflation of footballs, the idea that trans women athletes are really men... stuff like that.

We argue over the rules because they might interfere with behaviors that went for generations unchallenged, like sexual assault. As soon as something is declared outright illegal, we have to put it in the category of cheating.

Powerful people get a pass on all of this. Enforcement is selective on the lower classes. The mere suggestion of improper sexual attraction was enough to get Black men brutally slain, often without a pretense of arrest and trial. But decades after a pedophile ring on a Caribbean island was broken up, we have yet to learn the names of the prominent people on the client list.

While both legal and illegal immigrants who toil in factories, fields, and construction sites are being hunted down by the Department of Homeland Security, one-time illegal immigrant Elon Musk gets to buy the government and install himself as dictator because he arrived rich and made himself richer. Much of that wealth was from government contracts -- the tax dollars of working class Americans -- for services that this oligarch can threaten to terminate, or for dubious endeavors like a space program that produces more expensive fireworks displays than successful missions to Mars.

In the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, fortunes were made on dubious endeavors that defied the authority of the British government. Cheating is part of our national identity. Magnificent in its way as unconventional warfare, its legacy haunts us today in our quest to be a nation of laws with outlaw roots. That's not to say that the American colonists should have submitted meekly to British policies that bound their economy to permanent servitude. Back in the mid 18th Century it made more sense to go our own way and prove our concept by establishing a nation where it could be acted out. For a couple of hundred years, it worked out, more or less. But we've had to survive not only our Civil War, but other bloody upheavals to extend the full benefits of citizenship to more categories of the people who were living here anyway.

The founders tried to establish in the US Constitution a framework of laws that citizens would not feel the need to cheat on. The hand of government was meant to be as light as possible. Setting aside that the electorate consisted only of white make property owners, the basis for the plan was naively optimistic about human nature. It has evolved over time to try to address its limitations. Human cussedness is tireless. We still use the concept of laws as the basis of our arguments about what should be allowed. It's cumbersome, frustrating, slow, and still the best way to structure a government of the people, by the people, for the people.